Today's News: Hannibal sinks its teeth in a new future victim (500th post!)

Posted another scoop on MS late last night. Posting it here as my 500th post:

http://www.moviescene.nl/p/153489/michael_pitt_voegt_zich_bij_cast_hannibal_seizoen_2

Now that's he's sleeping with the fishes on Boardwalk Empire, Pitt has joined the cast of another show where you know for sure things are gonna end up badly for him. We've already seen the gruesome results of the meetings between Lecter and Verger on Ridley Scott's baroque Hannibal movie from 2001, and the TV show will now demystify how the appalling facial mutilations came to be for our enjoyment. Do we even want to know? It's not knowledge we particularly need, but any excuse to see Mads Mikkelsen psychologically toy with other people before proceeding to ruthlessly dispatch them, be it to their own private version of a mental hell or to the afterlife, makes for intriguing and intelligent television. If you can stomach such gruelling subject matter of course. Hannibal is certainly not for everybody. Even though the actual kills are most often not wholly explicitly shown, the amply present visual imagery of horribly disfigured bodily remains, intercut with lavish feasts of usually unidentified dinner ingredients (we're to decide whether Hannibal is engaging in his trademark cannibalism for ourselves, but it was stated early on in the show that he never eats a vegetarian meal), effectively cause a continuous feeling of queeziness and emotional unease. In short: this is a most disturbing show, successfully balancing attraction and abjection. You don't really want to watch it, but you can't turn it off either. Pitt's performance on Boardwalk was no different, as he portrayed a formerly good soul corrupted by war and coaxed into crime by his screwed-up family relations (his mother was only a kid when she had him for crying out loud!), ultimately bringing him to an untimely but foreseeable end. His personal demons were the main cause of his downfall, as is the case with Mason Verger who wouldn't have ended up the way he did if he hadn't condemned himself to his eventual deranged emotional state, something Hannibal feeded for his own nefarious purposes. The results, as illustrated before by Gary Oldman in heavy facial prosthetics, were pretty bad. It'll be interesting to see just how it came about, even if we already know what's gonna happen later down the road. Predictability so far hasn't been a detrimental issue on Hannibal, as we already know what's gonna happen to most of these characters (and the ones whose fate remains unknown are not particularly the people we're watching this show for). The talented cast and generally sickly but savoury atmosphere have made for a compelling first season, and Pitt's addition to the series is only an indication season 2 wont be any different. Plenty of interesting but abhorrent courses to follow, it seems. Don't watch this show while you're eating.

That's right: eeww! Just the sort of stuff you want your readers to see when reaching 500 posts.