Into the silent summer

We’re taking a break from the movies for a time until the fall.

Until then, I will start by catching you up on the films our EthnoFamilyMovieOgraphy (EFMO) audience reviewed before their summer solstice.

Before that, let’s have a song.

“The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel is a standby, an old friend:

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fWyzwo1xg0[/embedyt]

It was a reluctant success. Riding the waves of tunes like Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Byrd’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the song was adopted by the young (as most successful songs are), promoted by the well connected (as most successful songs are), and resurrected by the critics (as most successful songs are) to climb to #1 on the charts in January 1966 and to go on through the years to be considered one of the greatest songs of all time, and to immortalize lines like these:

“Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping”

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is an young FBI agent with a penchant for seeing through the dark. And so the silent chase begins. This 1991 film, “The Silence of the Lambs,” won the 64th Oscar for Best Picture from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the movie, Clarice pursues Buffalo Bill, a serial killer who skins his victims, with the aid of the heavily incarcerated Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), himself another serial killer who tends to eat his victims. Hardly an appetizing prelude, the story itself tends to the nightmarish, lambs screaming for silence in the night of Clarice’s dreams. The show is unforgettable and on the short list of “silent” films that aren’t and won’t leave you alone.

In 190 words, here is the summated review of our EFMO reviewers:

For “The Silence of the Lambs,” one viewer’s comment tells it all: “I will have nightmares for a week.”; the movie was variously described as sick, violent, scary, crazy, terrifying, emotionally disturbing, morbid, gory, monstrous, too frightening, too suspenseful and thrilling; even those shivering in the corners agreed the acting, story and ending were outstanding drama — Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling) and Anthony Hopkins (Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter) won the best-acting Oscars while the film also received best screenplay, best director and best picture (one of only three films ever to win all top-5 categories – the other two were “It Happened One Night” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”); despite the stellar performances and deserved awards, the show was just too much for the ethnofamilymovieography audience and managed only a 7.80 average rating, placing it at #40 of the first 64 Best Pictures; and the film received more “red” color choices than any other Best Picture to date; it was a movie not easily forgotten — the audience sitting like worried lambs silently squinting their eyes and tightly gripping their chairs, faces contorted in pained and squeamish grimaces.

Wow. All of that. And the Best Picture to boot. But difficult to receive well. Why?

Well, as noted, on the EFMO post-show survey, the first question is “Circle the primary color you associate with the film: Red Yellow Blue.” Almost everyone circled RED. The only other Best Picture that was close was “Rocky.” This is a raw show.

Another question asks, to wit, you are angry with a person and considering leaving the individual in the cold on a bare hillside or retrieving the person to a warm cabin, which way would this movie influence you to act? “Silence” had more LEAVE than any other of the first 64 Best Pictures. This is a show not disposing one to kindly dispositions.

You are holding an ice cream cone. You look down and see this movie as the ice cream in the cone. What flavor is the ice cream? No one circled MINT-CHOCOLATE-CHIP. This is the “fun” flavor. The movie “Platoon” also had no mint-chocolate-chip. That was not a fun show, and “Silence of Lambs,” though captivating and menacingly entertaining, is not a fun film to view.

We begin to see correlations.

Perhaps, like Clarice, we begin to see though the dark, and remember more of the lyrics from “The Sound of Silence.”

“And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls

And whispered in the sounds of silence”

The movie was a “thriller.” That was the one abstracted word from the comments to “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Remember, it’s only a movie.

Or, does it seem more?

Until the next show.

GPA Jim, quietly.

In the dark.