Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

Today's movie is Leaving Las Vegas from 1995

Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a Hollywood screenwriter whose alcoholism costs him his job, family, and friends. With nothing left, he goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. As he drives drunkenly down the Las Vegas Strip, he almost hits a woman in the cross walk, Sera (Shue), who chastises him. Ben checks into a sleazy motel called The Whole Year Inn. As he looks at this the wording changes to "The Hole You're In." Meanwhile, Sera is a prostitute for an abusive pimp, Yuri Butso (Julian Sands), a Latvian immigrant. Polish mobsters are after Yuri, so he breaks his relationship with Sera in fear that the Poles may hurt her, and Yuri is murdered (off-screen) shortly afterwards.

On his second day in Las Vegas, Ben meets Sera, introduces himself and offers $500 to go to his room for an hour. Sera agrees to go to his room, but Ben does not want sex. Instead, they talk and create an odd relationship. Their relationship is doomed; Sera has to promise Ben she will never ask him to stop drinking, and Ben is not allowed to criticize Sera's occupation. At first the two are stable, as Ben is "totally at ease with this (Sera's prostitution)." However, each becomes frustrated with the other's behaviour. Sera attempts to get Ben to eat but Ben stumbles for more alcohol. Sera begs him to see a doctor. Furious, Ben brings another prostitute (Mariska Hargitay) to Sera's house. Sera returns home and throws Ben out. Shortly afterwards, she is raped and beaten by three college students, and the injuries make her occupation obvious. After being evicted, Sera receives a call from Ben, who is on his deathbed. She visits Ben and they have sex. They fall asleep, and when Ben wakes up, he looks across at Sera, who is lying on top of him, and dies while holding her as she sleeps. His last word is "wow". In the final scene Sera says that she accepted Ben for who he was, liked his drama and that she loved him.

Getting Even With Dad (1994

Another movie for today is Getting Even With Dad from 1994

Timmy Gleason (Macaulay Culkin) is the estranged son of ex-con Ray Gleason (Ted Danson) and has been living with his aunt Kitty and her fiance since the death of his mother some years earlier. When Kitty goes on honeymoon, she dumps Timmy on a reluctant Ray, leaving him to look after his son for the next week. Timmy is hoping to spend time with his father, but is largely ignored by Ray, who is the midst of planning a rare coin heist with his two cronies Bobby and Carl (Saul Rubinek and Gailard Sartain). The robbery is successful, but Timmy learns of it and hides the stolen coins from them. He uses it to blackmail Ray into spending time with him, promising that he will return the coins to them afterwards. Thus father and son spend the next few days fishing, playing crazy golf and visiting amusement parks, with Bobby and Carl tagging along.

The police are suspicious of Ray, so Detective Theresa Walsh (Glenne Headly) is assigned to go undercover and survey him. By chance, Ray and Timmy get talking to Theresa, unaware of who she is, and invite her for a coffee and then to dinner. Theresa and Ray get closer and they kiss. Timmy and Ray have also gotten closer, and Timmy decides that he wants to stay with his dad permanently. He urges Ray to forget about the stolen coins, because he'll probably be caught and sent back to prison. Ray refuses, so Timmy prepares to return home, but at the last moment Ray has a change of heart and chooses Timmy. Bobby then appears at the bus station, and at gunpoint forces Ray to open the locker containing the coins. Ray and Bobby are set upon by the waiting police and arrested. Ray is crushed to discover that Theresa is a cop. However, it turns out that the bag in the locker was full of pennies, so Ray is released again. At Timmy's prompting, Theresa finds the rare coins in a department store, while father and son prepare for a new life together.

Big Top Pee Wee (1988)

Today's movie is Big Top Pee Wee

Pee-wee Herman has a dream of being a famous singer. He makes his exit by disguising himself as Abraham Lincoln. One of the fans asks him for his autograph, but his disguise is promptly exposed. They chase after him and he flies off to his ranch. Pee-wee finally awakens from his dream that morning to work on his farm with Vance the pig. Later, he has lunch with his fiancée, schoolteacher Winnie Johnson. Next, he races Vance to a general store owned by Mr. Ryan to order a cheese sandwich with a pickle.

The sheriff warns everyone of a big storm approaching town. After the storm ends, Pee-wee emerges from his storm shelter to discover that an entire traveling circus has been blown into his backyard. Befriended by Cabrini Circus manager Mace Montana, Pee-wee is hoping to impress Gina Piccolapupula, a trapeze artist and the circus' star attraction, thereby incurring the jealousy of his Winnie until she meets Gina's older brothers: The Piccolapupula Brothers. Gina leaves Pee-wee when she finds out about Winnie, but later returns to him when she realizes that Pee-wee actually loves her.

Pee-wee wants to join the circus, but his attempts fail. Gina then tells Pee-wee about her deceased father Papa Piccolapupula who was a famous aerialist who suffered a fall performing the Spiral of Death. Gina states that Pee-wee should try walking the tightrope in his honor.

Mace comes up with a brilliant idea: to stage a three-ring spectacular saluting the American Farm. The problem is that the majority of the town's residents are disgruntled, uncaring elderly people who have been demanding the circus Pee-wee is helping leave town.

The Sheriff and the townspeople show up and attempts to arrest Pee-Wee, The Sheriff promises to drop the charges if the circus leaves town. While the Circus is packing, Mace tells Pee-Wee they will do the circus somewhere else to prevent Pee-wee from going to jail, but Pee-wee saves the day when he sneaks genetically modified cocktail weenies from his hot-dog tree to the townspeople, causing them to become children once again. Now grateful to have extra years of life and without any memories of what happened, the children watch Mace's circus and Pee-wee perform.

George and Mildred The Movie (1980)

Today is the movie George and Mildred The Movie

Mildred decides that she and George will celebrate their wedding anniversary in style at a swanky London hotel - however unhappy George might be at the cost involved. "I'm a traffic warden, not Aristotle Onassis", he tells her. But on arrival, George is taken for a ruthless hit-man by a shady businessman (Stratford Johns), who wants a rival eliminated. Mildred meanwhile remains in blissful ignorance throughout the resulting chaos.

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

So the next in the series is Silence of the Lambs

Clarice Starling is pulled from her training at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia by Jack Crawford of the Bureau's Behavioural Science Unit. He tasks her with interviewing Hannibal Lecter, a former psychiatrist and incarcerated cannibalistic serial killer, believing Lecter's insight might be useful in the pursuit of a serial killer nicknamed "Buffalo Bill", who skins his female victims' corpses.

Starling travels to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where she is led by Frederick Chilton to Lecter's solitary quarters. Although initially pleasant and courteous, Lecter grows impatient with Starling's attempts at "dissecting" him and rebuffs her. As she is leaving, one of the prisoners flicks semen at her. Lecter, who considers this act "unspeakably ugly", calls Starling back and tells her to seek out an old patient of his. This leads her to a storage shed where she discovers a man's severed head. She returns to Lecter, who tells her that the man is linked to Buffalo Bill. He offers to profile Buffalo Bill on the condition that he be transferred away from Chilton, whom he detests.

Buffalo Bill abducts a U.S. Senator's daughter, Catherine Martin. Crawford authorizes Starling to offer Lecter a fake deal promising a prison transfer if he provides information that helps them find Buffalo Bill and rescue Catherine. Instead, Lecter demands a quid pro quo from Starling, offering clues about Buffalo Bill in exchange for personal information. Chilton secretly records the conversation and reveals Starling's deceit before offering Lecter a deal of Chilton's own making. Lecter agrees and is flown to Memphis, Tennessee, where he verbally torments Senator Martin and gives her misleading information on Buffalo Bill including the name "Louis Friend".

Starling notices that Louis Friend is an anagram of iron sulfide which is also known as fool's gold. She visits Lecter, who is now being held in a cage-like cell in a Tennessee courthouse, and asks for the truth. Lecter tells her that all the information she needs is contained in the case file. Rather than give her the real name, he insists they continue their quid pro quo and she recounts a traumatic childhood incident where she was woken by the sound of spring lambs being slaughtered on a relative's farm in Montana. Starling admits that she still sometimes wakes thinking she can hear lambs screaming and Lecter speculates that she is motivated to save Catherine in the hope that it will end the nightmares. Lecter gives her back the case files on Buffalo Bill after their conversation is interrupted by Chilton and the police who escort her from the building. Later that evening, Lecter kills his guards, escapes from his cell and disappears.

Starling analyzes Lecter's annotations to the case files and realizes that Buffalo Bill knew his first victim personally. Starling travels to the victim's hometown and discovers that Buffalo Bill was a tailor, with dresses and dress patterns identical to the patches of skin removed from each of his victims. She telephones Crawford to inform him that Buffalo Bill is trying to fashion a "woman suit" of real skin, but Crawford is already en route to make an arrest, having cross-referenced Lecter's notes with hospital archives and finding a man named Jame Gumb, who once applied unsuccessfully for a sex-change operation. Starling continues interviewing friends of Buffalo Bill's first victim in Ohio while Crawford leads an F.B.I. tactical team to Gumb's address in Illinois. The house in Illinois is empty and Starling is led to the house of "Jack Gordon", who she realizes is actually Jame Gumb. She pursues him into his multi-room basement, where she discovers that Catherine is still alive, but trapped in a dry well. After turning off the basement lights, Gumb stalks Starling in the dark with night-vision goggles but gives his position away when he cocks his revolver; Starling turns around just in time and kills him.

Some time later at her FBI Academy graduation party, Starling receives a phone call from Lecter, who is at an airport in Bimini. He assures her that he does not plan to pursue her and asks her to return the favor, which she says she cannot do. Lecter then hangs up the phone, saying that he is "having an old friend for dinner" and begins following a newly arrived Chilton before disappearing into the crowd.

Red Dragon (2002)

So to carry on the theme I am carrying on the chronicle and watching the next movie in the series.

Psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter hosts a dinner party in his townhouse in Baltimore, Maryland. At the party, Lecter is later visited by Will Graham, a gifted FBI agent and a psychologist, with whom he has been working on a psychological profile of a serial killer who has removed edible body parts from his victims, leading Graham to believe that the killer could be a cannibal. During the consultation, Graham discovers evidence implicating Lecter in the murders. Lecter attacks Graham, almost disemboweling him, before Graham overpowers Lecter. Lecter is sentenced to life imprisonment in an institution for the criminally insane while Graham, traumatized by the experience, retires from the FBI.

Some years later, another serial killer, nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy", appears. He stalks and kills seemingly random Southern families during sequential full moons. Hoping to capture the killer before his next attack, Special Agent Jack Crawford seeks Graham's assistance in determining his psychological profile. The death of another family weighing on his conscience, Graham reluctantly agrees. After visiting the crime scenes and speaking with Crawford, he concludes that he must once again consult Dr. Lecter for advice.

"The Tooth Fairy" is actually a psychotic named Francis Dolarhyde who kills at the behest of an alternate personality he calls "The Great Red Dragon." He is obsessed with the William Blake painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, and believes that each victim he "changes" brings him closer to "becoming" the Dragon. His pathology is born from the severe abuse he suffered at the hands of his sadistic grandmother, since he was orphaned after his parents died at young age.

Meanwhile, Freddy Lounds, a tabloid reporter who hounded Graham after Lecter's capture, now follows him for leads on the Tooth Fairy. There is a secret correspondence between Lecter and Dolarhyde. Graham's wife and son are endangered when Lecter gives the Tooth Fairy the agent's home address, forcing them to be relocated to a farm owned by Crawford's brother. Lecter, aware that the police are onto him, raises the stakes: in return for his help, he requests a first-class meal in his cell and the return of his book privileges.

Hoping to lure the Tooth Fairy out of hiding, Graham gives Lounds an interview, in which he disparages the killer as an impotent homosexual to anger the Tooth Fairy. This provokes Dolarhyde, who kidnaps Lounds, glues him to an antique wheelchair, forces him to recant his allegations, bites off his lips and then sets him on fire outside his newspaper's offices as a warning.

Meanwhile, at his job in a St. Louis photo lab, Dolarhyde falls in love with Reba McClane, a blind co-worker, but his Dragon personality demands that he kill her. He takes her home, where they make love. Dolarhyde attempts to stop the Dragon's "possession" of him by going to the Brooklyn Museum and literally consuming the original Blake painting.

Meanwhile, Graham deduces that the killer knew the layout of his victims' houses from their home videos, which he could only have seen if he worked for the editing company that transfers home movies to video cassette and edits them. From this point, he starts searching the companies and their workers so he could determine the real identity of the Tooth Fairy.

At work, Dolarhyde finds McClane with a co-worker, Ralph Mandy, whom she actually dislikes. Enraged for this apparent betrayal, Dolarhyde kills Mandy, kidnaps McClane, takes her to his house, and then sets it on fire. Finding himself unable to shoot her, Dolarhyde shoots himself. McClane is able to escape as the police arrive and the house explodes.

Dolarhyde, having staged his own death, turns up at Graham's home in Florida where he holds Graham's son hostage, threatening to kill him with a piece of broken glass. To defuse the situation, Graham slings insults at his son that are reminiscent of the ones Dolarhyde's grandmother had used against him. Feeling a sudden sympathy for the boy, the enraged Dolarhyde attacks Graham as the boy flees to safety. Both men are severely wounded in a shootout which ends when Graham's wife Molly kills Dolarhyde.

After the death of Dolarhyde, Graham receives a letter from Lecter, which bids him well, praises him for exposing and killing the Tooth Fairy and hopes that he isn't "too ugly", since he mocked his appearance and his hair, and tells him they are going to cross paths soon. With the death of Dolarhyde, Graham retires from the FBI once again and continues to have a family life.

Some time later, Lecter's jailer, Frederick Chilton, then tells him that a "young woman from the FBI is here to see you." Lecter asks, "What is her name?"

Hannibal Rising (2007)

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would keep a track of all the movies I have watched and then you can give me any recommendations on what to watch next.

First of is Hannibal Rising which is from 2007.

In 1944, soon after the Soviet Red Army had taken Lithuania from Germany, the Nazis launch a counter-assault. Eight-year-old Hannibal Lecter, his younger sister, Mischa, and their parents quickly escape to the family's hunting lodge. After the Nazis take over Lecter Castle, six Lithuanian militiamen, who want to join the Waffen-SS, are told to prove their worth. Their leader, Vladis Grutas, orders them to kill the Lecters' Jewish cook. They also threaten another servant of the Lecter household, asking him if he was a Gypsy or a Jew. As this happens, the Soviet Red Army begins launching attacks to retake the area.

A Soviet tank crew stops at the Lecters' lodge, telling the Lecters to stand away from the house while they get some water. The Soviet soldiers allow Hannibal and Mischa to stay within the lodge, where it is warmer. The Soviet tank is spotted by a German Stuka bomber, which sparks a firefight. The bomber is shot down by the tank, but subsequently crashes into it, and the ensuing explosion kills everyone who was outside. The Lithuanian Nazi militiamen loot Lecter Castle as the Soviet Red Army draws nearer. The advancing Soviet army forces the Nazi militiamen to hide out in the woods, where they happen upon the Lecter lodge. Finding no other food in the bitterly cold Baltic winter, they murder and cannibalize Mischa in front of Hannibal, who escapes and is found half-dead by Soviet soldiers.

Eight years later, Lecter once again lives in Lecter Castle, which has been turned into a Soviet-run orphanage. His co-residents are under the impression that he has been rendered mute by his childhood trauma. After exacting his revenge on a bully at the orphanage and retrieving letters from his uncle, Lecter escapes the castle orphanage, gets through border controls and goes to live in Paris with his aunt, Lady Murasaki. She manages to get him to speak and begins teaching him the arts of flower arrangement, martial arts, and ancestor worship.

At a local market, a butcher and former Vichy collaborator, makes racist remarks about Lady Murasaki and sexually harasses her, causing Lecter to fly into a rage and attempt to beat the man to death. The butcher later goes fishing and is disrespectful when Lecter turns up to request an apology. Lecter slices the butcher's stomach, arm and back with a katana, and then decapitates him. That same evening, he is questioned about the butcher's murder by Inspector Popil, a French detective who also lost his entire family during the war. While her protégé is being interrogated, Lady Murasaki places the butcher's head outside the headquarters with a swastika carved into his forehead, thus absolving Lecter of suspicion; but Popil is not convinced that Lecter is innocent.

Lecter soon becomes the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. He receives a working scholarship, where he is given a job preparing cadavers. One day, Lecter witnesses a condemned war criminal receiving a sodium thiopental injection to force him to recall repressed memories about his crimes. In an attempt to recall the names of those responsible for his sister's murder, Lecter injects himself with the solution while listening to Glenn Gould's recording of the Goldberg Variations. His subsequent recollection reveals that Pot Watcher had the dog tags of the other men who killed Mischa, and was subsequently killed as the advancing Soviet forces bombed a part of the lodge, which collapsed on top of him. Lecter reasons that the dog tags should still be in the ruins of the lodge.

Lecter returns to Lithuania in search of the dog tags, as well as his sister's remains. Because he crosses the Soviet border, a list containing his name draws the attention of the ex-nazi Dortlich, who is now a Soviet border patrol officer. Lecter excavates the ruins of the lodge and unearths the dog tags of the deserters who murdered Mischa. Dortlich tries to kill him, but Lecter gets the upper hand and incapacitates him. After he buries Mischa's remains, Lecter tortures Dortlich into revealing the whereabouts of his accomplices. He then decapitates Dortlich with an elaborate horse-drawn pulley lubricated with mayonnaise. Having killed the first of the men responsible for slaughtering and eating his sister, Lecter returns the favor in kind by cannibalizing Dortlich, making a brochette with his cheeks and wild mushrooms.

One of the pieces of information that Lecter had managed to extract from Dortlich was the location of one of the other men, Kolnas. At a restaurant in Fontainebleau, Lecter encounters Kolnas's young daughter, who, he notices, is wearing a bracelet that Kolnas had stolen from Mischa. Hannibal distracts her while he slips Kolnas' dog tag into her pocket, which Kolnas subsequently discovers. Lady Murasaki tries to persuade Lecter to spare him, for the sake of his children.

Dortlich's murder, along with Kolnas' discovery of his own dog tag, puts the rest of the group on alert. Grutas, now a sex trafficker, dispatches a second member of the group, Zigmas Milko, to kill Lecter. Milko sneaks into Lecter's laboratory at night with a gun, but Lecter, anticipating an assassination attempt, tricks him with the aid of a cadaver and knocks him out with an injection. Lecter locks Milko in the cadaver tank and leaves him to drown in the embalming fluid just as inspector Popil enters the laboratory.

Popil questions Lecter about Dortlich's murder, but is again unable to prove Lecter's guilt. Popil, dropping all pretences, then tries to dissuade him from killing the rest of the gang and offers to grant him immunity if he helps the police to locate Grutas, who is still a wanted war criminal. After Lecter relays all of the details of his past to the police, Popil remarks to his assistant that Lecter lost all of his humanity when Mischa died, and that when they do arrest Grutas, that he will have Lecter locked up in an asylum as well. That night, Lady Murasaki reveals her romantic feelings to Lecter and begs him to stop, but Lecter says that he made a promise to Mischa. He plants a time bomb in Grutas' home and attacks him in the bath. A maid alerts Grutas' bodyguards, but just as they are about to kill him, Lecter's bomb goes off and he manages to escape.

Grutas kidnaps Lady Murasaki to use her as bait. Lecter recognizes the sounds of Kolnas's ortolans from his restaurant in the background. Lecter goes to the restaurant and manipulates Kolnas into believing that he, Lecter, had kidnapped his children and had already injured them, forcing Kolnas to give up the location of Grutas' boat. Lecter calls Kolnas' home and hands over the phone to him. Panicked, he shouts at his wife to check on the children, to which she complies and returns to tell him that the children are safe in their beds. Lecter lays his gun down on the stove between him and Kolnas, saying that he will leave Kolnas alive for the sake of his family. Realizing that he had been duped, Kolnas angrily goes for the gun anyway, but Lecter is ready for this and impales him through the head with his tantō.

Lecter goes to the houseboat. Just as he is about to untie Lady Murasaki, Grutas shoots him in the back. Grutas then proceeds to molest Lady Murasaki in front of Lecter, who takes out the tanto from his back-sheath, which had shattered when blocking the bullet, and slashes Grutas's Achilles tendons with it, crippling him. Hearing Hannibal say he must kill them because they ate his sister, Grutas taunts Lecter with the fact that he too had consumed her in a broth fed to him by the deserters, and that he was killing them to keep this fact secret. A livid Lecter then carves his sister's initial, M, into Grutas's chest.

Lady Murasaki flees in horror. Lecter tries to tell her that he loves her, but she replies that there is nothing left in him to love. Hannibal proceeds to eat Grutas alive, starting with his cheeks. The houseboat is incinerated, but Lecter, assumed by Popil to be killed in the blast, is seen by Lady Murasaki emerging from the water on a nearby wooded shore. Lecter is shown to be hunting down the last member of the group, Grentz, in Canada. Stopping in at a general store run by Grentz, Lecter states he stopped by to "collect a head". He drops Grentz' dog tag on the counter, which he picks up and looks up at Lecter in horrified realization. The final shot is of Lecter driving away with a children's song (a favorite of Mischa's) being sung in the background.