^{Reviews of Movies I've Never Seen}

The theory behind reviewing movies without actually seeing them is simple: some movies just aren't worth the time. It probably isn't fair, but since I'm bombarded with trailers, ads, reviews and celebrity culture, and since movies are always derivative, it doesn't seem unfair either.

Besides, it shouldn't cost eight bucks to have an opinion.

Saving Silverman

If one of your friends says that he can't hang around and play video games because it's his girlfriend's birthday and he's taking her out to dinner and you make the "Whhhttt-dssh" whipping sound, this movie is for you.

A handful of guys (in the preview it looks like two) try to convince their other friend to break off his engagement because they can't do fun guy things without him. I'm not sure if he has the car or what, but he seems essential to the continued existence of the Porky's gang.

Guy #1's fiancee is played by some supermodel Maxim babe. Now, of course, any female role between the ages of 14-40 will be played by someone of unrealistic beauty, but here it's interesting. If Guy #1's fiancee had been played by a plain-looking woman, perhaps someone slightly overweight or a little shy or awkward but loved and in love with Guy #1, the efforts to split them up would seem cruel. But since it's Rachel Hunter or whoever doing a turn as an ice bitch - in the preview she threatens to withhold sex unless Guy #1 ditches his friends, I shudder to think what else they have her do - the movie sets her up to deserve whatever she gets.

Proving once again how male-dominated and male-directed our culture is, no one misinterprets the movie's title. Like Private Ryan was saved from the Nazis, we know that Silverman is being saved from girly cooties. There's no possibility this movie comes from Alyssa Milano's point of view. "Gee, I love this great guy and he loves me, but he has these friends who keep buying prostitutes for him, throwing up in my underwear drawer and giving him electro-shock therapy when he mentions my name. I need to save him from them."

No, this movie is about the sanctity of guy stuff and controlling the behavior of guys who wander too close to Sarah Michelle Gellar. I guarantee that in the first twenty minutes, they somehow convey that loveable friends #2 and 3 are heterosexual. They have to establish this because otherwise, these guys are so outraged by Silverman's (hetero)sex life, you have to wonder what goes on in the He-Men Woman-Haters Club. (Is this reference too obscure? Spanky hates that Alfalfa has a thing for Darla so he founds the club but Alfalfa would rather be a love than a hater? "I'm sorry Spanky, I have to live my own life...") Either one of them has a "perfect girlfriend" who he sees only for sex or one of them makes a "love 'em and leave 'em" comment.

Can't you see someone in an early production meeting going, "So when we say Silverman won't do 'guy stuff' anymore, uh, how do we mean that?"

I understand that to preserve guydom, they try to scare Denise Richards off and then decide to abduct and/or kill her. Yeah, nothing sexist about this movie.

Hannibal

A movie no one will like based on a book no one did like, and both will make truckloads of money? God bless hype.

Jodie Foster's reputation for intelligence doesn't really need any boosting, but I predict that dodging this movie will make her look like a genius. (She begged off the movie, pleading she was "too busy." Yeah, right.) Hannibal is a strange character. Like Norman Bates, his description doesn't sound scary. (A ninety-pound guy with a mother complex in a dress? Oooh, scary. An elderly aesthete who spends most of the movie in a cell? Hide me.) But on screen, both Norman and Hannibal worked cinematic magic for one movie. The more we see them, the less scary they are. Instead of being the murky subconscious of the film, like he was in Silence, Hannibal puts him front and center were he will become just a pudgy fop with a speech impediment.

Worse, following the lead of Harris' reputably terrible book, Hannibal has been granted a conscience. Sometime since the release of Silence, Hannibal Lechter became the hero. His victims include a corrupt cop, a deformed and demented billionaire bent on revenge and a two-faced FBI agent who stabs Clarice in the back. One thing that's always disappointed me about Silence's success is the dumb worship of Lechter. Fourteen year old boys imitating Hopkins as if they know what a Chianti is. ("fava beans and...") Of course it's fun to root for the bad guy or the killer or the dinosaur, but once a movie plays to that instinct the bad guy is no longer the bad guy. You get things like Godzilla defending Tokyo and Hannibal Lechter going from an evocative monster to a very specialized vigilante. Why can't our monsters be monsters?

Instead of chewing a nurse's tongue out because she leans over him, Hannibal now has a set of moral codes. In a sense, the only difference between him and the demented, revenge-seeking billionaire is that the movie is named after one so we know when to cheer.

How silly is this movie? The demented billionaire plans to capture Hannibal and slowly feed him to trained man-eating pigs. The same thing happened to Spiderman once. There's an old movie adage: If you show a gun in a movie, at some point it had better go off. The same thing applies to the pigs.