My Gosh, was Jodie Foster weak in this one ...

Rating: 10/10 (25 September 2010)

I saw it recently again, and I'm surprised how weak her acting skills were at the time. I'm not even sure why they picked her: I remembered her as somewhat mousy, but boy, does she look like a secretary. Not only that, on repeated viewings, it's obvious her character was written much smarter than she is: out of the blue, she suddenly burps out something very clever, but you can tell by her delivery and the look in her eyes that she just would have been able to come up with that on her own. Very weird.
Another thing that occurred to me this time, how come the nurses in the asylum are so, I don't know, sympathetic to Lecter? At the very beginning, we're told that he gruesomely and cold-heartedly maimed a nurse (presumably female) while she was trying to give him an EKG. Granted, he always 'justifies' his killings (most of them patients of him, often revolting, like his cell mate), but still. I could never treat a man maiming someone who was trying to help him with anything except extreme contempt and caution. The nurses, they seemed OK with him.
Still immensely watchable, but I see a lot more faults now than I remembered.