Terry Gilliam - C/D, S/D

I'll admit, I suspect it isn't as bad as I feel it is now, so I guess it's worth watching. It was just one of those visceral, angry moments of disappointment in watching a director completely fumble.

It is possible that the source material is a significant part of the problem. It is at times a very visually stunning movie, and there are moments that do work, but it still ended up as a half-assed Lynch film with no underlying psychology, or a movie with such a private language that it feels intentionally and mean-spiritedly incomprehensible.

xpost, but probably an answer of sorts.

His cartoons on Monty Python are by far my least favorite part of the show. I always fast forward. Sorry to distract from filmic convo. I just had to get that off my chest.

Yeah in retrospect I can't quite fathom how a movie featuring a farting taxidermied dead The Dude wasn't at all funny.

Peter Stormare was funny as shit in Brothers Grimm.

Fuck it. I liked Tideland, even if no one else on ILX did.

I also think the animated Python bits are sometimes the best bits of the show.

Talking about the possibilities for a Terry Gilliam movie is almost always superior to watching a Terry Gilliam movie. Fear and Loathing is entertaining in small doses and 12 Monkeys is probably OK - but I can't think of anything else I've seen that was passable. (Have not seen Brazil.)

abbott u crazy

12 Monkeys is wonderful, as is Brazil, although Brazil's wonder is completely overshadowed by the final shot, which obliterates more or less all that came before it in a devastating emotional smackdown. One of the finest endings in film history IMO.

Brazil: absolute Classic!

Fear and Loathing in Las vegas: Absolute Dud!

very much polar extremes in terms of quality (Not that the latter is of low quality, it's made quite well, I just depsise it).

Somebody besides me has seen The Reflecting Skin? Holy cow.

Best Amanda Plummer mini-performance: The Prophecy, being yanked around by Christopher Walken's Gabriel.

The Fisher King would be in my top 25 favorite films of all time. Also love 12 Monkeys, Brazil, Time Bandits. Just saw Brothers Grimm this week and eh. It had some good moments. Heath Ledger was surprisingly good.

No bad films, in my opinion. He is one of the greats.

MPython cartoons = CLASSIC

OMG. PROJECTSES!

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus starring Tom Waits and Heath Ledger! A Gorillaz movie! A GOOD OMENS adaptation!

If he makes even one of these movies my stokedness levels are through the roof.

Oh I somehow skipped over the first pages of the interview, they talk about Tideland and still trying to make the Don Quixote movie too.

In fact that doesn't even mention Tom Waits as Dr Parnassus, does it? I guess wiki does.

Love Terry Gilliam with all my heart, this in spite of the fact that his work seems to have totally fallen apart in the last decade.

Brazil and Time Bandits = two of my favorite movies, with very little competition. Munchausen is a mess, but I love it anyway - at least 80% brilliant. If you cut out Robin Williams, it'd be damn near perfect. Fisher King and 12 Monkeys are both admirable, and I respect them a lot, but they're a bit too square for me to really love.

Fear and Loathing, The Brothers Grimm and Tideland are terrible movies. Tideland is far and away the worst thing he's ever done, but it's not an aberration. It fits right in with Fear & Loathing and Bros Grimm: incoherent, arbitrary, poorly thought-out, tedious.

He says something at the end of the interview about how anything is possible if he keeps Johnny Depp on staff...if he makes a GOOD OMENS movie, will Depp play CRAWLEY? That would be good.

THAT WOULD BE AWESOME.

Just saw Tideland - I loved it. The actress who pays Jeliza Rose puts in one of the best performances from a child actor I've seen, I'm a little amazed at some of the comments upthread but of course views differ on such things. For me, it was a deeply moving film, and brought me to tears several times. Just thought I'd stick my neck out for this one, because sometimes I wonder if the critics realise what a brilliant director walks among us. It's not just the way he handles the material, or the actors, but also the material he selects in the first place. I think history will cover him in glory, even if many find him a bit hard to take right now.

Read some thing the other day saying he's still determined to finish Don Quixote.

Everything he's ever made has elements of Quixote so he may as well.

moley otm. Deeply disturbing but I quite liked it. Grimm was shithouse.

Um, so The Imaginarium of Dr Parnasssus will be in slight turmoil then.

Doesn't have the best of luck, our Tel.

YES YES YES YES

Law, Depp and Farrell to replace Ledger in film

Jude Law will appear as Heath Ledger's character, along with Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell, in the unfinished film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Law's spokeswoman said today.

They will all play the role of Tony in the fantasy film Ledger had been filming before his death.

It was not immediately clear how the role will be reconstructed for three actors.

DUH IT'S A GILLIAM FILM, LIKE YOU COMMON PRESS TYPES EVER GOT HIS FILMS ANYWAY

COMMON PRESS TYPES OTM, Gilliam movies generally awful

rong

brothers grimm was definitely a bit awful though

Masterpiece or horrible mess? Place your bets now.

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=23237

Sorry, here's one that works:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/15/heathledger?gusrc=rss&feed=film

Watched both Brazil an Tideland this week, for the first time

Thought Brazil was great, another film I can't believe I've never seen before.

Tideland on the other hand, mm not really my sort of thing. It seemed very unsatisfying and no particular moment held any interest for me.

Tideland is tough going, whether you're revolted by the more confronting moments or just bored. I liked it but I doubt I could sit through it again.

Brazil is the best film ever, and I really really wish Gilliam would just give up now.

Yeah, i could see how Tideland would appeal to some people rather than me just slandering it as a crap film which it certainly wasn't.

I just loved Brazil though, an extravanganza of gilliamness.

Grimm Brothers, on the other hand, was balls.

so is Tideland really NOT a crap film? because the consensus seems to be that it is actually even worse than that, that it's affront to cinema and sensibilities, among the worst movies ever made

I liked it but I doubt I could sit through it again.

Brazil is the best film ever

― I'm Richard (Autumn Almanac), Thursday, 27 November 2008 11:07

^I'll go with this.

Brief bits on Heath Ledger and 'The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus' from Comic-Con.

Read somewhere that he's back at Don Quixote. Lost in La Mancha was so wtf with disorganization and mayhem I'm surprised anything survived of his first go.

was posted on the heath ledger thread and even though it does focus on ledger a bit, i thought this was a pretty good read on Gilliam and the film as well: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/08/heath-ledger200908

can't help feeling sorry for the guy - has there ever been a more talented filmmaker with as much bad luck? seemed like him and ledger were really close too. :(

i'm pretty excited about this film, I think having charles mckeown back is the clincher for me, gilliam is spotty to terrible without him.

Roz- Welles maybe? Though a lot of Welles' problems were (however indirectly) of his own making...

Depp quits Don Quixote (again):

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5gWqLREHQxBHCMhKCAdktrMpz_HFw

"He added: "I wanted to shoot Don Quixote next spring. He said he's not available and we have both agreed that I'm going to die soon, so it would be nice to get this film under my belt.""

this statement doesn't really make sense to me?

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw2lUp1Cqz4

holy fucking shit

Just realized where I'd seen the young Parnassus' costume before

http://cdn.idolator.com/assets/resources/2008/03/mungolian.jpg

that trailer was spellbinding

i've watched it like 10 times now, i hate to type or even think something like this but heath ledger's death may have saved terry gilliam's career

I have to see that film.

Brief NYT blog thoughts on Parnassus:

The movie is Pythonesque but also Gilliam-y, with animated sequences involving giant unfurling tongues, cross-dressing troupes of singing men, burned-out landscapes and lavish dream worlds, and a storyline that hinges on the mystical/philosophical.

“On every level, it’s tragical and magical at the same time,” Mr. Gilliam said, introducing it at the screening at the Crosby Hotel.

“It’s not the film I set out to make,” he added later. “It might be better, it might not be better, but it’s different, and I actually love it.”

Fair enough; the stretch of having four actors play the same part is actually not the biggest imaginative leap that the film asks viewers to make. Surrealness has always been Mr. Gilliam’s best medium.

But “Parnassus” also includes several passages that seem eerie in light of the circumstances, including a parade of dead stars like James Dean and a speech about the virtues of dying young. Even weirder, those references were in the script from the beginning.

the CGI stuff in the trailers looks kind of meh to me.