Terry Gilliam - C/D, S/D

i wonder whether he got worse for the same reason george lucas got worse: everyone around him just doing what he says unquestioningly

e.g. 12 monkeys looking like brazil because production design thought he would like that

The problem with Tideland is not one of performance, technical execution or -as imago was typically desperate to enthusiastically doing round- the squares being shocked by the themes or plot.

It's the clumsiness. I said hamfisted above and it's still the right word. When you are clumsy and hamfisted and the topic is deliberately risky then the result will be a greater blowout than if you are as clumsy and hamfisted as Gilliam almost always is but the plot revolves around Johnny Depp mugging at a fish.

Gilliam's defence at the start of Tideland underlines his missing the point. It's not the theme. He's not shocked us with farts and underage sexual innuendo. His sin is that he earns nothing of the cloak of bold genius he thinks he dons by sheer virtue of a controversial attempt. He lets his actors down. Any drunk uncle can grasp at a shocking subject as he's being fucked out of the bar. Gilliam lacks the intellect, discipline and focus to actually shock, regardless of the theme. His level of execution isn't worthy of Sid James. The cunt is bawdy and he thinks he's dangerous. It's pathetic.

I'm not sure it was important that it be shocking. I think he may have even made an effort to take the edge off the nasty stuff.

He hasn't got an edge imo

admittedly if it weren't gilliam i probably would never have watched it

Darra- I mean just softening the uglier stuff like the corpse, child abuse and so on.

I didn't like Zero Theorem at all, it was just irritating and looked bad. I thought Parnassus was pretty good though. I think Gilliam is still capable of making a good movie but I don't know what it would take to get him to do that.

I liked things about Parnassus but the cgi and product placement puts a huge damper on it for me. I don't know why it'd look better than Zero Theorem.

darragh kind of 3 quarters otm

Not a bad return when the bloods up.

I'd note that it refers in the main to Tideland only, with a few recurring criticisms. If that helps.

well I've never felt the need to watch Tideland but bar a little rhetorical over-egging they felt like fair criticisms of the bulk of his career, the irony being that rhetorical over-egging is v. much a Gilliamesque trait, obv

Thing is I've never been able to get through the first twenty minutes of Brazil. So yknow there's that.

what

The order in which you approach an ouevre matters I guess.

Brazil, time bandits, same old Gilliam afaic

don't have much to add to this convo tbh but i just wanted to register my appreciation for dmac's new display name - a+ work

nod

so Don Quixote is finished. Already loads of criticism regardling charges that he 'destroyed' a convent, though the descriptions of 'destroyed' sound a bit overblown to me (a few broken modern roof tiles, and trees that were planted for another movie were removed).

He's a clumsy oaf

What happened?

rip

Is this about smashing up the nunnery?

It's a pleasingly complete description tbh

http://www.vulture.com/2018/04/here-is-the-long-awaited-man-who-killed-don-quixote-trailer.html

Damn looks like it might be a return to form

i hear it's being delayed again due to a lawsuit this time from someone who was one of the original producers (who gilliam claims never actually put in any money)

second trailer is a bad trailer, but I suspect that's the studio trying to make it look less Gilliam-y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVArq_Qs9lY

looks interesting and maybe trying for a Fellini feel. i really enjoyed Imaginarium (well the first 2/3 of it, by the ending the plot turned to shit).

https://screenrant.com/terry-gilliam-man-don-quixote-rights/

:(

Director Terry Gilliam has encountered more trouble with his years-long passion project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, as news broke today that the filmmaker has lost his rights to the film. Despite all of the time that Gilliam has poured into the film’s production, the director lost a court battle that determined who had proper rights to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

The Paris Court of Appeal ruled that the film’s former producer Paulo Branco has the rights to the project after reviewing a 2016 contract that confirmed Branco’s enduring ties to the film. It was Branco that originally began the suit, taking Gilliam to court over the film’s rights after claiming the filmmaker made the movie illegally.

what the hell

this project is cursed as fuck

well

gilliam behaves like a total fuckin brat asshole so stuff like this is perhaps tbe

that's true however everything I read about this lawsuit was bullshit.

well this did get some good reviews... i hope we see it eventually

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/05/19/keep-tilting-terry-with-the-magical-man-who-killed-don-quixote-gilliam-embraces-the-madness/

this film has leaked all over t0rr3nt sites btw. haven't watched it yet.

It came to the film festival here and was *much* better than I thought it would be, like 5/10

A One Night-Only Event!

https://deadline.com/2019/02/the-man-who-killed-don-quixote-trailer-adam-driver-jonathan-pryce-terry-gilliams-1202565160/

so as noted upthread, this movie is readily available in torrent form so last night I watched it. starts as a sort of normal movie and then rapidly goes off the rails into an hour and a half of surreal wandering through gorgeous countryside before breathlessly tying up the plot (such as it is) in the final castle scene, which I loved but is going to alienate anyone who isn't Team Gilliam probably. women in the movie are given absolutely nothing to do, and there is some hamfisted stuff about terrorists and immigrants that made me say thank god they didn't stick with Johnny Depp for the lead role, because Adam Driver overcomes this by being kind of self-absorbedly gentle about everything and it is an amazing performance. saves the movie from coming across as ugly as it might have otherwise. more than anything it reminds me of 12 Monkeys, as Gilliam films go... surprisingly more than Baron Munchausen which I would have expected.

I guess those first couple sentences could refer to many Gilliam movies so let me add I am talking about The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Sounds cool. Is there still a legal battle going on?

dunno, it's screening in the US on April 10th and had already got a European blu-ray release, so I guess they sorted something out.

Separately, his rival re Brazil, Sid Sheinberg, passed on the other day.

Wow love really does conquer all

lol

hee hee

Anybody else see this today? Just got back and thought... not good. Parts of it - the Quixote/Driver stuff - were fun for me, and it was heartwarming to see it actually existing as a real movie in a movie theater. But the non-Quixote plot elements I thought were terrible, the stuff with the Russian bad guy didn't work for me at all. Lots of hammy acting, Driver working very hard to sell a lot of thin writing. Like some of Gilliam's other weaker moments, a lot of the plot is advanced by people running around screaming each other's names and falling over stuff, which wore thin for me pretty fast. And the handling of the female characters was really embarrassing, two sex objects that exist to be fought over. I'm glad I re-read Quixote earlier this year and had fun picking out scenes and references. But pretty rough overall imho. Honestly would have preferred a version that cuts out everything except Pryce & Driver and went for a more straight adaptation.

Also thought Pryce was a great choice for Quixote and he did a great job with what he had, but I felt disappointed that the script flattened out the character to basically comic relief. Q is obv one of the richest characters in fiction, but here it felt like he just kind of shows up and does schtick to activate the various setpieces.

A large part of Gilliam's problems stem from believing in his talents an abilities far beyond anything justified by his output. And that applies both to him and to anyone who has bankrolled his films in the past three decades.

his films were good for the first of those 3 decades & he’s barely had anything funded in the latter two


tho they might have been better if he’d had money

One Eye Open otm

the first 2/3 of Quixote wasn't that bad. (Driver as Sancho Panza is a good joke, and his physicality makes for its own action movie.) The last 40 mins is pretty much the usual TG mess.