Tag: Terry Gilliam
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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s 8½
If I hadn’t seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with my own eyes, I’d have trouble believing it exists. So Terry Gilliam has finally made his Quixote; but it might be more accurate to say that he finally made his 8½. In a way, Gilliam has been making this movie over and over for […]
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France burns with religious mania in Ken Russell’s The Devils
Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) is a fictionalized account of the 17th-century Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier, tried and executed in Loudon, France. Questioning the authority of the Catholic Church is a controversial provocation at any time, but consider: if today, a sober movie like Spotlight (2015) is viewed as brave, then the The Devils’ […]
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Monty Python throws a farewell party for themselves in “Live (Mostly): One Down, Four to Go”
Like many misfit American kids of my generation, my brain was permanently rewired when I discovered the BBC series Monty Python’s Flying Circus on PBS in the 1980s. Monty Python, Doctor Who, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy formed a triumvirate of British pop culture that gave dorky anglophiles like us a pool of […]
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Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Terry Gilliam is burdened with a number of unfair reputations. First, as a visual stylist more than a storyteller or director of actors — the latter, at least, obviously refuted by the fact that many high-profile stars will repeatedly work with him for pennies. Second, he’s also thought of as an unpredictable hellion and spendthrift, […]
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Terry Gilliam throws the budget overboard in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Terry Gilliam’s mad, brilliant yarn The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a strongly anti-war fable to which every kid (and adult!) ought to be exposed. Like the best of its kind (including Ratatouille and Gilliam’s own Time Bandits), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen works on multiple levels and is accessible to all ages. It is, […]