Terry Gilliam

The Fisher King Review

July 15, 2017 by JD Hansel

While I think it takes a while to really get going, The Fisher King is almost certainly Terry Gilliam’s best film (perhaps excluding his Python work). Continuing his exploration of how Western civilization thinks of insanity, he presents a very strange, but charming, romantic comedy about people who are truly not right in the head. This goes beyond the usual romantic comedy about people who do crazy things for love, and beyond Silver Linings Playbook. Robin Williams’ character is purely mad – plain and simple – and Gilliam is able to use this to create two very different kinds of effects.

The first effect is that of childlike naivete. We see a man who wears kiddish pajamas and loves his toys, but he’s not a man-boy. He just looks at the world a little differently, and he dares to try things most of us wouldn’t. He believes in fairy-tales and in fairies, and yet he very much understands sex. He doesn’t judge people for their craziness – he usually just doesn’t see it; he simply sees people who ought to join him in singing some fun old standards like “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” The way that this benefits the movie the most is in what it allows Gilliam to do as a director and cinematographer: when we see the world through Parry’s eyes, we see a red knight in fiery light riding towards us on a frightening steed and a hundred busy people become a ballroom of dancers the moment his crush appears. While I can’t say I’m in love with everything about the movie – by no means – I have to say that it’s very charming (and in all the right ways).

The other side of this, however, is the film’s darkness. The movie largely takes place in a bad part of New York, where Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is selling pornos in a rundown movie rental store. When an insane man enters his life, it only makes the lives of Jack and Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) even more hellish, which leads to some of the best drama I’ve seen in any film. Much of the drama comes from Ruehl’s performance as Anne, which rightly won an Academy Award, and which made me empathize with this character in a way I never thought I could. Even with the movie’s tragic terrorist shooting, suicide attempts, and violent beatings, it’s still the relationship between Jack and Anne that’s the most intense part of the movie, and I didn’t really like either of them at the start. By the end of the movie, while I have no intention of revealing how the story ends in this review, Gilliam makes us love the last people on earth one would think we could love, and that’s surely one of the greatest accomplishments of any artist in history.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) Review

May 27, 2017 by JD Hansel

The story of Baron Munchausen is an old one, even though there’s really not much of a story here. I’ve seen the old German film adaptation of this story from the 1940s, and while many hold it as a great classic of cinema, I find it unbearable. That being said, it is imaginative, and whimsical, so I wondered what a good director/screenwriter would do with it, so I naturally became curious about Terry Gilliam’s version from the ’80s. (I also have a big fascination with ’80s fantasy cinema, so this one’s been on my list for a long time now.) Fortunately, Gilliam greatly improved this story by giving it more structure, but unfortunately, he negates his improvements with an ending that makes little sense.

What I like about this film is that there is a clear main cast of characters and a clear quest that serves as a through-line for all of the zany misadventures around the world (and outside the world). Unlike the 1942 film, it is very clear in this movie which of the characters have special abilities, what abilities those are, and what these characters have to do with the Baron, so none of them throw the audience off-guard or feel too random (it’s particularly helpful that they’re part of the opening exposition). There’s also a sense that each scene – or at least each location on the baron’s journey – makes a contribution to the story, so the story doesn’t feel too random or arbitrary. While all of this helps make the movie far more enjoyable to watch by allowing the viewer to focus on enjoying the fantasy, by the end of the film it is entirely unclear what has happened. There actually doesn’t seem to be any possible explanation for how the events that have occurred could have possibly occurred, unless one buys into the artsy, peusdo-intellectual notion that two or three contradictory stories can be true at the same time in cinema, which is exactly the kind of sophistry I would expect Gilliam to express. Still, as disappointing and irritating that I find it that the film makes no sense and seemingly has no point, the cast is good, the comedy is fun, and the visuals are, predictably, absolutely delightful, making this film worth the watch for any lover of fantasy.

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life Review

October 3, 2016 by JD Hansel

This is it – the last film in the Monty Python “Holy Trinity” – and it’s certainly the weirdest.

Its “prologue” is the worst part, and it is very clearly directed by Terry Gilliam. I have mixed feelings about Gilliam, and I think this short is a good example of what bugs me about his work. Somewhere between the films of Terry Gilliam and the books of Roald Dahl is the land of “Semi-Horrific, Mildly Comedic, Awkward Whimsy,” or “SHMCAW” for short. Shmcaw is my least favorite thing in cinema, or at least it’s up there. This is that nauseating feeling I have when a film presents uncomfortable dehumanizing in a whimsical way, causing my face to scrunch up. It happens in Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry’s aunt inflates, and all throughout The Witches, and it happens in The Crimson Permanent Assurance when we’re supposed to laugh at random businessmen being forced to jump out of a building to their deaths by delighted elderly folks. The whole thing just feels wrong, but I will not detract any points from my rating, because this is the short feature that plays before the main feature, and Wikipedia gives it a separate article as its own short film, but I felt the need to mention it because it is (in some respects) inseparable from the film.

There is very little for me to say for the film itself. I think that it offers much of the kind of comedy I expected, but its main focus seems to be doing whatever any other directing, production company, writers, or group of performers would never, ever, ever be allowed to do in a film distributed by Hollywood. It breaks rules of cinema that no one ever invented – there was no concept of a rule against showing a man in an elephant suit for no reason, or devoting half the movie to unimportant fish for no reason, or giving an impossibly fat man who vomits profusely and eats until he explodes his own scene for no reason. Monty Python made up rules to break, all in the spirit of giddy, childlike (or perhaps childish) fun. There is, however, the question of purpose – Life of Brian has good reasoning behind its scenes, with an important message, but why does this film need to exist? Is it merely here to weird out the audience as much as possible?

Personally, I’d prefer to see more sense to the senselessness, more logic to the lunacy, and more method to the madness, but that is not what the film is for. Many have said before that it is essentially an extended episode of Flying Circus, and that’s what it feels like to me. It is not their best film, but it is pretty good, with several, several moments that continue to pop up in my head many weeks every watching the film, and they continue to give me a chuckle. The music is some of Python’s best, making for a very enjoyable soundtrack. This movie offers a fair mix of some of the best and the worst that Python has to offer, but by the 1980s, the Pythoners had learned how to ensure that their worst was still rather fun.

Brazil Review

January 28, 2016 by JD Hansel

SPOILER ALERT

I think I finally understand what happened here! Not what happens in the movie Brazil – I could never understand that – but what happened to Labyrinth and Time Bandits. Some movie buffs and comedy lovers may know that the Monty Python approach to writing movies was generally to come up with different scenes/sketches that would be funny all centered around a general theme, and then a loose story would be created out of stringing the pieces of the movie together. Naturally, when someone who approaches screenwriting this way has the challenge of writing a more traditional narrative story (that’s focused on likable characters dealing with a dramatic plot, even if that drama is not meant to be taken seriously) we can expect issues to arise with the flow of the story. For Labyrinth, Terry Jones’ screenplay had to be doctored in secret by other writers because it needed a lot of work before it could be made into the film Jim wanted (which still had leftover story problems in the end). For Time Bandits, fellow Pythoner Terry Gilliam made a bizarre family film that makes no sense whatsoever, and is often more awkward and convoluted than entertaining. For Brazil, Gilliam made an iconic ’80s movie masterpiece, but it had similar flaws.

Before going any further, I must recognize that this is, in some ways, a brilliant film. As satire, it’s practically perfect in every way, and makes the human race seem hilariously absurd. At some moments, its comedic criticism of war is better than Stanley Kubrick’s. Much of the film is good fun, and the performances are perfect. The world Gilliam created is brilliantly clever, and the visuals are absolutely outstanding. This truly is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever laid eyes upon, as far as visual art is concerned, because the lighting, the colors, the set designs, and the cinematography are all spot-on. It’s a masterful work of art that raises the bar for the genre of comedy films, and I can respect it if people love this movie a heck of a lot more than I do.

I, however, just don’t get it. Every now and again, I encounter a movie that has me saying to myself, “What the heck IS this movie?!” more and more as the film progresses. It’s a very memorable experience, and it usually means that the movie is going to mean a lot to me for a long time, regardless of whether I think of it positively or negatively. This film had that special quality to it like no movie I’ve seen in a long time, if ever, and I can’t help but be reminded of the first time I saw Gremlins 2, one of my favorite films, and the first time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of my least favorite. As blown away as I was with just how perfect certain elements of the film are, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the story didn’t make enough sense. Some of that special feeling I mentioned above was coming from a sense of being immensely impressed, but some was coming from being annoyingly confused. I now understand why Roger Ebert only gave Brazil just two stars saying, “This is a confused and unsatisfying film in which the magnitude of the special effects, and the chaotic implications of the plot, make the movie hard work for any audience to follow, let alone appreciate.”

So, my first criticism is that the movie doesn’t make enough sense. What starts off seeming like it offers too little with its minimalist plot (which consists of a man trying to meet the woman he’s seen in his dreams) eventually unravels into a psychedelic acid rock song that’s sad about the loss of friendships and angry with society’s constraints. There is very little correlation between what happens in Sam’s dreams and what he deals with in real life, and this gives the audience too big of a chore when they have to try to find the patterns and the meaning in all this. Heck, even the movie’s title, and its titular song of the same name, don’t seem to be very connected to the film at all. There are just too many things that Gilliam did not communicate as efficiently as one would hope.

My second big criticism is directly tied into the first, as it pertains to the lack of satisfaction. I’m not against a movie that doesn’t end with the characters living happily ever after, but I am against endings that don’t feel “correct.” I may have written a bit too much about this before, but screenwriter Terry Rossio’s rules about how an ending must be set up, inevitable, and yet unexpected are a good way to figure out why one might feel unsatisfied by a movie. If the simplistic plot consists of navigating through a dystopian future to marry a dream-girl, there had better be a good reason for missing the one goal we’re rooting for Sam to achieve, but this Gilliam’s only reason seems to be that he wanted to blow one last raspberry at western governments before he had to step down from his soap box.

I think it’s plain to see that I have mixed feelings about this unique work of art. The various trains of thought that I’ve boarded because of this film are so numerous and labyrinthine that I can reach no final verdict. I can completely respect the opinion that this is one of the greatest motion pictures of all time, and I can equally respect the opinion that this movie is whiny, bitter rubbish. Any efforts to unveil what exactly I feel because of Brazil seem to be disappointingly futile, but perhaps the important thing is that it made me feel, and it did so profusely. When it comes to rating the visuals, however, my feelings are clear: it’s in the 99.9th percentile, A++.

(Monty Python’s) Life of Brian Review

June 2, 2015 by JD Hansel

This film is not sacrilegious. This film is not about Jesus. It is about the importance of rationally thinking for oneself rather than just accepting what others say is true. It mocks group think, pokes fun at activists, and challenges people to be critical thinkers, making it very much the skeptic’s film. In fact, Pythoner John Cleese has said that a number of Christians have told him how much they enjoyed the film, because they understood that making fun of religion is not the point. Cleese has also gone on record saying that he has always thought Life of Brian would be considered the best Python film ever made, but I have to ask myself, would I say such a thing? Well, let’s analyze the story, characters, and comedy, comparing it to what has been my favorite of the Python productions, Holy Grail.

In terms of story, Brian works better. Its story has far more structure to it, and the plot is more conflict driven, with a narrative that would work well even if it was not a comedy piece. The pace is actually a little slow, but it’s still a very interesting story on the whole. The main character, Brian, has much more reality than King Arthur, making for more investment in a relatable character. This also lends itself to a great comedic situation as Brian is a voice of reason in a world of lunatics, and no one really listens to him. Also, the supporting characters are fun, will-written, and performed excellently, but this film is still not as fun or funny as I had hoped.

There was little to make me fall out of my chair laughing, but most of the movie did manage to put a smile on my face or get a chuckle out of me. Part of the problem was the culture-specific jokes throughout, such as the parody of the British political activist groups at the time, and the jokes based on the Pythoners’ mutual experience with learning Latin in school – something that is not as common in the US. In a way, the film is more of a tragicomedy than a comedy, largely because the audience cares a bit too much for Brian to be okay with his suffering (or at least I did). I tend to be very empathetic concerning movie characters I like, so I was legitimately happy when Brian was happy, but in turn, some of what he dealt with was hard to watch. Particularly the stupid people who didn’t really listen to him no matter how well he communicated – I knew I was supposed to laugh, and I suppose I did some, but I couldn’t help but empathize with his misery too much.

Comedy is a tricky thing since it requires keeping people interested in what the characters endure without letting them get too invested. So, in the end, I do not find Life of Brian to be their funniest film. I do, however, think it’s Monty Python’s most important film. I cannot help but respect this movie immensely for making a piece that helps us see why we must be critical thinkers, while making us smile at giggle at the same time. This film serves as a perfect example of how to make a message movie: its focus is on a strong character in an interesting situation; it makes it clear that this is not our world, but rather an absurd variation on our world; it is not at all preachy, but instead puts fun first; the audience is left smiling, but still thinking about the nature of humanity.

For this reason, I highly recommend the film to everyone, because in a way, it may be Monty Python’s finest achievement. (Not to mention, “Bright Side” is pretty great.)

P.S. My next movie review concerns another message movie that needed to learn a lesson or two from Life of Brian, so stay tuned . . . .