esrosedotblog

IMAGINATION

Today's film was Terry Gilliam's

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2010)

Well. It is the usual Gilliam show. Sets that unfold like popup books, huge heads that emerge from the ground, clashes of culture.

Gilliam's style is instantly recognizable. The emerging head is as old as the Flying Circus days.

Now he has CGI to play with and play he does.

It is exhausting and must have a story with characters one cares about to hold up the scenery.

Unfortunately this is not happening here.

The Doctor is eternal and has a "daughter" who he has promised to the Devil for it. The eternist is Christopher Plummer. The Devil is Tom Waits. Posturing squared. But that is the Gilliam style.

This is the Heath Ledger final picture. Heath apparently did himself in, voluntarily or not, between the real life scenes and the CGI stuff so it makes a nice break to have the other three Heaths, Depp, Law and Farrell, fill in. It is smooth. I bet there was still a storm of rewriting.

Gilliam has always had this kind of bad luck. We saw a documentary of his first filming of a long planned film about Don Quixote with Johnny Depp and the disasters that beset those days, killing the film. Plague of locusts.

I got tired of it. I wasn't really into it from the start. Unfortunately I did FF. That takes a point off.

Normally a 1 out of Netflix5.

But for Gilliam and his fantasies I will give a 4 so 4 minus 1 equals 3. That is what I will rate this.