FIlM

Still lost

Terry Gilliam has been trying to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote for nearly 30 years. The most public of his efforts was one in 2000 effort starring Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort when he actually got to the point of rolling camera.

The plug was pulled on that production after Rochefort, cast as Quixote, turned up with a bad back and Jesus or the Devil rained down upon Gilliam’s set with a vengeance that wrecked the landscape and washed his equipment away. Further efforts to film Quixote since then have been mired in lawsuits and insurance issues, with many cast members, including Ewan McGregor, Michael Palin and Robert Duvall passing through.

So it was with a little bit of shock that I found myself sitting down for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a finished film directed by Terry Gilliam, almost 20 years after the documentary Lost in La Mancha depicted the collapse of the Depp iteration.

As a Gilliam fan, it is with a heavy heart that I report the film is—not too surprisingly—quite the mess, the result of too many revamps and adjustments over the years.

The problems are not with the performances. Adam Driver does an excellent job stepping in for Depp as Toby, a frantic, disillusioned TV commercial director who longs for the esoteric days of his not-too-distant filmmaking past (a character clearly modeled after Gilliam himself). Jonathan Pryce proves to be a perfect choice for Don Quixote—or, rather, a cobbler given an acting gig who goes so method in his approach that he believes he’s the real Quixote.

The film has Toby seeking out the Pryce character in an effort to bolster a current commercialized version of the Quixote story. In his travels, he confuses dreams with reality, finds himself being mistaken for Sancho Panza (Quixote’s dim sidekick), witnesses the exploitation of women in the workforce, and battles some fat giants.

The screenplay, co-written by Gilliam, is an ambitious one that shoots for satire about our current political atmosphere and the state of filmmaking in general. Its plot-driving device, the blurring of reality and the dream world, flat out fails. This is the first Gilliam film shot on video, and the visual richness that accompanied his previous films is nowhere to be found. Gilliam’s often violent and harried style, accompanied by sometimes tight, claustrophobic visuals, doesn’t translate to the video lens. Much of this movie is just a spastic mess.

Because the dream world and real world have no true visual distinction, Gilliam constantly has Toby pointing out when he is in a dream or not. It’s left to the viewer to really figure out what is going on, and what is going on is just some major storytelling funk. It just doesn’t work, especially in the film’s second half, where it all falls apart.

There are some inspired moments. The giants sequence, so memorably depicted in Lost in La Mancha as Gilliam’s big moment in the Quixote story, shows a flash of what the movie could’ve been. Granted, the movie he has made today was done for two thirds of the budget he had 20 years ago. Gilliam has expensive visual ambitions, and trying to convey them on shoestring budgets doesn’t work. Granted, big budgets are justified by the public’s want for a film, and interest probably isn’t too high for a blockbuster Quixote movie.

Gilliam has said in interviews that he just wanted this movie out of his system. Now that Quixote is finally on screens, perhaps it will vacate the cherished auteur’s mind and allow him to get on to better things. (Available to rent during limited theatrical release.) Ω

“We should really do something about those windmills. i heard the noise causes cancer...”

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1Dumbo The decline of Tim Burton continues with Dumbo, his wasteful remake of the classic animated movie that amounts to a big nothing, for kids and adults alike. The original Dumbo clocked in at just over an hour, while this one lasts for nearly two hours that feel like 40. Yes, the running time has been padded, but not with anything that registers as beneficial. A bunch of unnecessary subplots and added characters take away time from the title character, an admittedly cute CGI achievement. There are no talking animals in this movie, so scratch Timothy the mouse, the singing crows and the lullaby from Mama elephant off your list of expectations. The mouse—who makes a brief appearance as a caged mouse wearing a hat—is replaced by the requisite precocious children, one of them played by Thandie Newton’s daughter. Sorry, Thandie Newton’s daughter, but you can’t act. Colin Farrell appears as Holt, the precocious children’s dad, back from World War I with one arm, and his wife died of the flu while traveling with the circus. The circus is led by Max Medici (a blustery Danny DeVito), who has purchased a cheap, pregnant elephant. He wants Holt to be the keeper of his elephants, a comedown from his previous gig as a circus cowboy. Farrell, like most of the humans in this movie, seems lost. V.A. Vandevere, the villain of the film, played by Michael Keaton, purchases Dumbo and plans to make him a main attraction at his Dreamland, which has a strong resemblance to Disneyland. So, in a way, Vandevere is modeled after Walt Disney and is portrayed as an evil megalomaniac. So, in essence, Burton gets away with indirectly portraying Walt Disney as a bit of a greedy monster. I’m not saying this is anything inaccurate, but it’s a little odd to see in an actual Disney movie.

1Hellboy A Hellboy movie without director Guillermo del Toro proves to be a very unfortunate thing with Hellboy, the third movie based on the classic Dark Horse comic. This isn’t a sequel. It’s a reboot, and a cheap-assed, sloppy reboot at that. David Harbour steps in for Ron Perlman to play the title role, while Neil Marshall (The Descent) haphazardly directs in place of Guillermo del Toro. While Harbour (Stranger Things) is OK in the role, he does little to distinguish himself, basically doing some lightweight riffing on a character Perlman established. He’s a lot like Perlman, but he’s not as good as Perlman. Gone is the richness and depth of del Toro’s world, replaced by choppy CGI, unimpressive makeup and messy editing. The movie is just one lackluster action sequence after another, strung together with slow dialogue scenes that do nothing to make the film feel coherent. The movie starts off on a goofy note, with Hellboy in a wrestling match with his former partner turned vampire. That sounds stupid, and it is, giving the film a silly note to start on as the narrative jumps from vampire-slaying to giant-hunting. Hellboy battles giants, who are represented with the aforementioned choppy CGI. Marshall apparently got the go ahead to incorporate a lot of gore, and the movie has a lot of blood, to the point where it has a numbing effect. It’s totally void of fun.

1Mary Magdalene This latest take on Mary Magdalene, who has had widely ranging portrayals in cinema over the years, suggests that Mary (Rooney Mara) was Jesus’ closest disciple, and was by no means a prostitute, effectively declaring Barbra Hershey’s depiction of Mary in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ total bullshit. According to director Garth Davis (Lion), Mary wasn’t just the closest confidant of the Jesus, but easily the most boring. Mara’s Mary just sort of skulks about in this movie, arriving late for all of the big events like Jesus tearing up the temple, the Last Supper, and the whole Crucifixion deal. (In a strange way, she reminds of Brian in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, just not as funny.) And while Mara’s Mary is a snooze, she’s excitement personified next to this film’s Jesus, portrayed by the usually reliable Joaquin Phoenix. In the hands of Phoenix, Jesus becomes a quizzical sort who looks really cold all of the time, pulling his little shawl/robe around and coming off as super depressed. In short, Phoenix is a terrible Jesus. One of the worst ever. While it’s admirable to portray Magdalene as more disciple than prostitute, this movie makes the whole dying for your sins event a sleepy afterthought. Too bad … I like a good Jesus movie, and this isn’t one of them. It’s not a good Magdalene movie, either. It’s not a good movie, in general. (Available for rent during a limited theatrical release.)

2Pet Sematary The original cinematic take on Stephen King’s supposed scariest novel was a camp horror hoot, a strange mixture of gore and satire that holds up pretty well today. This take is more of a straightforward approach to King’s story about humans who can’t deal with death, especially when it comes to pets and family members. Jason Clarke steps in as Louis Creed, big city doctor moving to the country, where his wonderful new house is unfortunately bordered by a pet cemetery/Indian burial ground in the back and a road full of speeding trucks to the front. The death of the family cat leads to an ill-advised burial in the cemetery, which leads to a zombie return of the beloved cat. The cat is followed by a family member, and King fans will be surprised to see who that family member is (as long as you haven’t seen many of the commercials). This remake is sorely lacking the sense of humor that made the original twisted in a solid, King sort of way. The behavior of everybody in this movie is so stupid that when it is played straight, it just comes off as moronic rather than scary. Jete Laurence is very good as the young daughter, and John Lithgow is OK with a more serious take on neighbor Jud (played by the late, great Fred Gwynne in the original). The movie drifts away from the original book too much in the end and, again, could’ve used a few more sick laughs. It’s admirable that the filmmakers were shooting for something other than a note by note remake of the original but, by going off book too much, they lose some of the cruel sting of King’s intentions.

3Shazam! The DC universe gets its best movie since Wonder Woman with Shazam!, a fun—and sometimes shockingly dark—blast of comic book superhero fantasy. While a little sloppy at times, the movie works thanks to its central performances and warmhearted core. Zachary Levi proves an excellent choice to play the title character, the net result of a 14-year-old boy being handed super powers by a wizard (Djimon Hounsou). That boy is Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a foster child in search of his real mom. When he yells “Shazam!” a lightning bolt blasts him in his melon, and he becomes the glorious, red-suited, white-caped superhero, albeit a superhero with a 14-year-old’s brain. This gives Levi the chance to do a Tom Hanks-inBig kind of shtick, and he’s good at it. The new Shazam, who goes by various names, including Captain Sparkle Fingers, gets coached by his superhero-obsessed sidekick and foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer). Freddy is one of the big reasons this movie works despite its flaws. Grazer employs the same kind of whip smart line delivery that made him one of the more memorable kids running away from Pennywise. While the movie doesn’t always work due to some abrupt tonal shifts and subpar CGI, it’s refreshing to see DC go a comedic, shiny superhero route after the gloomy blunders that were Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and Justice League and the goofy bombast of Aquaman. Shazam! has some of the joy that’s missing from the latest Superman flicks.