Terry Gilliam
The American (now British) in the Monty Python troupe who was responsible for the outrageously funny and surreal animation sequences. Went on to become an immensely talented director of very imaginative and artistic movies which are often entertainingly bizarre. A recurring theme in his movies is of the relationship and clash between fantasy and reality, logic and imagination, exploring this in amazingly imaginative fantasy movies such as the more child-oriented Time Bandits, the commercial Grimm Brothers and the magnificent masterpiece Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Reality was also shoved aside by drugs in Fear and Loathing, madness in Fisher King, childish imagination in Tideland, desperate escapism in Brazil, etc.
Gilliam has fought hard to stay out of Hollywood interference but his problem is that he is an independent director with creativity and imagination that demands Hollywood budgets. He also seems to be cursed, with many of his projects encountering odd production catastrophes. He often directs his movies whimsically, inserting little details, jokes and flights of fancy, sometimes even swerving unexpectedly into comical territory. With this, he demands the audience follow him into his own mind rather than follow linear plots. All of his movies are fascinatingly imaginative but only the more unusual ones are listed here.
The brilliant surreal classic about a technocrat in the future getting into trouble with nightmarishly inefficient and overpowering beaurocracy while dreaming of love and chasing the woman of his dreams. A technical bureaucratic error leads him into an Orwellian nightmare where he is branded a terrorist while trying to correct a wrongful arrest. His dreams of flying and romantic imagery clash with a harsh world of bizarre executions, Kafka-esque work-places, down-to-earth trucker women, nasty face-lifts, terrifying plumbers and aggressively insistent tube-mail systems. Futuristic, but timeless, mixing various old technology with science-fiction and a unique visual sense that has been copied many times since. Sublimely bizarre.
Gilliam's return to form features a more mystical and morally-didactic exploration of the imagination, coupled with the usual Gilliam energy and wackiness. Doctor Parnassus is an immortal with a command of the imagination, using it to expose people's inner dreams and desires, forcing epiphanies and moral decisions. Trouble is, he has been reduced to performing in a mobile rickety sideshow circus in the streets, leading unsuspecting pedestrians to their own imagination behind a mirror where Gilliam pulls out all the stops of visual effects and imaginative images of huge designer shoes, dancing raunchy bobbies staight out of Monty Python, a devil's tongue as a river, kilometer-tall stilts, and much more. He has a strange relationship with a devil (Tom Waits) who likes to play sadistic games and wagers, one of which involves the Doctor's daughter. When Tony, who has a talent for surviving hangings, joins the troupe, he attempts to turn their luck around and together they fight the devil, but a love triangle and Tony's past threaten to ruin everything. A whimsical, slightly messy, but gripping, deep movie that grows on you about the power of the imagination and its role in our lives.
Gilliam takes a straightforward sci-fi story about a man sent back in time to try to stop a plague from destroying human life, and adds his inimitable, fascinating art direction with near-surreal sets and dark, imaginative images of the future. Willis is a strangely disturbed man living underground while the animals roam free on the diseased surface, sent on a mission to discover and stop the plague. He arrives too early, and is promptly locked in a mental institution while attempting to make sense of the sequence of events while drooling heavily and swallowing spiders. A visually rich feast as well as fascinating, fun entertainment with a tricky, time-travelling plot inspired by Chris Marker's The Pier. Unforgettable.
Terry Gilliam lends his madness and brilliant artistic sense to this trip into extreme drug abuse with non-stop mad visuals, hallucinations and a rapidly downward spiraling binge into paranoia and depravity. Based on Hunter S. Thompson's novel about the search for the American Dream by a journalist and his psychotic lawyer on a road trip to Vegas. There may have been a satiric message in here somehere, but it gets lost between the mescaline and ether, with characters that only have to act in various degrees of drug-induced confusion while babbling about some aspects of life that only a stoner would find profound. The trip is still pretty entertaining though.
Monty Python always bordered on the surreal and wallowed in the absurd, but with this final full-length movie from these British comedy masters, they also introduced over-the-top offensive attacks on social standards as well as the usual insanity. Between musicals about sacred sperm and the size of the universe, we get a man getting his liver cut out while still alive to make fun of charity, a huge man that constantly projectile vomits to make fun of food as pleasure, a nice surreal Gilliam sequence with buildings as pirate ships attacking high-rise corporations, my favorite sketch about teaching sex in the classroom to bored students, and many more. The sketches vary from hilarious to overlong and dull, but the cardinal sin the Python crew have committed which they never had a problem with before is to belabor their jokes long after the punchline has been delivered.
The most mature and challenging but unfortunately flawed Gilliam movie yet. This explores the world of a young girl who helps her hippy, trashy, demented parents take heroin, experiences their deaths, moves to the praries, makes friends with a crazed female taxidermist and her lobotomized son, talks to decapitated doll-heads and lets her imagination take hold in a twisted world that makes no sense. The movie edges uncomfortably with young sexual awakening and necrophilia but masterfully maintains its innocence, revolving around an astounding performance by the lead child actress and her mentally challenged friend. At times it feels like its exploring the dangers of uncontrolled imagination in a kind of twisted Alice in Wonderland (Gilliam describes it as a mix of Psycho and Alice), but the little-girl theatrics and doll-playing gets tiresome after a while, and the movie just seems to meander. A fascinating dark flight of fancy as long as you aren't expecting a point.