The Red Knight

Film: The Fisher King
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

In a lot of ways, Terry Gilliam is the Orson Welles of today. I like Gilliam a lot and have liked his work since I was a kid. I loved Monty Python (even named a dog after the show), and I remember my mother saying that she thought the show was funny, but hated the animation. I loved the animation, which was all Gilliam’s work. One of Gilliam’s most famous projects is the one about Don Quixote that he never completed. There’s a touch of synchronicity in this, as Terry Gilliam is himself a fairly quixotic guy. He’s tilted at the windmills of studios for most of his career and a lot of his films have a large fantasy element to them. Like Welles, Gilliam’s quixotic nature is at least partially self-inflicted. The Fisher King is heavily influenced by Arthurian legend, which makes it something of a return—a far less comedic one—to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a popular talk radio personality loosely modeled on Howard Stern. He’s rude to his callers, but funny. One day, just has he’s about to break into acting on a sitcom, an off-hand remark to a caller causes a tragedy. The caller takes Jack’s comments about a war against Yuppies literally and takes a shotgun into a nightclub and kills seven people before turning the gun on himself. It destroys Jack completely. Three years later, Jack and his girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) are living over the video store she owns and Jack is frequently drunk and just as frequently unable to deal with people.

South American Way, Part I

Film: Brazil
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I'm spilling the beans a few hours early. My podcasting partner Nick Jobe is running/ran a review tournament at the Large Association of Movie Blogs. Under duress, I participated (I was Nick's third back-up for people who dropped). I made it to the third round. I'm posting two of those reviews today and tomorrow, since they are a part of The List.

I’ve always been fascinated by the work of Terry Gilliam. Like David Lynch, Jean Renoir, and a few other directors, Gilliam is a director who makes auteur theory look like a real thing. Everything goes into the vision of the film, and Gilliam—regardless of any legendary battles with the studio—always shines through in the end product. Brazil is one of his first non-Monty Python efforts, and is legendary in terms of struggles for creative control and vision. Like Blade Runner, there are multiple versions of this film. For this, I watched Gilliam’s Final Cut.

Pie Jesu Domine

Film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

There was a time when I would have been happy to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail at any time just because. But it’s this movie that really taught me what maturity means. I can, as someone who has seen this film in the multiple dozens of times, quote virtually the entire thing. I can watch the movie and go right along with the dialogue. However, I don’t. That, friends and neighbors, is maturity.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a Python-head from the old school. I had a dog named Monty Python and another named Basil Fawlty. I own all of the shows on DVD as well as the bound versions of the show scripts. Tonight was the first time in years I’ve seen this, and, well, it’s still just as funny as it ever was. In many ways, classic comedies like Airplane! are modeled on Python in the sense that every possible joke is tossed against the wall to see what sticks (something Airplane! did in spades). The thing about Holy Grail is that a surprising amount of it does stick. Ridiculous things like the opening credits, the gorilla hand turning script pages, the coconut horses work as do the more highbrow pieces like Dennis and his mother discussing their anarcho-syndicalist commune.