Last night, through an amazing and unexpected string of good luck, I ended up at a special screening of Terry Gilliam’s new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus presented by Gilliam himself.

I should probably point out that I’m a huge, huge fan of Gilliam. To the point that I’ve said that I want to be buried with my Criterion Collection edition of Brazil. So bear with me if I start to nerd out a bit.

I thought Imaginarium was terrific. After The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, which were both dark, heavy films, this is a return to the lightness of his earlier films. Don’t pay attention and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a sequel to Time Bandits. Or maybe The Fisher King. Or maybe even The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. And hell, while I’m at it, there are a few shots there that made me think Gilliam has already cast Christopher Plummer in the lead of his currently-in-preproduction The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. This film shines a spotlight on the leitmotif running through all of his previous work: the idea that imagination and invention can break the spell of monotony cast by the drudgery of ordinary life.

At this point, I should probably try to summarise the plot. Isn’t that how these things work? But in Gilliam films, this is easier said than done. And to be honest, I think this is the kind of film that works best when you come into it blind, rather than with a bunch of preconceptions about what the story might be. Or don’t. Read everything you can, if you like. Just go and see it. But before you do, just let me say that Tom Waits is incredible as the Devil¹, and Lily Cole is a surprisingly good actress. And the rewrites following the death of Heath Ledger work so well I’d bet that in 30 years, people will barely know they weren’t intentional. Like the malfunctioning shark in Jaws, sometime restrictions bring out the best in us.

There’s another aspect of Imaginarium that highlights this too: the special effects. Before CGI effects really took off, Gilliam was forced to limit himself using physical effects, which had a tremendous… well… physicality to them. Unbridled, his fantastical CGI dreamworlds look amazing and expansive, but they feel paper-thin. When people first enter the Imaginarium, they start in a pantomime forest, with cardboard trees which may have looked cheap and ridiculous, but they at least felt real and believable. As they moved further into the Imaginarium and hit the CGI-heavy landscapes, it made me wonder whether Gilliam made the right choice in prioritising epic verisimilitude over whimsy. Especially considering the film’s message of liberation through imagination.

One thing I should probably point out, which no-one has mentioned so far, is the similarity between this film and Angela Carter’s novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Both are about unbridled imagination (and the potential perils thereof), but also, and perhaps more crucially, both are about identity and choice. I dunno, maybe I’m completely off-base with this one, but I could have sworn that one of the gravestones in Imaginarium had the name “Dr Hoffman” on it. Or maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me.

(Update: Over on imaginariumofdrparnassus.com, Dave Warren, the film’s art director wrote in (in response to a link to this review — whoa) to say that the actual name on the tombstone was “Bob Hollow”. That solves that, then.)

The film opens theatrically at the end of the month and I’ll be keeping my eyes open during this scene when I go back to see it again. For me, every one of Gilliam’s films improve on repeat viewings. Gilliam told Mark Kermode that his preferred tagline for Tideland was “Tideland — It’s a different experience the second time!” I’d bet a tenner the same thing is true for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

1. Although I think this is slightly lazy, obvious casting, considering what a great job he did as Kneller in Wristcutters: A Love Story [↩]

Director: James Watkins, 2008, 91′
IMDB Keywords: Lake, Young Couple, Lost In Woods, Bleeding To Death, Bicycle

Sometimes it feels like my life is just a series of stupid decisions, strung together with crippling anxiety. For example, there’s the time we went camping in Tuscany. It was probably my favourite camping holiday yet — we pitched our tent on the beach. Not ‘beside’ the beach or ‘near’ the beach. We were on the beach. The waves were breaking not ten metres from our tent. It was stunning. Beautiful in almost every way. Except I couldn’t get to sleep. I was a bit restless and thought that watching one of the movies on my iPod Touch would help lull me to sleep. And so, instead of watching something like The Jerk or Anvil, I decided it would be a great idea to watch Eden Lake, a horror film about a couple who go camping on a beach and get brutally terrorized by a bunch of ASBO kids.

See? Stupid decision. I didn’t get any sleep that night.

It’s not like it’s a flawless movie. Even horror movies have a breaking point when it comes to coincidences — the screaming victim just happens to run into a cave which just happens to be the home of the big scary monster. Eden Lake gleefully ignores this breaking point and keeps layering coincidence on top of coincidence. Towards the end, Eden Lake actually felt as if it was taking the piss. Either the filmmakers didn’t get the memo regarding the suspension of disbelief, or they’re implying that this couple are the two unluckiest people in the world.

I’ll tell you what though, they’re definitely two of the smuggest, most self-satisfied cunts in the world. And this is where the film plays a blinder.

They’re so overwhelmingly unbearable that I actually started to wish them bodily harm. It’s a horror film, so you know they’re going to suffer and so I was kind of look forward to that bit of the movie. When all the bad shit starts happening, I felt better. It’s catharsis. Establish the heel, make them suffer, and everyone goes home feeling as if everything is right with the world. Did anyone go to see House of Wax to see Paris Hilton escape unhurt? No. They paid good money to see Paris Hilton get a pole thrown through her head. It’s catharsis, and everyone (including Paris Hilton, I bet) knows it. But Eden Lake isn’t quite like that, because it doesn’t stop there. It just keeps pushing through into a new level of discomfort that few films have taken me to. The brutality is so unrelenting that it’s hard not to feel bad for hating these people. I mean, I just wanted to see them get a few cuts and scrapes. Nothing that would leave any kind of permanent scar. And the film goes so much further. It was kind of like when everyone was all “Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who should rot in hell” and then they saw the video of his hanging and then they were all “Oh.” Eden Lake is like that. Only with less genocide.

And I don’t think that I can finish up without mentioning Jack O’Connell, who plays the leader of the ASBOs. He really is the star of the show, completely believable and terrifying. He basically plays a more sociopathic version of the character he played in Skins, which makes me think that he’s either a great actor who is in danger of being typecast as a grotty teen, or someone the police should genuinely keep an eye on.

Remember when DVDs first arrived on the scene and everyone was gushing about how great it was that they could record their own commentaries for their favourite movies? How did that work out?

Not so good, huh?

Know why? Because most people are boring as shit. When you get them talking about movies they love, they’re even worse. I’m not saying I’m above this. Put a microphone in front of me when I’m watching Kickboxer you’ll just get me either rattling off the entire screenplay or not saying a word because I fucking love that film so much.

Over on the AV Club, frequent commenter and the world’s biggest fan of ownage, Zodiac Motherfucker, has recorded his own commentary for his film of 2009, Crank 2: High Voltage. This is decidedly not boring. Imagine the forgotten love-child of Andrew W.K. and Kanye West screaming at the TV, swearing like a docker and whooping for blood, and that’s his commentary. Stupid and puerile? Sure, but so are the Crank movies, and that doesn’t stop them being some of the most entertaining movies of the last few years.

Either way, there’s no-one better to watch Crank 2 with than Zodiac Motherfucker.

* Not an actual guarantee, obviously

I’ve got a friend in Rome. He’s a smart guy, funny, very well-read. But there’s a problem. A big problem. Are you sitting down? He has not seen The Goonies.

I know, it’s totally fucked, right?!

In fact, he hasn’t seen a lot of movies. I think he was raised Amish or something. Whenever I catch myself saying “Did you see that movie…?” I remember who I’m talking to and say “Of course you didn’t. You haven’t even seen The Goonies.” I don’t know why, but the fact he hasn’t seen The Goonies really bothers me. I guess it’s because I love that movie to a ridiculous degree. That and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When I was 10 or 11, I would get up extra-early before school, just so I could watch one of those movies. I did this every day for more than a year. I can’t explain it. OCD or autism, maybe. I dunno. Either way, the idea that someone hasn’t seen The Goonies just stikes me as ridiculous because that, to me, is an essential movie. I will say right now, on a stack of bibles, this movie made me a better person.

So, here are the movies that I can say will make you a better person.

• There Will Be Blood
  Let’s start with some hyperbole. There Will Be Blood is, by a long way, the best film I have seen in the past ten years. It’s the kind of film that, when I think about it, I realise how glad I was to have been able to see this film in the cinema, in the same way as I’m so incredibly bummed that I wasn’t born to see Apocalypse Now when it came out first. It’s a huge, virtuoso film, and the fact that the filmmakers managed to contain it perfectly still shocks me. In short, it’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey of our generation. Yeah, I went there. If you haven’t seen it already, you should stop reading the rest of this article and just go watch it. Right now. There, was that enough hyperbole for you?
• The Fountain
  I feel sorry for The Fountain. Stuck in development hell for ages, finally limping out of the gate a couple of years later with a quarter of its original budget. It got completely overlooked. I saw it as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, and the cinema was maybe half-full. After the film, most people went home grumbling about it being a load of old bollocks. Except it’s better than most people give it credit for. It was clearly a labour of love for Aronofsky. A deeply personal film about appreciating the moment instead of worrying about the future. What could have been a throw-away piece of cheap sentiment (not that I’m against cheap sentiment) suddenly blossoms into one of the most striking and moving films about mortality that you’ll be likely to see.
• Evil Dead 2
  

  Rob: Let’s just say that I hadn’t seen it and I said to you, “I haven’t seen Evil Dead II yet”, what would you think?

  Barry: I’d think that you’re a cinematic idiot and I’d feel sorry for you.

• Koyaanisqatsi
  Yes, I know I already wrote about this back in 2005 and I probably sound like a broken record, but it’s still breathtaking. I said at the time that it was the most extraordinary movie I’ve ever seen and one of the most beautiful films ever made. And I stand by that (even if the rest of my writing then was more than a little up my own hole).
• Big Trouble in Little ChinaThis might not be John Carpenter’s greatest movie. It might not even be John Carpenter’s greatest movie with Kurt Russell. It’s an absurd, over-the-top romp through Carpenter’s id. All flashy neon and high-flying stunts. But it knows how ridiculous it is. It enjoys the juxtaposion of “a reasonable guy” experiencing “unreasonable things”. In other words, it’s trying to say: don’t take things too seriously. Or, as Jack Burton says, “Like I told my last wife, I says, ‘Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.’”