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Review: Terry Gilliam realizes a long-time dream with THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE

18 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by cinepam in Reviews, Uncategorized

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Adam Driver, Jean Rochefort, John Hurt, Johnny Depp, Jonathan Pryce, Terry Gilliam, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Quixote 2.jpg

Terry Gilliam has been tilting at windmills for 30 years, trying to get his passion project, his spin on Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th century novel Don Quixote, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, made. Most famously, French actor Jean Rochefort donned Quixote’s helmet while Johnny Depp played commercials director Toby who becomes Quixote’s Sancho Panza in an aborted 200 production that was immortalized in the documentary Lost in La Mancha. Among the actors attached or considered for the role of Quixote in subsequent years were Gerard Depardieu, Robert Duvall, Gilliam’s fellow Python Michael Palin, and the late John Hurt (diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just prior to what was supposed to be a 2016 production start state) with Ewan McGregor and Jack O’Connell cast as Toby. This was a production clearly never meant to be, yet sometimes, giants are vanquished and miracles do happen as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote arrives in theaters with Gilliam’s Brazil star Jonathan Pryce as the grizzled Quixote and Adam Driver as Toby, the ad man begging for comeuppance.

The film represents probably the only opportunity to ever see Driver do an impression of vaudeville and early movie star Eddie Cantor, which he does with an inspired performance of “If You Knew Susie” that would be worth the price of admission alone even if Gilliam’s 30-years-in-the-making dream project was an utter failure. Which it isn’t, far from it. It was a given that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would be an eyepopping production. It couldn’t help but be that, not with Gilliam’s longtime cinematographer Nicola Pecorini’s gorgeous photography, Benjamín Fernández and Gabriel Liste’s exquisite production design, and resonant locations in Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands that evoke both the 17th century of Quixote’s time and our modern era. What couldn’t be anticipated was just how well Gilliam succeeds in telling his story. Those three decades and all the cast changes have not gone for naught. This is the director’s most satisfying film since The Fisher King 28 years ago.

Driver is one of those rare actors that doesn’t need to be liked, which a good thing, since Toby is such a pill: arrogant, rude, craven, betrayer of his boss (Stellan Skarsgård), and just a general pain in the ass. On location in Spain where he is shooting his latest commercial, he stumbles on a DVD of his student film, a Don Quixote story shot in a nearby village. Nostalgia coupled with a need to escape his current circumstances sends him on a visit back to that ancient town where he discovers that his old leading lady Angelica (Joana Ribeiro) has gone away and become an escort, while the cobbler (Pryce) who was his Quixote has fallen into the delusion that he is the character. Reunited with Toby, he’s found his Sancho Panza.

What follows is a kind of wondrous delirium. Reality and fantasy intertwine, complete with cameos from a gallery of Gilliam monsters. Toby resists and embraces his new role, displays cowardice and courage, and wrestles with the idea that his little student film changed the course of people’s lives, and not for the better. Pryce and Driver, even at loggerheads, share a delicious chemistry. Pryce is excellent, imbuing Quixote with warmth and a gentle daftness, while Driver is magnificent as he portrays Toby’s evolution from a brat to a human being who just might reclaim his soul.

Thirty years from idea to execution is a long time to embrace a dream. It was worth the wait to see its reality. Bravo, Terry Gilliam. –Pam Grady

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The Big Suck: Dark Shadows

11 Friday May 2012

Posted by cinepam in Reviews

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Chloe Grace Moretz, Dark Shadows, Eva Green, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, Jonny Lee Miller, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tim Burton

What ails Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows reboot can be summed up in three words: Jonny Lee Miller. Not that there’s anything wrong with him. He is a fine actor let down by movie in which his character Roger Collins – a sleazebag descendent of vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) – is so thin that he’s practically translucent. There’s no real point to the character or to casting a recognizable name to play him. There are many more missteps in this uninspired horror comedy, but the misuse of Miller is symbolic of the whole sorry enterprise. This eighth collaboration between Burton and Depp ought to be grounds for their divorce. At this point, they are only bringing out the worst in each other.

Unlike the recent 21 Jump Street – in which Depp shines in a cameo role – that simply took the premise of the original TV series of cops masquerading as high school kids and spun it into a completely new story, Dark Shadows hews closer in some aspects to the Gothic TV soap opera that inspired it. Freed from his coffin after 200 years, Barnabas returns to his Maine estate Collinwood and discovers that his once powerful family has fallen into such a state that they cannot even afford the upkeep on the mansion. The town, Collinsport, might still bear the family name, but it is Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green), the witch who cursed the family in the first place, who rules it.

Replacing the melodrama of the original series is weak comedy. The story is credited to two writers, frequent Burton collaborator John August (Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as the upcoming Frankenweenie) and Seth Grahame-Smith (who also wrote the screenplay) and it’s an incoherent mess that appears to take a checklist approach to the supernatural elements of vampire, witch, ghost and werewolf. The tale is set in the 1970s, apparently for the sole reason of mining weak jokes from the 18th-century vampire’s fraught interactions with lava lamps, Alice Cooper, The Carpenters and Roger’s double-knit polyester leisure suits.

Talented actors like Miller, Michelle Pfeiffer as lady of the manor Victoria Collins Stoddard, Chloe Grace Moretz as Victoria’s surly daughter Carolyn, and Burton’s partner Helena Bonham Carter as the Collins’ drunken live-in psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman are on hand to decorate the scenery, but this is Depp’s show. Once again, he’s that guy, the willful eccentric, the lovable rapscallion ever ready with a quip, and catnip for the ladies, this time despite Barnabas’ deathly pallor, ridiculous haircut and claws so lethal looking it seems apparent that the good-natured bloodsucker spends a lot of his free time sharpening them on the lid of his coffin. Barnabas is less a character than a cartoon and in Depp’s universe, only too familiar. Depp has become his own stereotype, self-consciously odd and overly broad. It’s a lazy abuse of genuine talent and it stopped being cute at least three Pirates of the Caribbeans ago.

Perhaps what is most shocking about Dark Shadows is how little imagination seems to have gone into it. At his worst, Burton’s films have always at least offered dazzle. While at times that means the movies seem more art directed than directed, they’ve also been gorgeous eye candy. Dark Shadows is downright dowdy. It’s a sad thing when the most memorable image in a Tim Burton film is Bonham Carter’s red wig.

It’s been twenty-two years since Burton and Depp first collaborated on Edward Scissorhands, a film with overflowing with visual panache and just as much heart. Dark Shadows has neither. Perhaps a vampire had at it. The movie has certainly been sucked dry of any reason for being. – Pam Grady

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