I love and have on DVD pretty much everything made by Terry Gilliam and he is amongst my top favourite directors. Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys, Baron Munchausen, Life of Brian, Holy Grail, The Fisher King, Tideland or Fear & Loathing I mean come on!
Here’s Brazil, which of course I thought was a documentary (sic!), starring the always watchable Johnathan Pryce who excels as our Knight errant! (Pryce has said it was the role of a lifetime!)
Bit parts of genius by the legendary Michael Palin, Bob Hoskins, with the lovely and tough Kim Greist as the love interest (although Gilliam was said to have been less than pleased with her role in it and cut her from many scenes - the audience loved her!) and of course the mercurial surreal Katherine Helmond (seen above), our own legendary Jim Broadbent too, our perennial heroes in Ian Holm and Peter Vaughan and even Robert De Niro (how DID Terry mange to sell that idea to him!?) The support cast looks like a who’s who of British character actors
(Genius casting - HILARIOUS)
Gilliam became a naturalised Brit and for political reasons renounced his US citizenship
"Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things"
One of my favorite movies of all time, as well. It's quite nearly a perfect movie. For a few years, I had my students write term papers on varying aspects of it.
ReplyDeleteWow Christopher! That is brilliant! Love the idea of the students writing papers on it and what a great teacher (lecturer?) you must be
ReplyDeleteGreat subject for an essay
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