Insidious: The Last Key on Netflix. Terrible bollocks altogether.

Well, Dune is fucking brilliant. 2½ hours flew, and my only complaint is that it wasn't longer. Obviously plenty of stuff was excised or skimmed over but that was inevitable. Hopefully part 2 gets the go ahead.

I watched Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" last night. The director's cut version.

For 25+ years I've heard how great it is and things like "What? You've never seen Brazil?!"

I shouldn't have bothered my hole. It is fairly fucking awful. A waste of 2.5hrs of my life.

Visually it has some jaw-dropping sequences but, like nearly every other one of his films, Gilliam has no idea of how to finish a project. The director's cut appears to have 4 endings only one of them in any way satisfying.

Jonathan Pryce is excellent in the lead though - as is DeNiro in his cameo role as the SAS-style plumber.

One of my favourite films, haha! I can understand someone might have misgivings about how it ends, but for me almost (almost!) every scene is just perfect. That said, I saw it first when I was around 15, so Gilliam's style is part of my film-appreciation DNA.

I tried to watch that 3 or 4 times, I've never gotten further than 10 mins. into it.

Is this due, in both your cases, to just not liking the Gilliam/Python schtick? Or you do like Gilliam, but just couldn't hack Brazil specifically? It's not his most digestible work (I guess that would be 12 Monkeys), but I would have taken it to be his masterpiece, me and the general view among critics. Curious to know what Gilliam folk who don't like Brazil do like.

Haven't seen many of his, really. Time Bandits & 12 Monkeys were alright, no better than that, Doctor Parnassus was just average - up and down as you'd expect, given the circumstances. Brasil just irritated me from the off and I haven't the patience to stick with it.

Saw and enjoyed 12  Monkeys when it came out. Don't know if I've seen any other of his films besides Fear and Loathing.

Watched Censor today. Thought it was shite.

Went to see Halloween kills in the cinema with a few friends and girlfriends. Best craic we had in ages.
I dunno if if it was intended but it was like a comedy most of the time 😄
We really missed the cinema with the lockdowns.
Place was fairly packed as well which was great to see.

Quote from: open face surgery on October 20, 2021, 10:15:23 PM
Saw and enjoyed 12  Monkeys when it came out. Don't know if I've seen any other of his films besides Fear and Loathing.

Watched Censor today. Thought it was shite.

F&LILV, forgot that was his. Yeah, rubbish.

Censor, however, was most excellent.

I love Fear and Loathing.

 Yeah, Fear & Loathing is great, a really ambitious attempt at transforming into film a book that really should have been unfilmable.

Fear & Loathing is fantastic. Only 're watched it recently and it's still stellar.

#2323 October 21, 2021, 04:31:15 PM Last Edit: October 21, 2021, 04:41:26 PM by StoutAndAle
Quote from: Black Shepherd Carnage on October 20, 2021, 06:17:46 PM
Is this due, in both your cases, to just not liking the Gilliam/Python schtick? Or you do like Gilliam, but just couldn't hack Brazil specifically? It's not his most digestible work (I guess that would be 12 Monkeys), but I would have taken it to be his masterpiece, me and the general view among critics. Curious to know what Gilliam folk who don't like Brazil do like.

Well, I'm a big fan of the Monty Python - I appreciated Gilliam's animated interstitial more as a late teen and adult rather than the first time I watched Python when it just got in the way of the funny stuff. I enjoyed how his mind worked. On some of the Python's movies though you can point at the screen and say "Gilliam" or "Jones" in terms of who directed which bit. Jones' scenes generally being the funnier and more coherent. Gilliam's looking better but also a complete disregard for editing or acting continuity.

I've seen a handful of his own films "Jabberwocky", "Baron Munchausen", "Time Bandits" and "Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas" - I think that the latter is his masterpiece.

I just thought "Brazil" was a mess and showed his (possibly admirable) bloody-mindedness to get his own way without a thought for the final project. He treats his films like student art projects sometimes.

The documentary "Lost In La Mancha" showcases this side of him. Gilliam blames the money men - the money men ask "Can we see your schedule or shooting script or just a general plan, Terry?". Gilliam says they have no spirit of adventure - they decide they don't want to be too adventurous with 60 million dollars.

Okay. But all that said, you're in a minority (nothing wrong with that either) in thinking that Brazil is a mess, so that needs somewhat to be taken into consideration too, right? Speaking of documentaries, in The Hamster Factor, the documentary about the making of 12 Monkeys, he talks about some of the first screen tests of Brazil. At the end, audience members, as standard, were asked to fill in a questionnaire with their feelings on the film. Across the tests, several questionnaires came back with various versions of "No more paperwork!!" scrawled on them, which the studio rejected as "spoiled" whereas, as Gilliam said, they were clearly the people who'd gotten the most out of the movie.

I dunno, I just don't see the film itself as a mess at all. It certainly depicts a mess, but that's the point; it's about the mess that inevitably spills out of a bureaucracy so rigid it is absurd, more Python does Kafka than Python does 1984 tbh. The whole bit with De Niro and the ducts bursting out of the walls is just an analogy within the film for what's happening in the world at large of the film; a mess!