Terry Gilliam’s mad, bril­liant yarn The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen is a strongly anti-war fable to which every kid (and adult!) ought to be exposed. Like the best of its kind (includ­ing Rata­touille and Gilliam’s own Time Ban­dits) The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen works on mul­ti­ple lev­els and is acces­si­ble to all ages. It is, how­ever, a Gilliam film, as as such pos­sessed of a cer­tain degree of dark­ness and naugh­ti­ness. But depic­tions of tobacco, decap­i­ta­tion, and brief nudity (of the young Uma Thur­man vari­ety… thank you, Terry!) were evi­dently A-OK for kid­dies in its era, and mer­ited a mere PG rat­ing. Spe­cial men­tion must also be paid to the spir­ited per­for­mance by a very young, adorable (but in a non-cloying way) Sarah Polley.

Oops, we threw the bud­get pro­jec­tions overboard…

What must be the most ironic cap­tion in cin­ema his­tory, “The Late 18^th Cen­tury: The Age of Rea­son,” is fol­lowed imme­di­ately by har­row­ing imagery of war­fare that wouldn’t be out of place in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Fur­ther dri­ving the point home for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence, a trip to Hades finds Vul­can (Oliver Reed) forg­ing ICBMs out of hell­fire. In a theme straight out of Noam Chom­sky, the mil­i­tary indus­trial com­plex (per­son­i­fied by Jonathan Pryce’s hilar­i­ously accented bureau­crat) impris­ons the peo­ple within the walls of their own city with a sham state of per­pet­ual war. In the end, the Baron (John Neville) defeats these vil­lains not with more vio­lence, but by inspir­ing the peo­ple to throw open their doors and thus their minds.

Uma comes out of her shell

Must read: The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen fun facts from Dreams, the Terry Gilliam Fanzine

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

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