Tag Archives: Colin Farrell

The Most Unlucky Man: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus movie poster

 

Terry Gilliam is bur­dened with num­ber of unfair rep­u­ta­tions. First, as a visual styl­ist more than a sto­ry­teller or direc­tor of actors — the lat­ter, at least, obvi­ously refuted by the fact that many high-profile stars will repeat­edly work with him for pen­nies. He’s also known as an unpre­dictable hel­lion and spend­thrift, which are, from the point of view of those that hold the purs­es­trings, the two least desir­able char­ac­ter­is­tics in a direc­tor. He may in fact be con­cerned more with the integrity of the work than with the busi­ness angle, as any artist should be, but he is no wastrel. In fact, all but one of his com­pleted movies came in on time and under bud­get. A bet­ter way to describe him would be as the most unlucky per­son in the movie business.

After the mul­ti­ple calami­ties and mis­for­tunes (that even an athe­ist might char­ac­ter­ize as acts of god) that befell The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam made The Broth­ers Grimm as a com­mer­cial con­ces­sion. Despite it still bear­ing his unmis­tak­able impri­matur, it remains the sole Gilliam film I actively dis­like. One good thing to come of it, how­ever, was a gen­uine friend­ship with its star Heath Ledger. Inter­ested in film­mak­ing him­self, Ledger stuck around on the set of The Imag­i­nar­ium of Doc­tor Par­nas­sus even when not needed on cam­era, serv­ing as Gilliam’ appren­tice and pitch­ing in when­ever possible.

Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“Can you put a price on your dreams?”

Gilliam’s fabled bad luck first reared when he was hit by a bus and cracked a ver­te­bra, as reported in Wired. Ledger died dur­ing pro­duc­tion, fol­lowed by pro­ducer William Vince before post-production could begin. If one untimely death could pos­si­bly be said to be any more of a shame than another, Ledger’s acci­den­tal over­dose at the age of 28 might be truly unfair. He was rid­ing the crest of a wave of appre­ci­a­tion for his per­for­mances in Broke­back Moun­tain and Bat­man: The Dark Knight, and had just begun to stretch his mus­cles as a direc­tor with music videos for Ben Harper and Mod­est Mouse.

The pro­duc­tion was very nearly halted, but Gilliam real­ized it could be sal­vaged and re-conceived if Ledger’s part were par­tially recast with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Far­rell. Gilliam stuck to one sim­ple and absolute cri­te­ria: all three actors must be per­sonal friends of Ledger, lead­ing him to report­edly turn down an over­ture by none less than Tom Cruise on the basis that he hadn’t known Ledger. Depp and Law actu­ally do quite resem­ble Ledger onscreen, at least with the aid of eye­liner and cos­tum­ing. How­ever, Far­rell most cap­tures Ledger’s phys­i­cal pres­ence and man­ner­isms. Charm­ingly, the movie is cred­ited not to Gilliam but to “A film from Heath Ledger and friends.”

Lily Cole in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“Voila!”

The eerie syn­chronic­ity between Ledger’s death and the film’s themes of mor­tal­ity are, remark­ably, coin­ci­den­tal. Gilliam co-wrote the script with Charles McK­e­own (also of Brazil and The Adven­tures of Baron Mun­chausen, which this movie most closely resem­bles). Accord­ing to Col­lider, the story is based on Gilliam’s own feel­ings of artis­tic frus­tra­tion, par­tic­u­larly after the recep­tion of his con­tro­ver­sial film Tide­land, which many found not just dif­fi­cult but even offensive.

As its title makes plain, The Imag­i­nar­ium of Dr. Par­nas­sus is set lit­er­ally in a world of imag­i­na­tion, a place we have vis­ited before in nearly every sin­gle Gilliam film. Most famously, Brazil riffs on James Thurber’s 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Wal­ter Mitty.” The few excep­tions include Jab­ber­wocky and The Broth­ers Grimm, in which fairy tales exist mat­ter of factly in the real world. In 12 Mon­keys, it remains ambigu­ous if James Cole’s (Bruce Willis) future (his present) or the present (his past) might be real or delusions.

Tom Waits in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus“He’s come to collect.”

It would be a huge mis­take to expect any Terry Gilliam film to make total log­i­cal sense. Such pedes­trian expec­ta­tions would weigh down an artist we love for his unique, vivid flights of fancy. But per­haps even the wildest Gilliam fancy ought to be inter­nally con­sis­tent to a degree. If some­thing doesn’t make sense, is it a tan­ta­liz­ing conun­drum left open for the viewer to mull over, or is it evi­dence of slop­pi­ness? The cen­tral ques­tion left unan­swered for me has to do with the core con­ceit of the film itself: peo­ple are drawn into the mind of Dr. Par­nas­sus through his mag­i­cal mir­ror. In his mind­scape, they must choose between enter­ing a build­ing main­tained by the Devil (Tom Waits), or… what, exactly? Of those few that reject the Devil, we see their bliss­ful, unen­cum­bered state upon leav­ing Dr. Par­nas­sus’ mind. What exactly hap­pens to them that makes them happy? Also, there’s the side effect of them shed­ding their pos­ses­sions. They may have been freed of their own earthly mate­ri­al­ism, but that doesn’t stop Par­nas­sus from con­ve­niently enrich­ing his own troupe’s cof­fers, giv­ing the whole process an air of a scammy con­fi­dence game instead of spir­i­tual awak­en­ing. Reflect­ing the theme of insin­cer­ity is the corn­ball tune “We Are the Chil­dren of the World” which appears as a ring­tone in the film, and at the end of the clos­ing credits.

The appar­ent pro­tag­o­nist turns out to be an unre­deemable vil­lain, unlike vir­tu­ally all of Gilliam’s pre­vi­ous heroes, in par­tic­u­lar Kevin in Time Ban­dits, Jack Lucas in The Fisher King, Sam Lowry in Brazil, James Cole in 12 Mon­keys, and Jeliza-Rose in Tide­land. Which leaves us with Dr. Par­nas­sus, who ends up a lit­tle bit like Parry (Robin Williams) as we meet him at the begin­ning of The Fisher King: home­less and seem­ingly per­ma­nently locked in a posi­tion of want. Both are hobos, ren­dered apart and invis­i­ble from a world of beauty and wealth. Par­nas­sus’ long­ings are embod­ied by the beau­ti­ful Valentina (Lily Cole), whom may or may not be his daugh­ter, now seen ensconced in an envi­ously bliss­ful nuclear fam­ily. Par­nas­sus remains for­ever tempted by the Devil.

Offi­cial movie site: www.doctorparnassus.com

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

 

Pride and Glory

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Pride and Glory movie poster

 

Pride and Glory was one of the last New Line Cin­ema pro­duc­tions made while still a semi-autonomous com­pany, before being evis­cer­ated by par­ent com­pany Warner Bros. in 2008. For the mor­bidly curi­ous, Van­ity Fair recently related the sad tale in its lat­est Hol­ly­wood issue. Dis­claimer: I worked for New Line Cin­ema through its end times, but had absolutely noth­ing to do with actu­ally mak­ing or mar­ket­ing its movies, and nobody there cared what rank-and-file employ­ees thought about the artis­tic merit of their prod­uct anyway.

For still undis­closed rea­sons, Pride and Glory was com­pleted in 2006, but sat on the shelf for almost two years. Direc­tor Gavin O’Connor (Tum­ble­weeds) pub­licly blamed New Line (and co-head Bob Shaye in par­tic­u­lar) for bury­ing his movie. Stars Edward Nor­ton and Colin Far­rel also spoke out about it in the press, clearly dis­ap­pointed but yet more under­stand­ing (per­haps these sea­soned actors were more jaded, and unsur­prised by stu­dio machi­na­tions). New Line coun­tered that the slid­ing release date was intended to avoid the lead actors’ com­pet­ing projects from dif­fer­ent stu­dios. It was even­tu­ally sched­uled for March 2008, but not actu­ally released until late 2008.

Colin Farrel and Ed Norton in Pride and GloryColin’s a bent copper

This atten­tion helped it become a minor cause célèbre among online movie afi­ciona­dos that couldn’t resist the bait: a scan­dalous tale of a sup­pressed mas­ter­piece. But the sad truth is that Pride and Glory is a god-awful, depress­ing, point­less mess of a movie. Actu­ally, that’s not fair; it’s not poorly made from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. Not to go out of my way to defend the stu­dio, but it now seems likely there was no actual con­spir­acy to bury a mis­un­der­stood mas­ter­piece. Per­haps New Line sim­ply couldn’t slot the film into its slate, fig­ure out how to mar­ket it, or was forced to shunt some projects aside dur­ing the stress of the immi­nent destruc­tion of the entire com­pany. Or maybe even, most unlikely of all, New Line had the sense to real­ize Pride and Glory just wasn’t a very good movie.

Also con­tribut­ing to the aura of con­tro­versy was the bun­gled film­ing of a police funeral scene at the actual cer­e­mony for New York City offi­cer Eric Her­nan­dez, acci­den­tally killed by friendly fire in 2006. The pro­duc­tion report­edly promised the fam­ily they would be respect­ful and stay out of their way, but reneged and clum­sily intruded on the sen­si­tive affair. Hav­ing seen the com­pleted scene, I don’t see any rea­son why it couldn’t have been effec­tively staged with a com­ple­ment of extras in full dress uniform.

Pride and Glory was writ­ten by broth­ers Gavin and Gre­gory O’Connor. As the sons of a police offi­cer, they had unusual access to the New York Police Depart­ment. If their film is sup­posed to be a trib­ute to hon­est cops, its cor­rup­tion plot must feel like a slap in the face. The movie’s fic­tional cor­rupt cops are wholly, utterly evil, with no gra­da­tions of char­ac­ter or moti­va­tion. Jimmy Egan (Far­rel) and a clutch of fel­low cops have been skim­ming money off drug busts for years, and have grad­u­ated to mur­der and sell­ing drugs them­selves. Egan’s brother-in-law Ray Tier­ney (Nor­ton) finds him­self in a posi­tion where he could turn Egan in. Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, Tierney’s pop Fran­cis Sr. (John Voight) and brother Fran­cis Jr. (Noah Emmerich, brother to New Line exec­u­tive Toby Emmerich, and type­cast as a cop after his role in Lit­tle Chil­dren) are also in the force. Fran­cis Jr. also knows about the cor­rup­tion, but doesn’t have the courage to man up. If Ray does the right thing, it will not only tear up his fam­ily but the New York Police Depart­ment itself. But events con­spire such that the good guys don’t have to act; three crooked cops self-destruct of their own accord, and the story reveals itself to the press. Jimmy and Ray are freed to set­tle their per­sonal griev­ances as two stereo­typ­i­cal movie Irish cops ought: fisticuffs in a pub.

John Voight in Pride and GloryCheese it, it’s the fuzz!

I sus­pect O’Connor had pre­ten­sions to mak­ing another L.A. Con­fi­den­tial, but his result doesn’t mea­sure up to the stan­dards of such a supe­rior film noir. Note the super­fi­cial resem­blances: police cor­rup­tion, drugs, fam­ily pride. Pride and Glory’s plot only seems com­plex, but is actu­ally stupid-simple. Expo­si­tion scenes basi­cally lay out the plot quite early, drain­ing any sense of mys­tery or sus­pense. The dia­logue is pep­pered with a tor­rent of names that are chal­leng­ing for the audi­ence to con­nect with faces, a tech­nique that pro­vides only a super­fi­cial com­plex­ity to a sim­ple plot.

The tone is absurdly grim and totally humor­less, and devoid of any human emo­tion beyond Ray’s grim sense of duty. The clas­sic film noir ele­ment most notably lack­ing in this boy’s club pro­duc­tion is any hint of women or sex. What few women there are in the cast barely fig­ure into the plot. The most sig­nif­i­cant female char­ac­ter is cancer-stricken Abby (Jen­nifer Ehle), whose sole pur­pose in the plot seems to be to human­ize hus­band Fran­cis Jr. Pride and Glory utterly lacks the sense of verisimil­i­tude of the tele­vi­sion series The Wire, sim­i­larly set in the worlds of inner city drug and police cul­tures. Now is as good a time as any to state that The Dork Report does not apol­o­gize for tak­ing advan­tage of any oppor­tu­nity what­so­ever to evan­ge­lize The Wire.

The set­ting is a ver­sion of New York City that may or may not actu­ally exist. In fact, there’s an unusual dis­claimer before the end cred­its stat­ing its char­ac­ters and events are totally fic­tional. Obvi­ously, if there was an actual case of such mas­sive cor­rup­tion in the NYPD, we’d have heard about it. After the cred­its, there’s yet another dis­claimer I’ve never seen before, stat­ing that no one con­nected with the pro­duc­tion took any money to pro­mote the use of tobacco prod­ucts. This Dork Reporter don’t smoke, and never has, but is offended by the notion that movies are influ­en­tial in this way. Granted, movies are a pow­er­ful art­form, and can affect people’s hearts and minds. The ills of soci­ety are real prob­lems that require com­plex solu­tions, but cen­sor­ing movies is not one of them. It’s a cheap and easy way for right­eous fools to believe they are com­bat­ing a prob­lem. Where’s the cor­re­spond­ing worry that lit­tle kids will watch this movie and be inspired to grow up to be cor­rupt cops?

Offi­cial movie site: www.prideandglorymovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Miami Vice (2006)

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Miami Vice movie poster

 

Miami Vice is decid­edly slight on char­ac­ter and depth, which is not sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the source mate­r­ial. It is quite so, how­ever, con­sid­er­ing writer/director Michael Mann’s track record once leav­ing the iconic 80s tv show behind.

The deep char­ac­ter­i­za­tion in all his crime dra­mas rang­ing from Thief through Col­lat­eral ele­vate them above the ultra­styl­ized and hyper­vi­o­lent genre films they would have been oth­er­wise. Even the most minor char­ac­ters in Heat have back­sto­ries and sub­stance. Thief and Heat each revolves around a long cof­fee­house con­ver­sa­tion; how many genre films slow down long enough for the char­ac­ters to talk to each other? And it also has to be said of Col­lat­eral that Mann some­how drew out of the increas­ingly looney Tom Cruise an actual per­for­mance, prob­a­bly one of his last before he heads fur­ther down Michael Jack­son lane to crazy town.

But Miami Vice is dis­ap­point­ingly empty, with an engag­ingly twisty-turny plot and typ­i­cally bril­liant edit­ing and cin­e­matog­ra­phy. But when there is no invest­ment in the char­ac­ters, who cares when they start shoot­ing each other in the face?

Alexander

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Alexander movie poster

 

Ugh. I should have lis­tened to the myr­iad crit­ics and friends who warned me off this one… it is indeed quite bad. Every­thing you’ve heard is true: impos­si­bly long, unin­tel­li­gi­bly edited (can any­one explain to me Alexander’s sup­pos­edly bril­liant scheme in the first bat­tle? Run­ning away and com­ing back will allow greater access to strike the enemy king exactly how?), and schiz­o­phrenic with regards to its sex­ual pol­i­tics. So Alexan­der was bisex­ual, fine. But in this day and age, doing any­thing to avoid show­ing an onscreen kiss just calls atten­tion to itself. Two pretty men gaz­ing at each other and say­ing things like “By Zeus’ beard, you are indeed a great man” is just comical.

And most amus­ingly: if accents are to be judged, Angelina Jolie’s char­ac­ter hails from Tran­syl­va­nia, and Alexan­der and his father came to Greece by way of down the pub. In fact, the kid who plays the young Alexan­der sounds more Irish than Colin Far­rel himself!

I rented the director’s cut, which bucks the trend in actu­ally being shorter than the the­atri­cal ver­sion (the only other direc­tor I know of to do this is Stan­ley Kubrick, who would often con­tinue to abridge films even dur­ing release). At 3 hours, 55 min­utes, I am quite glad I didn’t decide to go with the the­atri­cal version.

What was good about it? Angelina Jolie is always a plea­sure to watch — an old-school movie star in the sense that her pres­ence and beauty are so over­pow­er­ing that she might as well be from another planet. I’ve always thought Val Kilmer was a fine actor (espe­cially in the under­rated Spar­tan). And in a supris­ingly plain-looking movie for Stone, it’s a great relief when he finally cuts loose in the sur­real, lit­er­ally blood-soaked sequence of Alexander’s near-fatal wound­ing in India.