The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

[Elliotanimated]

I could have sworn there was already a thread for this but I couldn't find it.
Terry Vance Gilliam's next...
http://www.movie-list.com/trailers.php?id=imaginariumofdoctorparnassus

[drugmassacre]

I think it looks brilliant. I didn't hate Tideland, but I didn't love it either. Something felt so...OFF about it. This feels like Gilliam to me

[Elliotanimated]

Tideland is an incredibly demanding film - not easy to enjoy.
If you liked it at all you're appreciating it more than most folks, I think.

[Lester Toil]

Is this Heath's last role or was Batman?

[drugmassacre]

Is this Heath's last role or was Batman?

this is what Heath was filming when he passed...he didn't actually finish what was need, so a bit of tomfoolery was needed to complete the film

[ACH]

Looks pretty fun, I'd see this. Love the choice of Tom Waits as the devil...I'd pay to see that alone.

[krisvahl]

So they cast Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to play the rest of Heath's role? If so, that's a pretty clever workaround. In context of the fantastical storyline it works well.

[Gorgonzola]

If I remember correctly, there's alternate dimensions or something that Ledger's character goes through to save the girl...each time he goes into one of those dimensions, they switch the character over from Ledger to one of the three. Incredibly crafty solution, if ya ask me.

[The Armando]

This looks fantastic, but I don't really trust Gilliam anymore. I will watch definitely, but without any high expectations.

[Elliotanimated]

Some stuffity stuff:
http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/parntitl.htm

[Elliotanimated]

Saw this today.
Challenging and sometimes incoherent, but full of great stuff and has a great ending.
Possibly his most personal film - Parnassus himself seems to be Gilliam.

[drugmassacre]

I'm torn on it. I am a HUGE Gilliam fan, and this to me feels like he kept a lot of the same sensibilities that went into Tideland and attempted to mesh them with his earlier work

There are loads of fantastic imagery here, but a lot of it feels like its being forced now, and doesn't feel as organic as it used to with Gilliam. Partly it's because he's wanted to go big and over the top and using CGI to get it, but without a budget to make a lot of it properly convincing. But also it's that the intention behind the fantastical imagery just rings false and contrived.

There is a lot of biblical allegory here, some it done in interesting ways, but a lot of it is so on-the-nose that it feels weird.

Overall I liked the movie but it's a shame that Gilliam feels the need to so haphazardly include what seems like every possible idea he has for it instead of weeding out the bad seeds. It starts out as a bit of an over-complicated mess, dragging early on, that oddly enough over time starts to dissipate enough layers off until the energy picks and sucked me in again in the second act. Then the third act comes around and everything convolutes again.

There are some good performances, most notably by Tom Waits, Christopher Plummer, and the extremely interesting-looking Lily Cole. Heath Ledger has some very bright moments, but overall his performance seemed stale to me, and the bits with his replacement actors (johnny Depp, Jude law, and Colin Ferrel) flew by so fast and were shadowed by the fact that they tried very hard to make them look and act like Ledger yet kept calling attention in the script to the fact that he looked different.

I would recommend this to people who are either hardcore Gilliam fans or are simply looking for something very out of the ordinary....but this is not for everyone.
___________

[Elliotanimated]

I agree on almost every point, although I thought it started well and got more complicated as it went along.
I'm such a Gilliam fan that I'm inclined to think favorably of him even when he doesn't hit the nail on the head.
I also thought Ledger was very good.
Any suggestions as to the meaning of the whistle and the symbols on Tony's forehead?

[She-Thing]

Not a fan of Gilliam, but I found a mini-treasure when I saw Brazil. As for the movie I think it was magical. Made me squeal from time to time "look! the blue boy! hey, she looks just like Venus from the birth of Venus" (my friend was quite fed up of those comments X) )

Agreed with drugs, wish that the story came out with more fluidity (was it the story or the storytelling?) but, dialogues were actually fun-- I enjoyed that specific suburban relationship between characters

By the way-- there's something in the end I don't get- why didn't the Doc simply got out of his "Imaginarium"? The searching for his daughter was a metaphor that he had to look into himself so he could "free her and let her become a woman"?

[drugmassacre]

I agree on almost every point, although I thought it started well and got more complicated as it went along.
I'm such a Gilliam fan that I'm inclined to think favorably of him even when he doesn't hit the nail on the head.
I also thought Ledger was very good.
Any suggestions as to the meaning of the whistle and the symbols on Tony's forehead?

i need to dwell on those two things and perhaps even see the film again. There were a number of questions raised at the of the film.

My girlfriend wondered why they were able to change the material of the material and yet it still worked. Could it be that any gateway could be the "mirror" when the doctor was in his trance? That was just tipping the surface.

I really like it when movies don't spell every little thing out and leave me wondering things, so that's definitely a positive about this one for me