Reviews by JxSxPx

If there’s any genre that I think is difficult to make operate effectively in film, it’s the road movie. “The journey is the destination” mantra that hovers over these films typically reduces us into episodic moments in which the loosely assembled narrative frequently threatens to come undone by a parade of quirky side characters the hero meets along the way, and the rapidly shifting tones as we move from one stop to the next. There needs to be something strong holding the entire enterprise together than a yearning to be upon the road, or for the character to find himself long the way.

I will admit that when Nebraska started I was quite worried that it would venture into this same territory. That it would possibly even take some mean-spirited pot shots at flyover states and their denizens. But as the film kept going, I got more involved with its rhythm, and eventually a part of it touched my spirit. I began to rather enjoy its lack of sentimentality, that a lot of the characters were fuck-ups and hard-asses. People were willing to look at life’s hardships squarely in the face and not flinch, but instead work through them with a dogged determination and just get it done.

Much of the credit for this entire film working at all goes to Bruce Dern’s quiet, contradictory performance. He plays an alcoholic, slowly succumbing to memory loss that has remained a mystery to those closest to him. Woody is obsessed with the possibility that an obvious scheme may actually be his ticket to easy riches, and, I suspect, for the first time ever has decided to become proactive about something. One suspects that he’s lucid enough to know that this is his one last shot at completing a task like this, no matter how foolish.

Dern finds the truth to this man and plays it for all that it’s worth. As each day passes, Dern has his character awaken with a joy in his eyes and bounding in his step that is then trampled upon by the mundane and repetitive nature of his environments. This fool’s gold of a prize is an obvious MacGuffin, an errand only for those without the basic knowledge to spot an obvious attempt at manipulation. Yet Dern invests this dream with believability and an earnestness that is almost pitiable and charming in equal doses. The same could be said for his frequent alcoholic episodes in which he promptly says fairly terrible or emotionally damaging things to the people around him, not out of malice or spite, but from simply lacking in the common courtesy of thinking before speaking.

Will Forte, yes the one from SNL, proves to have unexpected depths as a dramatic actor. I’m so used to seeing his grotesqueries on SNL or 30 Rock that to see him play a real person so believably is almost perverse. Yet there he is, bringing a wounded melancholia and crumbling pride as the younger son of Dern who accompanies his father on the journey for a variety of reasons. One of them is clearly to keep an eye on the old man, another is to discover something about his father, and himself, along the way. It’s never too late to change or grow as a person if you truly want to, and Forte’s character experiences the most growth as he transitions from a man slowly becoming exactly like his father, to one filled with agency and a clearer picture of who he would like to be.

But Nebraska is easily stolen by June Squibb as Dern’s long-suffering wife. While she may be shoved into the long-suffering wife role, that doesn’t mean her character is as one-note and expected as that. Squibb takes every opportunity to create the crass, tough, devil-may-care persona of this particular woman. A scene in the cemetery where she offers up particularly brusque and rude insights about family history and character traits is gut-busting for how committed she is to saying terrible things in a straight-forward way. Even better is a scene late in the film where she unloads on the scheming relatives who are trying to grab a piece of Dern’s alleged winnings.

Yet it’s the morose nature hovering over Nebraska that stays with me. The sense that the main character is easily coming closer and closer to staring death in the face, and the uncomfortable, often painful attempts at two generations trying to understand each other. I think Forte walked away at the end of the film understanding his personal history and his personality just a bit better, but what an awkward journey to get there. Mixing tragedy with comedy is hard, but somewhere Alexander Payne manages to do it every time he steps up to the bat.

Courage under fire makes for great storytelling, if it’s done properly. Captain Phillips, more often than not, does this type of story incredibly well. Inspired by true events, it gives us an everyman straining to keep a level head and turn the quickly escalating situations towards his favor. An ominous blip on the radar is just the beginning of a series of twists and turns that feel too good to be real, which inevitability means that they are.

What’s most interesting about Captain Phillips is how it begins with contrasting, yet not entirely dissimilar, montages of the two main characters waking up and preparing to go out on the ocean. One of them is a middle-aged white man from the First World’s middle-class, the other skeletal Somali pirate from the Third World who seems to be burning with hunger. It is when Captain Phillips focuses in on this thought process, of how the First and Third World experiences are buttressing against each other in conflict and occasional bits of understanding and empathy, that the film soars.

When forced to become fierce and threatening, the skeletal Muse, leader of the Somali pirates, becomes a wraith-like figure with eyes that burn in desperation to obtain a piece of wealth for himself. Yet we can’t help but feel the tiniest bit of sympathy for this man. Much of that credit goes to the complicated performance from Barkhad Abdi, a first-timer who digs deep into his own life experience and emerges with a reading of the character that feels lived in and empathetic. That Abdi is able to hold the screen with Tom Hanks, and appear to be a more indomitable force than the beloved actor is a true testament to his skills. I hope there are some great character parts available to him in the future as I would love to see what else he can bring to a film.

It’s odd to think of Tom Hanks and snubbed in the same sentence, he did win back-to-back Oscars after all, but here we are. This year’s Best Actor category was heavily loaded with at least ten possibilities for nominees, and since there are only five slots available, Hanks’s work here became one of the great unappreciated. A major problem with Captain Phillips is that the script never truly fleshes out its main characters or develops them beyond our initial meetings with them, that they become something more falls squarely on the shoulders of Hanks and Abdi filling in the blanks. For the final scene, in which Phillips finally breaks after everything is all over, Hanks digs deep and delivers some of his finest acting in quite some time. If I had a hand in voting, and it pains me to say this since I love them both so much, I probably would have dropped Christian Bale’s fine work in American Hustle for Hanks in this. This final nervous breakdown, a cathartic moment for everyone to breathe after going through the hellfire right by his side, is what solidifies Captain Phillips as a visceral, enthralling film in the end.

Acting often makes or breaks a movie, and in Blue Jasmine, Blanchett elevates the film into must-see territory. Respect must be paid for Woody Allen’s consistency of output, averaging out to be one film per year since 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? Of course with a career spanning that long there are going to be ebbs and flows in creativity, and I think the problem is that Blue Jasmine leans too heavily on trying to update A Streetcar Named Desire for modern times.

The flashbacks, which set the descent into mental illness and self-prescription, aren’t terrible interesting despite being well-played by all involved. Alec Baldwin makes for a great Bernie Madoff stand-in, Andrew Dice Clay does some solid character work as poor brother-in-law (I know, I was shocked by it too), but these sequences just aren’t as interesting as watching Blanchett’s disgraced upper-class wife suddenly finds herself without a safety net and no visible means to support herself. The flashbacks are of inevitable events, we’ve already been told that she’s lost everything thanks to her husband’s duplicitous schemes in the opening voiceover, so these parts feel redundant.

Luckily Allen does much better work when Jasmine lands in San Francisco to temporarily live with her sister, Ginger (played by the wonderful Sally Hawkins). We see this world, a blue collar menagerie of variations on Stanley Kowalski and Stella, through Jasmine’s fractured point-of-view. Ginger is clearly the Stella proxy, but Stanley is fractured into three different men – her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), her current boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale, doing dirty, sexy and loud with a nice flair) and a random romance Ginger engages in (Louis CK, nicely expanding on his everyday schlep persona). But Sally Hawkins is real supporting MVP, never overplaying her hand, always working in the background, but investing her character with a truth and honesty that comes to fruition. Ginger and Jasmine clearly have a contentious history together, and even when destitute Jasmine treats all of these characters are poor relations.

Obviously, Jasmine is our modern Blanche DuBois, an aristocratic older sister with a tenuous grip on reality and a penchant for spinning out events to fit the narrative of herself that she has imagined. It’s a juicy role in its original incarnation, and this update works wonders. But Blanchett goes that extra mile, believably playing panic attacks and modulating the performance from someone who is able to keep it together into someone who has completely fallen apart. A scene in which she meets an aspiring politician (Peter Sarsgaard, a criminally underused actor), turns on the charm, and reinvents her entire life history to make herself more appealing to him is a marvel of acting. It is well within Jasmine’s established character to do something like this, but the callous reasoning behind it is even more astonishing. She only wants this man because he represents a stepping stone back to her former life of luxury and refinement. Blanchett’s strident, nervy performance blows the entire competition away, she’s just that good. But when isn’t delivering consistently brilliant work?

I walked away from Blue Jasmine admiring that Allen had taken a hot topic from the headlines and explored from the enablers perspective, but I just wish that he had developed a more original scenario to go with it. At times the film recalls A Woman Under the Influence and A Streetcar Named Desire too heavily to be truly original. But with Blanchett and Hawkins delivery career-best work, and those two influences being great works of art, it’s not a bad thing. It’s also nice to see that so late in the game a writer-director of Allen’s stature still has something to say.

I think Philomena ended up doing more things right than wrong, and knew I was seeing something so clearly made for prestige, but goddammit the movie ended up touching me. There’s a sweetness and purity to Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), she may not be a worldly woman, but she’s a good one. And to watch her struggle with her religious convictions, to see the foundations of her faith shaken, is to watch a soul being reborn.

This may sound like a joke, but I am being serious: how many horror stories are there of the Catholic Church being cruel to the Irish? After having a hook-up, Philomena Lee finds she’s pregnant and sent off to a nunnery. There she is housed, delivers the baby, forced into servitude to repay the debts of housing her for a few years, then her child is placed into adoption. The cold, uncaring distance displayed by the nuns seems at odds with the teachings of charity, compassion and love involved in Christianity. But Christianity’s hypocritical standards are part of what moved me so much.

The story mostly concerns a road trip between Lee and Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, pulling triple duty as a co-writer and producer), a disgraced government press agent who is trying to find work in the equally competitive field of freelance journalism. While he denounces “human interest” stories as pure hammy palp, there’s something about Lee’s character and story that brings him in. Maybe it’s the way that an institution has so clearly committed a sinful abuse against her, yet she unquestioningly holds tight to her faith while looking, and hoping, for some details about the son that was taken from her.

Granted this is heavy material, and as more revelations pile up and Lee’s faith gets shaken and reexamined, it only gets tougher, I think Philomena errs when it leans too hard on trying to mine the naivety and sweetness of the main character for cheap laughs against the more sardonic, cynical Sixsmith. Her character is clearly not stupid; she’s just earnest, polite and unfailingly tries to see the good in situations. The world could use more optimists like her, so I don’t know why the movie so heavily tries to make us laugh at her. It’s refreshing to see her accept various story beats with clarity and intelligence. Another problem is that a few scenes stick out as being obvious inventions, namely a climatic confrontation with the cruel Sister Hildegard.

But Stephen Frears, a filmmaker I greatly admire, always knows how to get rich performances from his actors. Dench’s Philomena Lee is a great one, a fully realized human being who may prattle on a bit, but is still lovely company to keep. Her quiet moments of contemplation and hilariously detailed monologues in which she describes a trashy romance novel are equally played with rich subtleties and smart choices. And Coogan’s annoyed Sixsmith displays a truth about many comics: they make fine dramatic actors. He’s still playing a lot of deadpan laughs in the early part of the film, but as it goes on he digs in deeper to the character. The transformation from wanting to tell this woman’s story for profit to genuinely wanting to help her find her son is done so quietly and smoothly you barely notice that the shift is taking place. A staunch atheist, Sixsmith’s buying a tiny Jesus figurine for Lee is a finely realized moment in which we see how layered these characters on and how wonderfully brought to life they have been.

Viciously satirical and rambunctious, The Wolf of Wall Street finds Martin Scorsese making his sharpest comedy yet. Working for the fifth time with Leonardo DiCaprio, Scorsese’s always managed to push DiCaprio to his limits as an actor and get surprisingly full performances out of him; this movie can only be described as a bacchanal of greed, sex and drugs.

Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street drops us into the hedonistic world of insider stock trading. Starting as a wide-eyed youth with dreams of making big money, Belfort throws out any altruism that may have remained in his character the moment he meets his new boss, played by Matthew McConaughey. McConaughey’s role is basically that of the Devil offering up a Faustian bargain, the opens the portal to excesses of cocaine (amongst many other drugs), attaining wealth at all costs (the customers don’t matter), and sex (women are objects to be exploited and concurred in this world). He doesn’t have much screen time, but McConaughey makes a lasting impression on not only DiCaprio’s Belfort, but on the audience.

The story naturally revolves around the social climbing and status obsessions that drive these characters before the eventual fall, brought about by their own hubris, or lack thereof. What we sit and become witness to is a series of deplorable acts. These begin small, by convincing millionaires to buy penny stocks – a quick way to amass a fortune if you figure out how to work the system. This quickly escalates into dropping his nice girl wife for the sexy model (Margot Robbie, as a woman who uses her sexuality as a power play), an insatiable need for any and all drugs, and various kinds of prostitutes.

If one is to believe the auteur theory, and I think it only works on a case-by-case basis, then the term papers on Scorsese practically write themselves. GoodFellas and The Wolf of Wall Street share many similarities, and a college essay detailing how they compare and contrast is just ripe for the picking for a film studies major. I think Scorsese firmly falls into the area of auteurism, as each of his films bare a certain set of trademarks. One of these trademarks is the lack of a typical score and a frantic editing pace that feels like rock and roll rhythms. Wall Street runs at a fever pitch of punk rock nihilism and speed-fueled energy. The first five minutes see Scorsese film a scene in which DiCaprio blows coke up a hooker’s ass. It’s that kind of crazy, strange trip.

No one can maintain a sense of relentless energy and momentum like Scorsese does, and at nearly three hours in length that’s no mean feat. The story and cast are sprawling, and Scorsese makes it all come together in sequences which are heavy on dialog and explaining how these nasty deeds were committed or the foul-mouthed poetry of DiCaprio’s narration. Scorsese finds a way to match the verbal contortions of Terence Winter’s script with his obscene images. And this is why I worship at the feet of Scorsese.

But let’s go back to that cast for a moment – I’ve already mentioned McConaughey, Robbie and DiCaprio. Yet I have not said much about DiCaprio’s work. I think that he’s reached a new level of his talents here. After years of picking brooding, serious roles like Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby or J. Edgar Hoover in J. Edgar, it’s refreshing to see him loosen up and let it rip. I think beneath the serious actor, charismatic leading man, and good looking movie star, beats the heart of a comedic actor. I was torn between wanting DiCaprio to finally win that elusive Oscar this year or wanting to see McConaughey awarded for his career resurgence and string of great performances. DiCaprio is just that good here. If the quaaludes scene isn’t enough to win it for him, I don’t know what else possibly could.

To continue on with the GoodFellas analogy, Jonah Hill would be the Joe Pesci role here. Hill’s sidekick role here is pure sleaze, his buckteeth and faux-yuppie clothing providing an outward appearance for the WASP-y ambitions that he so clearly has. To think that Hill has gone from Superbad to deranged character portrait he does here is pretty astounding to think about. These two partners-in-crime are like a coked-up variation of Laurel & Hardy, or something similar.

But all of this debauchery just makes the satire cut that much deeper. A scene where Belfort begins by saying he’s stepping down before doubling back and roaring like a mad lion that he’s not going anywhere plays out the corrupting promise of greed. It takes the mantra “Greed is good” to its logical conclusion: at some point in time, you begin to buy the very bullshit you’ve sold to get there. I felt no sympathy for these people, and none of the actors asked for us to like them, and, obviously, neither does Scorsese. The ending cuts even deeper as a rapt audience sits at full attention waiting for Belfort to impart his wisdom upon them, to unlock the secrets of wealth and conspicuous consumption. Welcome to America, now sell me this pen.

I’m going to throw a word around that I don’t tend to do much: overrated. I think The Long Good Friday is an overrated British gangster film on the whole, but in the tiny details it does do some unique things and is blessed to have Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren as the leads. When the film begins to get cumbersome, Hoskins and Mirren are there to work tiny miracles and save it.

I think much of the blame for the more lumbering choices in the film land squarely on director John Mackenzie’s shoulders. His indifferent camera work is a problem, but so is the choice to pull focus from Hoskins and Mirren trying to go legit. When we focus in on the character portrait of Harold Shand, Hoskins in his big break role, the film soars, and where we lose interest in when we move away from him and into scenes showing the bombings and killings of his men. This would not normally be a problem if any of these men or these bombings were fully developed. However, these excursions away from the main action frequently interrupt and upset the more compulsive viewing of watching Shand be a smooth operator with the American Mafia or treat street kids tenderly. This man is a mess of contradictions, but these bombings and deaths are of various characters that have only the flimsiest of development before being dispatched. There is not much tension there. (Although the sight of a young Pierce Brosnan feeling his body under a shower-head in a local gym is incredibly attractive image that burnt itself into my brain.)

But we keep returning to Shand and his trophy wife (Mirren). Shand is a man that knows how to be a smooth operator, who rose to the top of the pack not because he’s a compact, muscular fireplug, but because he sees through it all and knows what to say, when to say, and to whom it must be said. And here he is, in an attempt to go legit, helplessly watching his empire crumble while desperately trying, in vain, to remain respectable and maintain the façade of upper-class mobility. He’s always far more interesting than the rest of the film ever threatens to become. Mirren, for her part, isn’t given much to do, but she’s beautiful, elegant, and her very presence here only reinforces the notion that Shand is but a pretender to this glamorous and well-groomed world that he so desires to be a part of. I just wonder what a director like, say, Neil Jordan could have done with this material in the end.

Mona Lisa is a pretty solid example of a great film that gets slightly derailed by an ending that feels entirely at odds with everything that has happened before it. Here is a film about two people who bicker, argue, team-up to rescue a lost soul, encounter dangerous people at every turn, and yet it still manages to end on a note of happiness. This feels wrong.

Other than this one problem, all of the necessary components are running at their highest capacity to make a great film. The film’s script smartly reveals its many twists and turns through small hints and slowly evolving relationship dynamics between the two main characters. Neil Jordan and David Leland’s dialog is also a thing of beauty, taking the British gangster vernacular and twisting it around into a street-tough poetry. The way the arguments unfold between this low-level British gangster and the high-class hooker he’s tasked with driving around and protecting are wildly entertaining. Once they understand how much they’re entertained by and look forward to their squabbles, they’re finally on the same page as us.

Jordan, who also directs, uses his camera to tremendous effect. His moody lighting creates an atmosphere that surrounds the goings on and makes for interesting viewing. Think of way Michael Caine’s dangerous gangster lit to look like the king of the underworld. Caine’s features appear distorted like Satan himself, here to charm us with promises while concealing ulterior motives behind the smile and eyes. He also exhibits tight control over when and how information unravels to the audience. We begin by thinking Mona Lisa will be about these two characters learning to appreciate each other, but it slowly develops into a frantic search for a long-lost friend from the hooker’s past.

I watched this and The Long Good Friday back-to-back, and I came away with a deeper appreciation for Bob Hoskins as an actor. In Good Friday, he’s a ruthless gangster who stares in vain as his empire crumbles before his eyes, and here is a more innocent, boorish character. He’s the lowest level in the British mob that one can be, fresh from a stint in jail and desperate for any job that will take him. It is here that Caine extends a helping hand, and arranges for him to become the driver to Cathy Tyson’s call girl. It’s not a surprise that Hoskins got an Oscar nomination for his role, but what is a shock is that it was his lone nomination before retiring in 2012.

For her part, Cathy Tyson is elusive and mysterious. Projecting a cultivated aura that is supposed to be enigmatic and alluring, Hoskins stands no chance once we learn that he is falling in love with this woman. She was performing a siren call to him from the very beginning. When we learn the truth about her, everything we’ve seen happen before takes on the appearance of a character performing to get a desired outcome. It’s a tricky character, and Tyson excels at it. This feels like a star is born role, but alas, Tyson only sporadically appeared in films after this.

And now we must end where we began, with that happy ending. After getting thrown into the deep end, the neat and tidy ending doesn’t work. Everything seemed to be leading to an ending of tremendous ambiguity and power. Instead, we’re given something that neatly ties everything together and then ties it all up with a bow on top. It stood out as a discordant tone to the rest of the film for me. And it is here that the film fails to deliver. It doesn’t stick the landing, and so points must be deducted.

Anatole Litvak isn’t exactly the most exciting film director of the studio era, he’s a man happier to simply point-and-shoot and does filmed versions of plays, but he always managed to get great work out of his actors. James Cagney showed range in City for Conquest, Olivia de Havilland was fabulous in The Snake Pit and Ingrid Bergman had a comeback with Anastasia. Following this logical through line, The Deep Blue Sea is beautifully acted but awkwardly filmed.

Here is a story that seemed like a great choice for a hauntingly filmed black-and-white character study, but is filmed in CinemaScope and bright Technicolor. Much of the intimacy is gone, which harms the film’s overall impact. As does the Production Code’s enforced censorship which dulls much of the erotic longing and romance involved in the extramarital affair at the heart of the story. It still gets its major points across, but I couldn’t help feeling like this film needed a more evocative, moody touch to really sell it.

Luckily though, Litvak has come to the property with Vivien Leigh, an actress rarely, if ever, not in top form. Leigh makes her society dame a woman who is all ice on the surface, but a jumbled mess of neediness and naked emotion underneath. The moments when her façade cracks are miniature masterpieces of character detail in which we see the damaged heart, the ugly, naked need for a connection. Her character’s sexual frustrations are born from a place of rejection by the men in her life, and Leigh’s slow burning realization that she will only be a complete person when she learns to live and value herself without a man is a marvel. Too often when talking about Leigh’s film accomplishments the conversation begins with
Gone With the Wind and ends with A Streetcar Named Desire, two of the all-time great performances, but miss out on the smaller films and works like this or Waterloo Bridge. Kenneth More and Emlyn Williams are the two men in her life, and their work is just as richly textured and delivered, but they’re wise enough to realize that they’re supporting players to Leigh’s tragic central figure.

I don’t know, I just don’t get it.

Withnail & I is a film with a large cult following, but something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I just find it hard to laugh off such grossly self-destructive behavior? I will concede that the film does have several merits and things working for it, but I walked away from this feeling more at arm’s length then rushing to embrace it.

I think there’s also something of a generational divide between myself and the original audience for this movie. At the time taking the piss out of boho culture was something new, but in the twenty-plus years since it hasn’t exactly retained the same potency. And I found the characterization of Uncle Monty to be a bit of relic from a past age, a lecherous older gay man making advances on a nubile younger man is played for laughs at the humiliation, degradation of Monty. Of course, there was always the lurking feeling that these characters were more pitiful and depressing than charming, funny or humorous. They needed a long spell in rehab to deal with their drinking problem.

But we’re getting away from the positives while I try to wrap my brain around why I didn’t love it. I mostly liked Withnail & I for two simple reasons: Paul McGann, who plays the “I,” and Richard E. Grant as Withnail. Grant’s work in particular is iconic, and in this film, he has granted himself immortality. What’s astonishing is that Grant never once plays his character for cheap laughs or for any kind of laugh at all. His character is an aggressive, deeply unhappy man who appears to be trying to flirt with suicide. He drinks lighter fluid when no booze can be found, so we’re clearly not dealing with someone entirely in their correct frame of mind.

McGann gets the less showy role, but that doesn’t mean he’s regulated to sidekick status. He’s just seeking out some kind of adventure in permanent drunken stupor I suppose. Between the two of them, he’s retained more; I suppose we could call it this, common sense and remains more in touch with reality. While Withnail is dancing towards oblivion and madness, “I” seems to tag along in a spirit of friendship. McGann finds the soul within the role.

Much of the bite and satire of the film buckles under the gloominess that pervades the entire thing. It’s not entirely plausible to assume that others can see a wit and transcendence in its misery, but I was most relieved when “I” ran off from Withnail into adulthood and sobriety. For the strength of the two central performances, I can’t find any fault. But that’s about all of my enjoyment to be found in it.

Query: would eccentric be the best word to describe Terry Gilliam’s films?

Sometimes to a fault, and sometimes to joyous effect, Gilliam’s work is always distinctly his. And Time Bandits is a combination of both his best and worst tendencies. The episodic film is only engaging in small parts, a total bore in others, but consistently trying to create something original.

The story follows a young boy as he joins a group of dwarfs who slip into various times and steal goods from each of them. Along the way he meets a cavalcade of stars dressing up as various historical and mythical figures. All the while they’re trying to escape from the Supreme Being and find their ship. It’s a bit of a mess to be honest, but it does offer up minor pleasures.

The special effects work does a lot to cover up the potholes in the plot and the inconsistent tone and narrative structure. A ship is really the hat of a giant, a bedroom wall keeps receding further and further out, and a child’s bedroom closet explodes with various guests coming out of it. Some of these tricks are neater than others, but they’re all pretty original and unique to behold. But a film cannot sustain itself on quirky images alone.

The reclaiming of the ship and the Supreme Being is a bit of a chore to get through, despite Ralph Richardson trying his best to appear menacing as a disembodied floating head. This doesn’t mean that the parade of guest stars is consistently better, but these detours can be wildly strange and entertaining. The two worst appearances have got to be Sean Connery as King Agamemnon and Shelley Duvall as a ditzy pansy. Duvall is just stuck with a lame character that doesn’t offer up much of a joke, while Connery is just miscast as an ancient Greek king. Much better are Ian Holm as Napolean and John Cleese as a droll Robin Hood. I’m still not sure what to make of the sideways trip with the ogres played by Peter Vaughan and Katherine Helmond, but I’m leaning more towards it being an unsuccessful trip, drunk on the strangeness of its images than landing a successful punch line.

Much like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Time Bandits is a film that erratically veers from one story point to another. Not always successful, but consistently deploying a variety of eccentric and original images and actors, I’d have to say that I landed more in the realm of enjoying it than not. A tighter script, editing has never been Gilliam’s strongest virtue, would have spun some wonders out of the same basic materials.