|
Post by The Ghost of LLC on Apr 15, 2007 23:03:24 GMT
If I recall correctly, didn't Capo refer to Fear and Loathing as a "self-indulgent mess"? I really don't understand how you can get that from this film at all. Of course it's a self-indulgent mess. That's the point. Again, I can't stress enough the importance of the deleted scene in which Duke finds himself in a bar in the desert, as it seems to be the first time in the film that he regrets his actions, hence finding himself to be a completely self-indulgent douche bag. However, it probably would have totally fucked up the flow of the end of the film. But as long as he understood the subplot regarding the end of an era/the 60s, and didn't go "omg this movie is all about DRUGS!" then I can respect whatever Capo thought.
|
|
|
Post by Michael on Apr 16, 2007 0:26:42 GMT
Self-indulgent? Terry Gilliam is the director, not Hunter. S. Thompson.
And even if Thompson did direct the film, I still don't see how it's self-indulgent. I also don't understand how self-indulgence is automatically a bad thing.
|
|
|
Post by The Ghost of LLC on Apr 16, 2007 1:24:04 GMT
Thompson, as a human being and a writer, was self-indulgent. This is a film about a life-experience of Thompson's, based up the way in which he chose to write about it.
How can a piece based on the self-indulgent perception of a self-indulgent man not be self-indulgent? The film is self-indulgent, and it's for the better. The film is a mess, and it's also for the better. Try and imagine this film with a cleaned up narrative-style? If it had been presenting in any other way than the way in which Gilliam chose to present it, it would've been an artistic mess. But it's not, it's just stylistically messy, and it works.
|
|
|
Post by The Ghost of LLC on Apr 16, 2007 1:27:31 GMT
I also don't understand how self-indulgence is automatically a bad thing. And, I don't understand this statement. You know I am defending that it's rightfully self-indulgent. It's self-indulgent, and if it weren't, the film would serve no purpose. It's a movie about the death of the only period of time and society that Hunter could realistically live comfortably in, as told by him in the first-person. That's just the makings for self-indulgent. And that's a compliment.
|
|
Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
|
Post by Capo on Apr 16, 2007 13:41:42 GMT
If I recall correctly, didn't Capo refer to Fear and Loathing as a "self-indulgent mess"? I really don't understand how you can get that from this film at all. I did. "Self-indulgent" is just a description, not a criticism. The "mess" part is a criticism. Self-indulgence isn't a bad thing. I definitely need to see it again, though.
|
|
|
Post by Michael on Apr 16, 2007 18:56:20 GMT
How can a piece based on the self-indulgent perception of a self-indulgent man not be self-indulgent? The film explores the idea of self-indulgence, and the idea of self-indulgence is a universal one, not completely personal. Everyone looks into themselves and has a relationship with themselves, and drugs enhance that. I think at its core, the film doesn't exist to simply tell Thompson's story, but to focus on drugs, or the idea of drugs, and their capabilities. The film doesn't glorify drugs, and it doesn't vilify them either. I like that. Of course, you've seen the film many more times than I have, so I may be wrong, and I need a rewatch to completely sort out my thoughts on it. But when I think of self-indulgence, I think of films like Zerkalo and 8 1/2, not Fear and Loathing.
|
|
|
Post by Michael on Apr 16, 2007 18:56:53 GMT
I also don't understand how self-indulgence is automatically a bad thing. And, I don't understand this statement. You know I am defending that it's rightfully self-indulgent. That was directed at Capo, and he's cleared it up.
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Apr 25, 2007 16:09:58 GMT
>>> smh.com.au MICHAEL PALIN makes travel documentaries and Eric Idle created the hit musical Spamalot. But Terry Gilliam believes that his former Monty Python colleagues have not been creative enough since they went their separate ways.
"As a member of that group, I just thought there was such an extraordinary amount of talent there, in particular John Cleese," says the visionary filmmaker behind Brazil, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys and Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.
"When you think of Fawlty Towers and how utterly brilliant that was, then what has John done subsequently? Very little. He did A Fish Called Wanda, which was brilliant. Then he just got into a lifestyle where he doesn't really like making films. A great creative voice has not been heard."
Gilliam, talking from London while a cappucino machine froths loudly in the background, is saddened that so many creative talents lack the thick skin necessary for survival in the film business.
"Mediocrity tends to be the voice you hear more than not," he says.
Gilliam's films are many things - imaginative, inventive, visually intense, and sometimes chaotic and bewildering - but they are rarely mediocre. The only American in the famous comedy troupe, he co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life before a wild filmmaking ride that has gained him a cult following.
Lately, Gilliam has been surprised by the success of Spamalot, a musical version of The Holy Grail.
"We all thought, 'What a stupid idea', and said, 'OK, Eric, go ahead'. But it's hugely popular. It keeps the Pythons alive in a surrogate way. And it helps to pay some of the electrical bills."
Gilliam's latest film, Tideland, is a modern reworking of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that centres on a young girl, Jeliza-Rose, who prepares fixes for her junkie parents. It features four severed dolls' heads that talk, a one-eyed woman with a taste for taxidermy, and her simpleton brother who believes the wheat fields are being patrolled by a monster shark.
Tideland has not been treated kindly by US and British reviewers.
"You noticed," Gilliam says with a cackle. "What's been interesting is I go on the web and look at Rotten Tomatoes and see that 70 to 75 per cent of the critics don't like it. Then you read the public comments and it's just the opposite - 70 to 75 per cent of the public who write in like it. So I'm not sure who's out of touch."
Gilliam says all his films have had very mixed reactions.
"Too many reviewers like neat films. I like making films that are more like life and are complex."
The writer Mitch Cullin originally sent Gilliam a copy of his novel Tideland hoping for a quote for the cover. He did not expect a filmmaker he calls "this god" would want to adapt it.
"I loved the characters," says Gilliam. "I loved the situations. I thought: 'What is going on here?' I couldn't make sense of it. It really was like Alice in Wonderland. You head down a rabbit hole and you don't know what you're going to experience. And I loved the character of Jeliza-Rose. So I said: 'Let's make this; this looks like fun. This'll get a few people talking."'
Numerous reviewers have been troubled by the apparent sexualising of the relationship between Jeliza-Rose and the simpleton Dickens. Gilliam rejects these concerns, insisting Tideland looks at childhood in an unsentimental and unromantic way.
"It's totally innocent," he says. "What's interesting about it is all the reviews I read that use the word pedophile. I think, 'What are they talking about?' They're not talking about what's there on the screen. They're talking about how they've been brainwashed by the media."
Gilliam shot Tideland while editing the patchy The Brothers Grimm in 2005. They were his first films since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1998, though not for want of trying.
"There was that little episode with Don Quixote," he says. "That took up several years of my life."
The disastrous attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which ran into problems including a flash flood and an injury to a key actor, Johnny Depp, was chronicled in the documentary Lost in La Mancha. The legal fallout between the German insurers and the French production company was messy.
"I've spent the last five years trying to get the rights to the script back," Gilliam says. "We're very close to getting them and then we'll make the film again."
Depp would again play an advertising executive who travels back in time and is mistaken by Don Quixote for Sancho Panza.
"We can't make it without him and we can certainly make it a lot more easily now with him," Gilliam says. "It's quite extraordinary because at the time, Johnny meant nothing to the studios. Now they'll kill to have him there."
But first - finance permitting - comes The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, set in a travelling show which has an attraction that allows patrons to go inside a man's mind.
Gilliam says his wife is convinced he keeps making the same film. "They're all about imagination and reality and the battle between the two things. And I think that will always continue because I don't know what the answer is. I know you need both reality and you need imagination, and the balance is something I guess I've spent my life trying to work out. I don't think I'm capable of making just a realistic film. My ideas are hyper-realistic."
As his idiosyncratic output suggests, Gilliam is no fan of Hollywood's conservatism.
"The cost of marketing a film is so high now that they'd rather gamble on a $US150 million film that they can market well than four, say, $US40 million films. Because the gamble, if it pays off, goes gangbusters. If it doesn't, you lose your shirt. But you can lose your shirt more slowly and more painfully by doing smaller films.
"The people running the studios are not even film people any more. They just want success. They want security. So they play it safe all the time."
But Gilliam has a solution that would allow him to make everything in his fevered mind, including such long-planned films as The Defective Detective and Good Omens. "If I could keep Johnny Depp on the payroll then I could do all these films."
|
|
Pherdy
Ghost writer
Posts: 596
|
Post by Pherdy on Apr 25, 2007 17:05:13 GMT
he was in Amsterdam last week to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award. interviews with him were all over tv: he is quite a character. very self-aware of his cult-status, yet at the same time refreshingly down-to-earth. all those would-be-future-projects sound great.
|
|
Blib
Ghost writer
Posts: 623
|
Post by Blib on Nov 24, 2007 20:14:40 GMT
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) - Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) - Twelve Monkeys (1995) - The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) - Time Bandits (1981)
|
|
|
Post by Michael on Oct 24, 2008 8:35:33 GMT
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) ***
|
|
|
Post by Anasazie on Oct 24, 2008 9:20:39 GMT
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) 6/10 2. Twelve Monkeys (1995) 6/10 3. Time Bandits (1981) 5/10 4. Brazil (1985) 4/10 5. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) 3/10
|
|