Tag Archive: Terry Gilliam
Gadgets in a pre-digital age. Still from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Apropos of nothing I got to thinking how the speed of life and pace of change has affected the way we communicate and consume so fundamentally that it’s easy to forget what the pre-digital age was like.
When I was growing up, getting a colour TV for the first time was a big deal. I’m 54 but I sometimes feel I was born in the 19th century. Continue reading
THE BEATLES’ MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR REVISITED BBC Two.
On this Arena special, it was good to get another chance to see the complete TV film of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. A documentary, containing interviews and behind the scenes footage, was also illuminating in helping to put the film in a social and historical context.
The last time I saw the film in its entirety was when it was first broadcast (in black and white) on Boxing Day in 1967. I was just eight years old at the time so had only a vague memory of it.
I was too young to pick up on all the LSD inspired images but old enough to realise that it had what one of the film’s extras describes as “disconnected shots of weird things”.
What I do vividly recall is the scene with a stripper while The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band are singing Death Cab For Cutie. The sight of bare breasts on a prime time TV slot at Christmas made a big impact on me. My parents, who were also watching, were less impressed!
This is why I can endorse Ian Macdonald’s view, in his book Revolution In The Head, that: “Magical Mystery Tour marks the breakdown of the cross-generational consensus ………this is where parents began to part company with their sons and daughters over the group, rightly suspecting a drug-induced persuasion setting in” Continue reading
LA JETÉE directed by Chris Marker (France, 1962)
12 MONKEYS directed by Terry Gilliam (USA, 1995)
If you have a good story, you don’t need elaborate sets or A-list actors. This is probably why most Science Fiction works better in books or graphic novels than in big budget movies. These two movies illustrate this point perfectly.
They each tell the same story but in very different ways. In both, a time traveller is sent on a mission from the future to find the origin of a deadly virus that has all but wiped out the human race. Continue reading
A DANGEROUS METHOD directed by David Cronenberg (Canada, 2011)
"Trust me, I'm a doctor!"
‘Restrained’ and ‘tasteful’ are not adjectives I want to see associated with David Cronenberg.
It’s as incongruous as describing a Terry Gilliam as understated and temperate or David Lynch as cosy and reassuring.
For a film that deals with sexual behaviour and personal liberty you’d expect A Dangerous Method to stir up some healthy controversy. Yet, the normally provocative director seems intent on maintaining an uncharacteristic (and unwelcome) level of respectability.This means that Viggo Mortensen, who plays Sigmund Freud, is not being ironic when he calls it Cronenberg’s Merchant-Ivory film. Continue reading
