Since we recently concluded a decade, there have been a few "best of" lists for those ten years. Let's chip in! Rather than go through the process of picking out the ten best movies regardless of where they fell (I have been very obsessive about ranking movies in the past), I figured I'd list my favorite from each year.
2010: Inception
I've been a big fan of Christopher Nolan since Memento. I went back and watched Following when I became aware of its existence. Memento was my favorite movie for a while. The Dark Knight instantly was a favorite. Outside of Batman, Inception became Nolan's most famous movie thanks to its trippy visuals (later replicated in Doctor Strange) and outstanding cast. It singlehandedly revived Tom Hardy's career!
2011: Warrior
Speaking of Hardy, Warrior was my favorite movie released a year later. It's Hardy's Brando moment. And he stars opposite Joel Edgerton in his breakthrough role. It's an unspeakably breathtaking cinematic achievement on a strictly human scale, in a decade that increasingly belonged to spectacle. Many dismiss it as an MMA movie, but if it is, then it's the Rocky of MMA movies, and nobody ever dismissed Rocky as a boxing movie.
2012: Django Unchained
I thought Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz had engineered magic in Inglourious Basterds, but I hadn't seen anything yet. Waltz has continued to be a significant presence in film, but he will never top the moment he tells Leonardo DiCaprio that the writer (Alexander Dumas) he was attempting to use to legitimize slavery was actually black.
2013: Saving Mr. Banks
The incredible story of how Mary Poppins was made not only gave Tom Hanks an unexpectedly brilliant role as Walt Disney, but Colin Farrell another career highlight as the inspiration for the title. The whole thing is great insight into the creative process, besides.
2014: Interstellar
Here's Christopher Nolan again! A lot of viewers, I think, were exhausted over his supposed genius. They saw Inception. They were wowed by Inception. But for a lot of people, one towering achievement can never truly be followed by another. So they saw Interstellar and thought..."Well that's not 2001: A Space Odyssey," a movie it superficially resembles. I was never wowed by 2001. I ended up reading all four Arthur C. Clarke books at one point, but I never thought the books, or the Stanley Kubrick movie, was really as great as they clearly want to be. But Interstellar is truly great, and it achieves that status by being transcendent, which is what 2001 desperately wants to be, but instead is just one of those projects that grapples at big ideas but doesn't know what to do with them except toss them up on a page or the screen. And as he always is, Nolan is in full control of Interstellar, and I still wonder if it's his best film.
2015: The Force Awakens
Okay, I'm a Star Wars nerd, but in the same way I'm a Star Trek nerd. I generally like all of it, even the stuff most of the fans despise. It's not because I'm indiscriminant, but that I don't choose to hate something just because it exists, which seems like the primary motivating factor of a lot of fans, even if they will never admit it and come up with a million things to defend their views. So I really loved seeing another Star Wars trilogy begin. And this was a great beginning.
2016: Arrival
Denis Villeneuve is about as close to the second coming of Christopher Nolan as we're likely to get, at least anytime soon. I missed Prisoners when it was released, but was sufficiently wowed when I got around to it. And he has never disappointed me. And Arrival is a masterpiece (still want to read the original short story on which it's based), the best showcase Amy Adams has gotten in an already phenomenal career.
2017: Logan
After Dark Knight, this is the best superhero movie ever made. Hugh Jackman was born to play Wolverine, and this is the performance he was building toward all along, and everything around him works, at last, equally well.
2018: Isle of Dogs
A hugely charming fable, exquisitely put together, a towering artistic achievement from Wes Anderson.
2019: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
I can't stop praising this one. I've been a fan of Terry Gilliam since before I really had a personal reason to be (that was how much I loved The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), and so I was well aware of the tortured history to this becoming a reality, so it was a great relief to see how much it was worth the wait. Especially having recently read and very much enjoyed the original Cervantes, to see how cleverly Gilliam updated it, with enough original charm, I'm still aghast at how little anyone else seems to care.
Showing posts with label The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Show all posts
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Thursday, June 13, 2019
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)
rating: *****
the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.
review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film. You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.
I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book. I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare). Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book. They might not even care. They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.
It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story. Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining. Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly. Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life. At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.
But what is Sancho's story? Well, it's much like Toby's. (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material. Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)
Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver. Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it. There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote. Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote. It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.
But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego. Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest. As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him. As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.
So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.
Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant. (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.) And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him. And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook. She disagrees that his student production ruined her life. But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.
As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book. Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well. I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical.
It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'. A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction. Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself. (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.") Gilliam's instincts are well-established. His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design. He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that). It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever! Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams. Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.
Driver is perfect as Toby. I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role. Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands. Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover). Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature. It's a performance that needed to be grounded. By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.
My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil. Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like. But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make. We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations. But storytelling is always about retelling stories. The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant. Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it. I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point. In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote. But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt. He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy. This isn't an impossible dream. It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something. Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing. The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took. This is a story of how they meet up again.
Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else. You don't need to try and take life lessons from it. Things work out for Toby. The end.
the story: A young director finds himself thrust into the world of Don Quixote.
review: By some fortuitous twist of fate, I ended up reading Don Quixote by Cervantes, for the first time, not long before finally getting to see Terry Gilliam's torturously-gestated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I don't think it's necessary to have read the book recently, but to have read it at all surely helps explain many if not most of Gilliam's subsequent creative choices for the film. You might even say that Gilliam's film is a modern updating of the book.
I think the reaction of most critics to the film owes to their ignorance of the book. I think the reaction of most critics owes to the fact that they really only know the story from the musical Man of La Mancha, whose fifty year existence is something of a drop in the bucket of the four hundred years the book has been in existence (Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare). Those critics may not know how much the musical departs from the book. They might not even care. They might really be convinced that Don Quixote is the story of an irrepressible dreamer.
It is, in fact, Sancho Panza's story. Sancho is Don Quixote's squire, a peasant from the same neighborhood as the lord whose fortunes have been declining. Most of the misfortunes that befall Don Quixote, in their subsequent adventures together, fall on Sancho more harshly. Sancho spends the book doubting Don Quixote's sanity and going along with his flight of fancy mostly because he believes he'll end up with a higher station in life. At one point he gets to play governor of an "island," something Don Quixote has been promising him as the most likely outcome of their time together.
But what is Sancho's story? Well, it's much like Toby's. (Meanwhile, the name of this character in Gilliam's movie is most likely derived from a namesake character in Tristram Shandy, a book inspired by Don Quixote and much later adapted into Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, which takes a much more literal metafictional approach to adapting the source material. Toby is also a supporting player in that story, and at least in the book, steals attention as shamelessly as Sancho.)
Toby is the young director played by Adam Driver. Toby's career sort of peaked early when he made a student film, called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He discovers a DVD copy of it by chance, in the present, and he decides to return to the village where he filmed it. There he comes across the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce) he'd convinced to play Don Quixote. Only now, the cobbler believes he is Don Quixote. It's a comparable development to how Cervantes first set Don Quixote on his path of knight-errantry.
But Toby is driven, like Sancho, mostly by ego. Going on the road with Don Quixote has nothing to do with believing in his quest. As with Sancho, Toby doesn't believe for a minute that the cobbler is really Don Quixote, and the audience is given a concrete reason to sympathize with him. As in the book, the character of Don Quixote becomes the very colorful window dressing the story uses to follow Toby's doubt, and how by the end he begins to believe.
So in short, the musical is about belief, while the book and this new movie are about doubt.
Toby's life is complicated by the fact that the main producer (Stellan Skarsgard) of the commercial he had set out to make when he becomes plunged into the world of Don Quixote, is something of a tyrant. (A character no doubt inspired by Gilliam's ridiculously complicated production history.) And the producer's wife (Olga Kurylenko) keeps trying to have an affair with him. And the girl Toby cast as Don Quixote's beloved Dulcinea has reentered his life as well, and keeps instigating him to look beyond his cynical outlook. She disagrees that his student production ruined her life. But their further relationship clarifies around the cobbler's adventures, and the story ends up coming full circle.
As I've said, most of the story beats in Gilliam's film come directly from Cervantes' book. Most of Gilliam's films throw their main characters into bewildering journeys, and sometimes the bewilderment becomes the viewer's as well. I think Toby provides a clear center, his perspective easy to understand, whether or not you see all the parallels with the book, the departures and many elements missing from the musical.
It actually becomes ironic, that we're once again living in an age like Cervantes'. A real argument could be made that what Don Quixote was really about was Cervantes complaining that his contemporaries no longer valued or understood the literature that he himself still cherished, which in his case as with his main character was chivalric fiction. Critics today, by their bewilderment of this film, admit that they have no real knowledge of the book itself. (Makes you really wonder when you read any review that claims, "the book was better.") Gilliam's instincts are well-established. His last movie, The Zero Theorem, was pretty straight-forward but a lot weirder by design. He never sets out to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote weird for the sake of being weird (probably Tideland is the benchmark in Gilliam's work for that). It's probably his most straight-forward movie ever! Even The Fisher King makes you wait to find out what happened to Robin Williams. Here you know everything you need to almost right from the start, and the story becomes, as with most stories, waiting to see how things turn out.
Driver is perfect as Toby. I know there were many actors cast to play the character, and Don Quixote for that matter, over the years, but in the film as it ended up, it's difficult to imagine anyone else being able to lose himself in the role. Johnny Depp, at the time he was cast, had yet to break out as a true character actor, and so still retained his dreamy persona, when not sporting scissors for hands. Don Juan De Marco is an excellent example of Depp in his prime at that point in his career, and is similar to Don Quixote (a man who believes he is in fact the celebrated lover). Driver is able to sell the ego-driven Toby, the would-be lover, and the man who becomes completely overwhelmed by his later experiences, and finally someone capable of taking on, yes, the impossible dream, without ever making any of it feel like a caricature. It's a performance that needed to be grounded. By all rights, it's a career-defining performance, in Gilliam's, at long last, career-defining film.
My favorite Gilliam movie, before this, was The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I'm still working on fully appreciating Brazil. Arguably The Fisher King will remain his most accessible movie, and Twelve Monkeys will be the one the cool kids like. But The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie he tried making for a quarter century, is quite literally a movie only he could make, in a career of movies only he could make. We live in an age where the idea of the remake is anathema, even as we never quite scoff at mere adaptations. But storytelling is always about retelling stories. The best stories are those that continue to resonate, even if a few details have to be updated every now and then, because they are continuously relevant. Gilliam includes Muslims and even Russians in his version. Muslims were in fact integral to Cervantes' version as well, and that's just one of the many ways Gilliam helps resurrect it. I think Toby's arc, from being lost in his own life to allowing himself to be lost in someone else's, is the whole point. In the movie, as in the book, there are characters who think they'll make things better by attempting to do so cynically, mostly so they can mock Don Quixote. But what Toby discovers is that the better version of himself, the one he can live with, has finally cut himself free from doubt. He no longer views Don Quixote as crazy. This isn't an impossible dream. It's about finally refusing to make compromises, and just doing something. Somewhere along the way, the spontaneous Toby who made the student film stopped existing. The course he set the cobbler on was the opposite one Toby took. This is a story of how they meet up again.
Anyway, it's also a damn good film, beyond anything else. You don't need to try and take life lessons from it. Things work out for Toby. The end.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
The tortured road to finally getting to watch The Man Who Killed Don Quixote...
Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote had a famously tortured production history. I don't really need to detail it here. The first efforts eventually documented in Lost in La Mancha (2002) led more than a decade later to Gilliam successfully completing the film. And then financiers decided he couldn't release it. And then Cannes let him screen it (out of competition). And then, in the US, it got a single day for cinematic screening earlier this year. And then the home video was finally announced, and that was last Tuesday.
Ah! Now it would be simple!
Ha! Of course not. Of course not!
I found a Blu-ray copy at Target, but I do not do Blu-ray. I figured Wal-Mart would definitely have it. But it didn't.
So I ordered a copy on Amazon. Simple enough, right? Except, no! Amazon didn't even have it officially listed. There were only "used" copies available. I ordered one of those. I checked out Redbox later, but Redbox didn't seem to have it, either.
I have to assume additional hoops were placed even for the home video release. You have to be very dedicated to have gotten a copy. I mean, in the age of the internet, it's somewhat standard practice at this point. I don't know if the movie can be found on cable, or Netflix, or some other service. But it shouldn't have been this hard!
I mean, I get why Gilliam's original production had problems. Some of it seemed avoidable, in hindsight. I'm glad he got to go back and finally make the thing. I'm still appalled that anyone involved in this effort could then decide they could possibly be justified in blocking it. I'm appalled that Gilliam didn't have willing investors from the usual channels, from the many, many movies that are made and released without notable incident. I'm appalled that distribution for the home video release was equally convoluted. In a sane world, most of this would have sounded positively insane.
But in a weird sort of way, if it weren't all so crazy, would it really be a Terry Gilliam movie?
So I will appreciate that it got made, and that I got a copy, and that I will get to enjoy it for years to come. We now live in a world where The Man Who Killed Don Quixote officially exists, and anyone who really wants to see it, can. That's pretty awesome.
Ah! Now it would be simple!
Ha! Of course not. Of course not!
I found a Blu-ray copy at Target, but I do not do Blu-ray. I figured Wal-Mart would definitely have it. But it didn't.
So I ordered a copy on Amazon. Simple enough, right? Except, no! Amazon didn't even have it officially listed. There were only "used" copies available. I ordered one of those. I checked out Redbox later, but Redbox didn't seem to have it, either.
I have to assume additional hoops were placed even for the home video release. You have to be very dedicated to have gotten a copy. I mean, in the age of the internet, it's somewhat standard practice at this point. I don't know if the movie can be found on cable, or Netflix, or some other service. But it shouldn't have been this hard!
I mean, I get why Gilliam's original production had problems. Some of it seemed avoidable, in hindsight. I'm glad he got to go back and finally make the thing. I'm still appalled that anyone involved in this effort could then decide they could possibly be justified in blocking it. I'm appalled that Gilliam didn't have willing investors from the usual channels, from the many, many movies that are made and released without notable incident. I'm appalled that distribution for the home video release was equally convoluted. In a sane world, most of this would have sounded positively insane.
But in a weird sort of way, if it weren't all so crazy, would it really be a Terry Gilliam movie?
So I will appreciate that it got made, and that I got a copy, and that I will get to enjoy it for years to come. We now live in a world where The Man Who Killed Don Quixote officially exists, and anyone who really wants to see it, can. That's pretty awesome.
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