Gilliam complaining about an excess of overt fantasy?

Gilliam sort of lost me when he compared the studio's re-edit of "Brazil" to the Holocaust.

He's not wrong, but it's one of those things where in the right hands, you can create a really immersive fantasy world. Lord Of The Rings probably comes closest to realizing it with a sizable chunk of the special effects not calling attention to themselves. Movies are facing the narrative problem always present incomic books in which just because you can ramp it up to 11 doesn't mean you should. Compare Star Wars to the early Marvel series. In the comic, anything is possible so cue lots of fights with giant monsters that don't have a tenth oh the wonder of the movie.

As the effects get cheaper, we'll see more ambitious productions that use these effects to bring a good story to life, rather than a script that merely ties together action sequences.

I can't blame him as Hollywood just hasn't been the same for years now. I'm still shocked that they did the LOTR films so well but thats probably more Peter Jackson and making it far away from the US over in NZ.

CGI is a bore fest. Stunts mean nothing at all to me any more-how can they be thrilling at all, when you know without doubt that no human is involved, that anything you see on screen that looks dangerous is likely to be very crafty animation?

Bring back Colt Seavers.

I totally see where Gilliam is coming from.

By the way, Hugo is good.

I need to catch Hugo in 3D before it leaves all theaters (which may be soon).

Gilliam has become like Alan Moore, the old man ranting at the youngsters in his lawn.

And yet, you know, deep down, that he speaks words of truth.

It's like Pete Townsend telling me to turn my radio down.

Quit your crazy ranting, Rafael.

















(I agree with you.)

So, basically, the other 4 Pythons didn't want to do a reunion...

Why does she keep doing that to her boobs?

I have no answer.

But I wanted to repost it.

I'm willing to give both a pass, because neither mainstream comics or summer movies are in a particularly great place creatively speaking... and both men have high standards. Had Gilliam been trashing Dark Knight this way, while praising some POS sit-com on television; then his opinion would be utterly worthless; but he's taken aim at one of the most successful awful movies of all time (and I say this as someone who enjoyed Transformers 2 & 3), which effectively points out the creatively bankruptcy of a lot of today's movies.

As Evans says, CGI is boring... as are car chases, shoot-outs, and explosions.

Compare this car chase



with this one.



Or compare the car chases of the two Blues Brothers movies and notice how the movie with the bigger budget isn't any better.

That reminds me. What do you get when you combine



with this?



You get this:

Bullitt is the greatest car chase of all time. And those two cars were boss, particularly for that year.

I'm not suggesting it's not a great scene, but it's not a great scene because car chases are inherently awesome. That scene begat thousands of really lame, boring car chases because the people making them had no idea how to make a car chase interesting.

Gilliam is not wrong. But it's not hopeless, either. There are still filmmakers who know how to tell stories without building them out of an endless string of cliches -- which is the fundamental problem afflicting both effects and dialogue.

I prefer this insight from Gilliam.

Why Kubrick is better than Speilberg (but you already knew that).

http://www.openculture.com/2011/11/terr ... akers.html

Shindler's List did try to show how he felt like a failure late in the movie, talking about how his watch could have saved another person... but the movie doesn't really leave you hanging on that. It is pretty much a feel-good Holocaust movie.

Just recently I watched an episode of Foyle's War (a detective series set during WWII) and there's a great scene near the end of the Dunkirk episode where a fisherman has just come back from saving a dozen men... and there's nothing but despair in his voice as he recounts the horror that he saw and the thousands he had to leave behind, those emotions eclipsing his own personal tragedy. Several months back I watched a really fascinating documentary about The Rape Of Nanking, which had several actors acting out the personal letters of the men and women who did all they could to save the Chinese people, and despair and outrage were the most common emotions, with one of the women killing herself after leaving Nanking because she couldn't live with her failure... this was a woman who saved countless lives, but she could only see the ones she couldn't save.

Here's the thing--love them or hate them, for a quarter of a century now, the Coen Brothers have been producing and directing their own screenplays through major studios and getting final cut on all of their films, with virtually no studio interference, and despite a somewhat uneven track record at the box office. My best guess is that the reason they succeed because they (rather famously) always bring in their films within budget, and the fact that they appear to have people skills--for starters, they have never compared the people who are financing their films to Nazis. They also don't appear to have drug or alcohol problems--Robert Altman was another talented but embittered director who tended to blame "the studio system" for all of his foibles/drunken mentdowns.