AUTUMN MOVIE SPECIAL
THE BEST OF THE REST CONTINUED......
THE SOLOIST Pride and Prejudice and Atonement director Joe Wright’s new film is an adaptation of LA journalist Steve Lopez’ semi autobiographical book about a story-hungry
journalist who befriends a homeless Julliard- trained musician. Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx star (guess who plays who) and Erin Brockovich screenwriter Susannah Grant works hard to keep this thin tale just the right side of mawkish. This is the kind of film that sweeps the Academy Award for no good reason other than Americans love a redemptive hard luck story. ■ Out Fri 25 Sep.
THE INVENTION OF LYING
Ricky Gervais continues his ingenious if not particularly successful campaign to win the hearts and minds of our American friends with this clever and funny alternative universe comedy. Set in a world where no one has ever lied, a struggling writer realises he can use it for personal gain. Combining the charm of early Ealing comedies with the wordy frenetics of Preston Sturges’ wackier comedies, The Invention of Lying could well be a future family classic. ■ Out Fri 2 Oct.
KATALIN VARGA Part classic revenge story, part road movie Peter Strickland’s directorial debut is poetic cinema at it’s most cultish and rich. The unsettling story explores what happens
when single mum Katalin (Hilda Péter) banished by her village, sets out in search of the father of her son. What unfolds is something both haunting and elementally shocking. Full of literary and mythical allusion and controlled atmospherics this excellent co-production marks the arrival of an intuitive and clearly gifted talent. ■ Out Fri 9 Oct.
PONTYPOOL Bruce The Tracey Fragments McDonald’s unpredictable Canadian chiller has got to be one of the year’s best horrors. On one seemingly normal winter’s day Ontario shock-jock Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) goes on air to present his morning phone-in radio show from a studio in the basement of the town’s church with shocking conclusion. Pontypool has been accurately described as like a cross between Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio and John Carpenter’s The Fog, McDonald refreshingly uses claustrophobia and implied threat in place of elaborate special effects. ■ Out Fri 16 Oct.
12 THE LIST 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009
CAPTURING THE IMAGINATION Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam talks to Miles Fielder about his latest opus and the Heath Ledger legacy
T erry Gilliam is without doubt a singularly gifted visionary and an irrepressibly maverick filmmaker. However, the 66-year-old American former Monty Python animator also appears to be cursed with dreadfully bad fortune. The debacle with the financiers that plagued the production of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, nearly bankrupting its director, might have been partly of Gilliam’s own making, but the biblical flood that washed away the Spanish set of the ill-fated and still unrealised The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was certainly a case of force majeure. As was the crisis that befell Gilliam’s latest flight of fantasy, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, which he was half way through shooting when his leading man Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs last January.
‘I just said, “I don’t know how I’m going to make this thing work”, Gilliam recalls. ‘I was too distraught to actually work out what to do. But everybody around me said, “No, no, you have to carry on, you have got to do finish the film.”’ No stranger to profound misfortune, Gilliam and his co-screenwriter Charles McKeown (who previously collaborated on Brazil and Baron Munchausen) hastily completed some script rewrites, and then the director called on some actor friends to finish what Ledger started by playing different facets of his character (which in the context of the film’s series of alternative fantasy worlds seemed to make sense). Johnny Depp (the man who would have killed Don Quixote), Colin Farrell and Jude Law duly arrived to do their bit for the increasingly chaotic production and eventually the film was finished.
‘Their willingness to help rescue the film and Heath’s last performance was an incredible act of generosity and love,’ Gilliam says, ‘and, as a result, the film is even more special. This is a different film than the one we began. It’s strange, but the forced solutions may have focused us into creating a better film. All in all, it’s a bit more magical.’
Set in present-day London, the film tells the story of immortal showman Dr Parnassus (played by Christopher Plummer) and his travelling Imaginarium, a theatre that looks like a Victorian toy and which allows audience members to journey into worlds created by their own imaginations. Parnassus’ longevity, however, came at a cost – the soul of his daughter (Lily Cole), forfeit to the devil (Tom Waits), with whom the doc lost a bet, on the girl’s sixteenth birthday. Desperate to save his beloved, Parnassus renegotiates his wager with old Nick so that the girl will be now be won by whomever first seduces five other souls, and it’s here that Ledger’s charming stranger, Tony, enters the fantastic narrative. If that plot summary, with its blend of mysticism, metaphysics and theatrics, sounds like a compendium of Gilliam films then that’s because in a way it is. Not having directed from a self-penned original script since Munchausen, Gilliam returned to his roots to dream his latest effort up from scratch, and the result is a morality play that represents a hodge-podge (not in a bad way) of the filmmaker’s thematic preoccupations. ‘The theme of imagination is central,’ says McKeown, ‘the importance of imagination to how you live – and that’s very much a Terry Gilliam theme. For some time, he’s taken other scripts and books and made them his own, but this goes further than what he’s done recently.