The magical Munchausen
Speaking of movies—and we were—there’s another I’d place on my list of a hundred favorites, and it would be pretty high up at that. It’s Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” a box office and financial disaster when it first came out.
I saw it in a movie theater, which is by far the best way to view this strange but vastly entertaining movie. The visuals are astounding, the script funny, the kid captivating, the scene with Uma Thurman’s Venus and Oliver Reed’s Vulcan and John Neville’s Munchausen delicious, and the music by the late Michael Kamen (personal disclosure: I knew the charismatic Kamen as a teenager and had a mad crush on him) suitably magnificent.
The following is only a dim echo of the movie, which I urge you to rent if you haven’t seen it before (or even if you have), especially if you own a large TV. You can easily see why it went hugely over budget:
It is a great movie. It’s fascinating to interpret it through the lens of Toulmin’s Cosmopolis.
the movie is great…
by the time he did this, the average smarts of the population had been dropped (and their knowlege of cultural past already stunted). in my life the clear mark i saw was a general 8th grade level degrade to a barely 5th grade level. the classics are out of the reach of most now (forget about reading them with a proper historical context that has all its connections and meanings to all the other facts, as learned meant in the past). We forget that technically shakespeare wrote for the common man. and cultural mashups like zena, have insured that the wise lessons of the past are just a mish mosh of jumbled moral stories with no relevance.
so progress is regress…
It’s Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” a box office and financial disaster when it first came out.
Love that movie; and Time Bandits. I knew there was a reason we get along.
I have a Terry Gilliam spot that can only be satisfied by….
Terry Gilliam.
It was clear a long time ago that you had some smarts, but you have finally confirmed that you are vastly intelligent and possessed of exquisite taste.
I love a lot of what Terry Gilliam has done. I’m not as big on the Baron. I love “Brazil” and “12 Monkey’s” much more. “Brazil” is one of my all time favorites. If you like Gilliam, then you should see the movies of Jean-Pierre Jeunet such as “Delicatessen”, “City of Lost Children”, “Amelie” and another of my all time favorites “A Very Long Engagement”.
Munchausen is a definite favorite. The scenes inside the whale, the hot air balloon made of undergarments, so many great scenes.
Fisher King is another great one, and one of the few movies where Robin Williams is tolerable.
If you are interested in Gilliam, Lost in La Mancha is an interesting documentary about his failed attempt to make Don Quixote.
If you look at Gilliam’s IMDB page, he had a hand in an awful lot of great movies: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/
Though I’d stay away from The Brothers Grimm. God, that was awful. I would note he didn’t write it.
I saw it in a theater, too, and loved it. Very entertaining, and wild.
I like when Jonathan Pryce’s French-Revolutionary commissioner character is introduced (right before he orders Sting executed for showing bravery) as the `Right Ordinary So-and-So…’
Neo,
As you know, “Mé¼nchausen” has a medical context, as well, in “Mé¼nchausen syndrome,” one of the factitious disorders in psychiatric nosology
This rather arcane and not especially common problem has appeared twice already in my hospital consultation work this year.
Jamie Irons
Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books has a similar effect on me, though it’s not as good as Munchausen. Some of the individual scenes are incredibly beautiful.
There’s this great scene in the movie where Eric Idle outruns a musket ball. I have this very distinct memory of seeing that scene in an ad or trailer on the television in the kitchen of my grandparents’ lake cottage. However, that cannot be since they sold the cottage in 1979, and the movie did not come out until 1988. Thus, Baron Munchausen figures prominently in one of my only known false memories. I don’t know how this spurious association occurred, perhaps it was some sort of “Munchausen by proximity” inside my mind.
What a great movie. It’s a shame it didn’t do better.
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