Ulises Brenes’s blog

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz 

‘Lost in La Mancha’ is a documentary co-directed and written by Keith
Fulton and Louis Pepe that started as the making of Terry Gilliam’s proposed
fairy tale film “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” but changed gears when
it became apparent that the hard luck film wasn’t going to be made and
instead filmed what went wrong. 

The documentary goes behind the scenes to show the bad breaks the
energetic 61-year-old, the former cartoonist and Monty Python guy as director
and actor, Terry Gilliam (”12 Monkeys” /”Time Bandits“/”The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen“/”Brazil“), ran into, and it left
me feeling sympathetic to his plight up to a certain point. When he starts
comparing his doom to Orson Welles’ or tries to say there’s a curse on
this project, he loses me. It’s true Orson Welles was also obsessed with
making a contemporary film about Cervantes’ heroic dreamer who saw giants
when fighting windmills, but there the similarities end. Welles began his
project in 1957 but by the time he died in 1985 he still didn’t release
a film that was actually completed. It was a low budget film that benefited
from his innovative skills and joy for the project, and was made despite
the star playing Quixote dying before the shoot ended. Perhaps still unsatisfied
and not able to stop tinkering with it, Welles nevertherless still owned
the rights to his film and hoped some day to release it. After Welles’
death the film was sold and butchered, so there’s no record of what the
film was like except through friends who saw the original and said it was
indeed another Wellesian masterpiece. Also, Gilliam’s comparison is unfair
because as a filmmaker he’s unquestionably talented but he’s not in the
genius stratosphere as Welles and it’s doubtful judging by his mixed results
in previous films if he could have told the Quixote story with the same
depth and feeling. But in his favor, from this documentary I got the impression
he was not the ‘enfant terrible’ and egomaniac the studio bosses make him
out to be. He was somewhat flexible and not that difficult to work with.
But under all his cheerleading and happy poses, he grimaced a lot and didn’t
seem to be having fun making this film. That seemed a shame. 

The biggest fault that could be laid at Gilliam’s feet is the film’s
chaotic situation and how he never had control of it (the money people
did). There were too many things that must happen perfectly for the film
to be made, and that’s not a good way to work. It’s not a healthy situation
for any filmmaker. That’s probably why it’s mostly mediocre films, ones
not taking chances, that get made, as the money people have very little
tolerance for disappointments and I believe a certain amount of disappointments
are inevitable when making a film. Perhaps Gilliam’s major mistake was
thinking that he could make a Hollywood film without Hollywood. 

The documentary serves as an historical record about the confusion
on the set and how no one had control of the situation — which is a sad
reminder on how difficult it is to put together a film that means so much
that you want to do it right, but things you have no control over occur
and kill your best laid plans.

This is a project that Gilliam has been obsessed with for ten years
and after a few starts it ran into financial mishaps causing its delay.
Finally he got all European backers for a promised 40 million dollar budget,
which soon became 32 million dollar (cheap by Hollywood standards) when
a major backer bowed out at the last minute. Gilliam also got actors who
believed in the project to work for as little as possible (close to scale),
but ran into problems with scheduling rehearsals and a contract dispute
with the lead actress Vanessa Paradis. Gilliam mentions in passing that
the production of the film was contingent on three principals: Terry Gilliam
directing, the charming 70-year-old French comedic actor Jean Rochefort
playing Don Quixote, and Johnny Depp co-starring. He was needed for his
drawing power. If anyone of the three was not available, there would be
no film.

Gilliam’s idea was to have Sancho Panza as a modern advertising man
transported back to the 17th century, during the days of the Spanish Inquisition,
as the handsome and smooth Depp would play him as a character named Toby
Grisini. Gilliam sees Don Quixote as an old dignified man who is going
out on his last adventure, who surrounds himself with romantic whims and
gleefully battles against logic. 

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The film ran into problems at the start of shooting, as a series
of setbacks on location in Spain in September 2000 became never ending.
The soundstage in Madrid isn’t sound-proof. In a new location at a nature
preserve, far from Madrid, there were F-16 fighter planes constantly flying
overhead doing exercises for NATO. A severe thunderstorm caused hail and
flash floods and mudholes, that made it impossible to shoot until they
dried. It also ruined some of the camera equipment. And, the final blow
was before the sixth day Rochefort removed himself from the shoot after
experiencing pain while on horseback. He studied English for seven months
because he wanted the part, so it was not easy for him to leave the film.
But he believed he was having prostrate problems and returned to see his
doctors in France. Rochefort never returned after operated on for two herniated
discs and the film was immediately shut down some time during the second
week of shooting. A clause in the contract over something called “force
majeure” allowed the insurance people to take over the film rights. Gilliam
still plans to shoot the film, as he’s trying to raise enough money to
buy the rights back. Near the film’s close Gilliam grimaces once again
and scribbles “The Windmills of Reality Fight Back” across one of his Quixote
drawings he made in his sketchbook of the film. He has already played the
film out in his head so many times that he feels he must forget about it
or fight to make the film he can’t get out his head. The first assistant
director Phil Patterson, a longtime regular with Gilliam, who took a lot
of the blame for the problems, says “The failure is a consequence of poor
planning that didn’t allow for the intrusion of bad luck.” For these guys,
failure seems to be more about their ego being bruised and the box office
bombing than anything artistic going wrong. It wouldn’t surprise me if
this tantalizing video does a brisk rental business, as viewers always
seem to have a strange curiosity about disasters. But as far as the “windmills
of reality” being an intrusion, I don’t know. The video only told me so
much and no more. It just left out too much of the real dope for me to
feel compelled to totally buy into Gilliam’s sob story. I still have no
idea how guys like Gilliam really think. He has too much of Hollywood in
him to be the outsider, but he also has too much of the outsider to be
considered Hollywood.

s amputated them.

If the original "Charlie's Angels" had any legs nostalgically, director "McG" (that's right: no first name, no last name, just "McG") has amputated them. His nauseating direction feels like the machinations of a fast food worker at the end of his mental rope, begging the logical question: "McG, do I get fries with this?" Apparently, McG is short for McGagreflex.

Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu are back as female superspies, but could easily be mistaken for bored extras in a 105-minute music video tribute to classic rock. Humor and logic are about as native to McG and company as ditch-digging and humility.

The film's language isn't merely indecipherable — it's something that will confound linguists 10,000 years from now as they try to determine whether it qualified as actual human communication. The Angels are trying to recover some rings that contain a code protected by something called Halo. They backflip over bullets and grab onto helicopters falling from the sky in an apparent effort to inspire Isaac Newton's enraged corpse to reanimate and hunt them down.

At the end of this long, torturous path is villain Madison Lee (Demi Moore), a former Angel herself. Moore has apparently been on hiatus from Hollywood for the past few years, waiting for Ashton Kutcher to become legal. Moore slinks around in a body so augmented and skin so shiny that several Dow Corning executives at my screening had to be carried out on stretchers. Thankfully, the medics remained on standby until this disaster concluded.

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Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A realistic mystery story about an investigation of a child suspected
of being poisoned to death by strychnine. Director-writer Andrew L. Stone
keeps the terse story tense despite the almost certainty that the murder
suspect is indeed the obvious guilty one, but he leaves open that it is
not absolutely certain who did it until the climactic last scene.

Whitney Cameron (Joseph Cotten) is the concerned uncle who rushes
to the NYC hospital from his home in Boston to see how his deceased brother’s
daughter Polly is doing after going into a convulsion. His brother recently
died and his wife Lynne (Jean Peters) is taking care of Polly and her younger
brother Doug, children from his former marriage. When Polly seems to have
recovered but goes into another convulsion late at night and suddenly dies
Dr. Stevenson, the one treating her, doesn’t understand how and wants an
autopsy performed, but Lynne refuses.

In a hurry to get back to work Cameron is about to leave but the
family lawyer Fred Sargent (Merrill) and his news reporter wife Maggie
(McLeod) become suspicious of the way the child died, suspecting that she’s
been poisoned. Maggie reminds Cameron that his brother died in the same
way while also saying, “Don’t touch my feet.” His brother’s death was classified
as caused by sleeping sickness, a virus infection, but there wasn’t an
autopsy performed. At first, Cameron is reluctant to believe that the very
loving, prim and pretty Lynne is capable of murder. But the motive soon
becomes clear when Fred says he drew up his brother’s will and it states
that his wife gets to inherit the entire estate if the two children are
deceased.

Behind Lynne’s back, Cameron has the police perform an autopsy on
Polly and they find enough strychnine in her to kill four horses. They
then call in for questioning all the servants and Lynne, and she becomes
the prime suspect. In their investigation they find that the child was
poisoned in the hospital and that her last medicine didn’t come from the
pharmacy but that Lynne brought it from her own pharmacy. When they try
to indict her on murder charges, the judge throws out the case for lack
of sufficient evidence. The pain on Cameron’s face relates to how helpless
he feels because the system doesn’t work. The fear now is that young Doug
will be killed next and he can’t do anything to prevent it.

Warning: spoiler to follow in the last two
paragraphs.

Lynne informs Cameron that she plans to take Doug by boat to Europe
for a year’s vacation to get him to forget the ordeal. Cameron is afraid
that she will get away with poisoning him, and therefore comes up with
an extreme plan to thwart her. He surprises her by joining the voyage and
trying to romance her so that she is not suspicious of his presence. His
ultimate plan is to poison her but when the time comes, he can’t. But while
having a last drink in her room he discovers in her bedroom a bottle of
aspirins, with a few pills having a different marking on them. He surmises
that those pills will be used to poison Doug. So he takes one of them and
puts it into her drink and has the ship’s detective there in case she confesses.
She has 5-10 minutes to get the doctor to help before the poison sets in
for the painful convulsions to begin. But she doesn’t call the doctor until
after that time period passes, as she tries to decide which of her two
choices is the better one: the electric chair or dying from the poison.
She decides to take her chances in court, where she will later on be convicted
and sentenced to life.

This is a well-acted thriller and it is directed with some nice touches,
as when Cotten is romancing Lynne on the deck but is disturbed as a door
opens to a burst of laughter from some party-goers–which indicates their
romance is only a joke. Also, in the climactic scene, when we are certain
of Lynne’s guilt, but under duress she manages to convincingly act indignant
toward Cotten for playing on her hospitality and deceptively using her
under false pretenses. We notice a doubt that creeps over Cotton, as she
questions what kind of man he is to poison her.