Gremlins (1984)

It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple hours went by. Dad wasn't home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went, and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire...and that's when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top, and me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird...and instead they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He'd been climbing down the chimney on Christmas Eve, his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck, died instantly. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.
--Kate Beringer

Ahh, it's Christmastime again. The most wonderful time of the year. The season of joy and giving, of warm feelings and happy memories, of holly and mistletoe and eggnog and presents and figgy pudding.

Let's do a horror movie.

Written by the director of the first two Harry Potter films as well as the only two Home Alone movies that anyone really remembers, Gremlins is one of several movies from the early 1980s, along with Poltergeist, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and a few others, which drew fire from critics and patrons for some particular scenes of violence and horror that many felt pushed the boundaries of a PG-rated film at the time. The complaints eventually got so loud it led filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who produced and/or directed many of those movies, including this one, to petition the MPAA for a new rating for films that were not PG, not quite an R. They agreed, and two months later Red Dawn became the first film ever to be released with the brand new PG-13 rating.

Thank you, Santa Spielberg.

In the nondescript Midwestern town of Kingston Falls, USA, a town that is so straight out of the past it may as well be Bedford Falls or the set from Back to the Future, lives an aspiring cartoonist named Billy, played by Zach Galligan, the son of an inventor with high aspirations whose inventions never work quite right and should probably just stick to acting and country singing since, well, he's Hoyt Axton. Every day he gets up and goes to work at the savings and loan and has to put up with the daily threats and rantings of the richest cat lady in town, Mrs. Deagle (played by Polly Holliday a.k.a. Flo from Alice), the resident grumpy old bat who enjoys metaphorically whizzing on poor people, drenching carolers and stringing up people's pets on their front porches every time they poop on her lawn. Then he goes to a bar to drink away work stress and listen to his suck-up coworker lord over his new house and how he'll usurp the bank once the boss dies and how superior he thinks he is in every way.

I wouldn't sell this kid short, though. I mean, not only is he a talented artist, but look who he's getting drawing tips from:

"Yeah, I know how you feel, Billy. I've dealt with Grinches before."

The things that keep him going every day are his art (more power to him), a coworker at his bank by the name of Kate Beringer (Phoebe Cates out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High) whom he is trying to work up the nerve to ask out on a date, and quite recently a new addition to his household: a small, furry, pointy-eared new pet his father has given him as an early Christmas present. Purchased at a curio shop within the Chinatown district of the nearest major city to Kingston Falls via the grandson of its more hesitant curator, the creature is a "mogwai" (the Cantonese word for "demon") and is just the cutest-wootest widdle ball of fwuff you could ever lay eyes on.

He also comes with three very important rules for his proper care which I'm assuming every 80's movie nut knows by heart but I'm repeating here anyway: don't expose him to bright lights as sunlight in particular will kill him, don't get him wet, and absolutely under no circumstances feed him after midnight.

"For every piece of poop I find on my lawn...I BOIL A KITTEN."

Seems easy enough. The adorable little nummy-muffin is given the name Gizmo, and he and Billy become fast friends. He sits around on Billy's bed a lot watching old movies on TV and being pwecious.

Of course the thing is, with movies that revolve around rules that absolutely positively must not be broken under any circumstance, one or more of them will at some point in its running time, be broken, for if not, the plot would not naturally progress. And I'm afraid that this film is no exception. The trouble starts around the time when Corey Feldman stops by to deliver a Christmas tree and accidentally knocks a paintbrush jar full of water on the poor creature.

All together now...AWWWWWWWWWWWW.

As it happens, pouring water on these creatures causes them to reproduce, which raises a lot of questions as to what kind of mammals bore offspring via skin growths which drop off the body and sprout brand new creatures whenever they get wet. Then questions are further raised when Billy accidentally feeds these newborns past midnight, discovering too late that his alarm clock's wires have been eaten through. This has the result of the gremlin babies forming chrysaliseseses...chrysalees...chrysalii?...that hatch before too long and form larger, scaly-skinned creatures that have somehow lost all their fur. And these new creatures are less like the docile, harmless little fuzzball voiced by Skeeter from Muppet Babies and more like monstrous, foul-tempered, mischievous little trolls voiced by Optimus Prime, Megatron and that one guy from the Police Academy movies. One in particular has a mohawk and is named Stripe for ease of convenience.

That poor gingerbread man. Have they no scruples?

Before long, the entire town is waist-deep in an army of these voracious affronts to God and nature raising untold amounts of hell upon the population. Billy's mother finds three in the kitchen and minces one in the food processor, stabs a second and explodes a third in the microwave in true PG-13 fashion before a fourth attacks her from inside the Christmas tree. A snowplow is driven into the living room of snowplow driver Mr. Futterman (Dick Miller), a character who ironically announced his detest of imported goods as he believed they weren't made as properly. ("They put gremlins in everything!") A group of them pose as Christmas carolers to scare the crap out of Mrs. Deagle while one gives her a speedy ride on a stair lift chair. Even poor Kate has her hands full during her night job as a waitress at Dorry's Tavern, where many of these blighted little hellbeasts are in for a night of drinking, dancing, card playing and quick sight gags. She has only just made her escape with the help of a flash bulb off a Polaroid camera when Billy and cutie-wootie Gizmo arrive to pull her out of there.

And of course, during all this, Billy's father is out of town at an inventor's convention and it's no use going to the police because, frankly, a story about how his grandmother got run down by Santa's sleigh would have been more plausible to them. They don't realize he's telling the truth until a ghastly bit of proof that Mother Nature has a sick sense of humor fiddles with his brakes.

Damn American-made snowplows!

Right about here, we get the movie's most famous piece of dialogue, after those three rules, of course. Holed up in the bank with Billy and Gizmo, Kate picks this moment to talk about a traumatic event in her childhood that explains why she doesn't celebrate Christmas. I need not go into too much detail here, as I have recreated her monologue at the top of this page. I'm not exactly sure what it has to do with the rest of the film, apart from a need of the filmmakers to inject a bit of dark comedy into what is already a darkly comedic film.

I have holiday depression now.

During Kate's tale of woe, we find that the beastly little mutants have retreated from the bright lights of downtown Kingston Falls (though as Billy and Kate were running away from the bar, it seemed that they were running around attacking people just fine without fear of injury) and have retreated into the only movie theater in town. Some of them have even defied their own evolutionary process to rig up the projector to play a reel of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and being too savage to grasp the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, they all seem to be enjoying themselves.

At the very least, it provides the perfect distraction for Billy, Kate and Gizmo to rig the theater to explode with a flaming rag and a gas leak in the boiler room and incinerate the little buggers.

Unfortunately, the one named Stripe has escaped his deserved burnination by escaping ahead of time into the town's neighborhood Montgomery Ward (remember that place?) setting up a final showdown in, appropriately enough, a department store, the most modern-looking (circa 1984) building in town. Thus begins what turns out to be a race to the working water fixture in the gardening section that would start this whole movie all over again. Billy battles Sprite, Kate gets the lights working, and Gizmo eventually wins the day for good guy cuteness by opening up the blinds to the bright lights of a convenient winter's morning to send the unholy abomination back to Hell where it belongs.

Finally, at the end of the film, on Christmas Day, I assume, the Peltzers and Kate are watching TV news coverage of the aftermath when the Chinatown curio shop owner suddenly appears to take Gizmo back and to deliver the message of this film, saying that man with his modern technology has a tendency to abuse nature's gifts, and they are not ready for the responsibilities of something as delicate as a mogwai. But noticing Gizmo's attachment to Billy, he says that one day HE may be ready.

Maybe around the time Gremlins 2: The New Batch comes out.

These new Muppets look DREADFUL.

The thing that sticks out the most to me about Gremlins, more than the puppetry or the horror-comedy aspect, is its message.

Part of that has to do with its setting - nearly every building in town could easily come straight out of It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story, Billy's car looks more vintage than anything, and I swear the only channel they get on cable out there is Turner Classic Movies. If not for the odd 1980s technological advancement, or the department store in the film's climax, or Billy's father's malfuntioning inventions all over his house, I could have sworn this movie took place in the fifties. It sets up a general theme of the introduction of new technology in an old environment.

And then there are the gremlins themselves, obviously named for a term used for a failure in something mechanical like a "bug" or a "kink" as Mr. Futterman is nice to point out for us. Most of the time they are terrorizing people it's something technological, like tinkering with wiring or screwing with traffic lights or hotwiring snowplows. I'm surprised they managed to start up a movie projector.

And of course it takes place on Christmas. The most commercialized holiday on the Gregorian calendar.

Take away the animatronic creatures and the microwave explosions and the chimney story and that's what Gremlins is - a message film about technology and nature. Or you could, you know, leave all that stuff in and get an entertaining movie regardless.

Hmmm...not everyone can successfully lose weight for their New Year's resolution. Maybe they're not so bad after all.

The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988)

All the big things I should have done by now, but I was so busy doing little things. I wonder how many other people are out there? Writing stories and scripts that nobody else may ever read, making movies that nobody may ever see... discovering secrets, important things that could help everybody. Maybe I shouldn't make movies for a living... I could deliver Steve's pizzas...

If we could live on hopes and wishes, make movies at the speed of thought, all the movies that could have been, all the dreams that I could spin...

One of the things about being a movie lover is that you get a interest in the art of movie making. It's always interesting to learn how certain scenes were filmed, what kind of camera techniques were used, and how certain visual effects are pulled off.

I think Jurassic Park was the last presently-released film where I was genuinely interested in its special effects. It seems nowadays that questions like these are mainly answered with three simple letters: C-G-I. Lower-tech movies made before the era of green screens and naming 3D computer animators in the end credits are much more fascinating to me. Movies like The Black Hole, Tron, Flash Gordon, Terry Gilliam's "Trilogy of Imagination", even The Thief and the Cobbler with its complex animation sequences. I've seen more breath-taking shots in those movies than I ever have in a million films that use superimposed backgrounds to save themselves buying a shooting permit.

Mike Jittlov could tell you a thing or two about the buisness of show. A math-language graduate out of UCLA who took animation as an art requirement, Jittlov made many films involving stop motion animation, rotoscoping and pixilation throughout the 70s, which won him many accolades and got him a job as an animator at the Disney studio. One of his most famous creations was the Mickey Mouse satellite that was first seen when the Disney Channel launched in 1983. He later went on to do special effects on several fan films as well as the 1990 Patrick Swayze film Ghost.

To understand his only feature-length directorial effort The Wizard of Speed and Time, you must first get to know another film--a three-minute film Jittlov made in 1979 with the same title:

This film was shown on a Hollywood special effects episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney" that was made to coincide with their release of The Black Hole. Science fiction conventions across the country screened the film for years afterward, and its popularity convinced Jittlov to write, produce, direct and star in this feature, a faux behind-the-scenes account of the making of this short with bits and pieces slightly exaggerated for comedic and satirical effect.

BEST. BEDROOM. EVER.

It all began in Hollywood in the far off year of 1977 ("and maybe another dimension") where big-shot producer Harvey Bookman of Nameless Dreamcrusher Studios (played by Richard Kaye--the producer of this film, ironically enough) and director Lucky Straeker (The Giant Spider Invasion's Steve Brodie in his final film appearance) are putting together a show about special effects filmmakers. Lucky seems interested in this one as-yet unknown independent filmmaker named Mike Jittlov, and contacts him at his mother's house where he works in the company of robots, wind-up toys and other menagerie to ask him to bring in a demo reel, but Bookman throughout remains convinced that Mike can't make movies since he's just an effects guy whom nobody's ever heard of. The two of them eventually decide to hire him, but with a catch--Lucky has placed a bet of $25,000 that Mike CAN make a film that they can use in their show.

The film contains a great deal of satire regarding the Hollywood movie machine. A second job offer at a rival TV production doesn't pan out as they refuse to hire Mike when they find out he's freelance and insists that he join a union. What follows is a brief montage where Mike is sent from one union office to another, dealing with union representatives all played by the same guy (Disney voice actor Will Ryan) and getting swamped with regulations, paperwork and fees.

"Nobody gets into the Union! Not nobody, not no how!"

And of course, Bookman is the evil Hollywood executive who's made a bet that he hopes will enable him to use the phrase "you'll never work in this town again", so naturally he attempts to sabotage Mike's production any way he can--not giving him the use of his soundstages or lighting or even paying him until the film is finished. Thus Mike has to rely on his friends to help him shoot, sell most of his possessions to raise his own film budget, scrounge empty film cans from studio dumpsters and shoot an entire full-size stop motion sequence in his garage in the middle of a rainstorm.

Bookman, at a screening of his film, in which he is singing and surrounded by film cans, walking camera tripods and a carnivorous clapper board, asks Mike and company the next day to do a second special effects sequence with location shots and plenty of girls by Friday, and then hires two thugs who talk like Cheech Marin and either Doug or Bob Mackenzie to dress as policemen (or Keystone Kops, to be precise) and hassle them, knowing that Mike's crew don't have the time to get shooting permits. Along the way they steal a police car belonging to Tubbs from Miami Vice, unaware that there's a police dog in the back seat.

Jeez, does this guy hate independent productions so much that he'd actually go to such lengths to sink a guy's homemade film before it's even in the can? I mean, I know they have torpedoed ideas in the past with focus groups, target demographics and time slots opposite the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards, but actual production sabotage? I've heard of Screwed by the Network, but WOW.

"Cheech and Canuck" did not test well early on.

Location shooting proves difficult in a humorous scene involving a police helicopter chase at Griffiths Park that turns into a citywide manhunt, while the actress problem kinda takes care of itself--Mike meets an actress named Cindy (Paige Moore) while meeting with Bookman on another of his more calamitous productions for the upcoming special, with fog machines blaring at random and crew members walking off the set in frustration. Lucky for Mike, Bookman finds out about her work on his film and fires her for breach of contract, and she's brought some friends along as well.

Oh yeah, and it's around this time in the movie that the two of them fall in love.

"Joke's on you, Hollywood! I got ALL your film cans! Good luck storing your film reels NOW!"

Finally the film is complete, and Mike must get it down to the studio, but without a car or an electrified bicycle or any other means of transportation, he is forced to ride his camera dolly all the way to Bookman's office, and thus another chase scene ensues with the fake police officers, the REAL police officers whose car they stole, a Woody Allen impersonator (or maybe that IS Woody Allen, I dunno) and the set of a prison escape movie.

And after all of this, Bookman takes the film and exits without even giving him the check. This makes Mike so angry that he crashes a party at Bookman's house demanding to be paid and then gets thrown in a swimming pool, actually holding his breath at the bottom for an entire two minutes until he gets his money.

So he does his own stunts as well.

In the end, Mike eventually gets his money, Bookman loses the bet and also his job, and the big night arrives. The gang put up flyers and advertise on the moon, but on the night of the premiere:

 

So what effect is this? Does the presidential seal explode or what?

A preemptive speech from the President slowly clears the room as the commander-in-chief drones on and on and on. A discouraged Mike starts burning boxes of film until Cindy takes him for a drive to clear his head. Luckily for Mike, the President finally stops talking just in time to show his film--a recreation of his original 1979 short to accommodate for casting changes and such. Fast motion, stop motion, visual effects and men in green jackets galore, plus a few inspiring subliminal messages inserted for those of you watching the film on a QuickTime file or any media player that lets you advance one frame at a time.

Not much to the rest of the film after that. Mike and Cindy kiss, they're greeted by a crowd in a movie theater who must have just watched the film and sing their congratulations to him, and then the credits roll.

The only way to travel.

The Wizard of Speed and Time is a rare insight into the mind of a director/producer/actor/special effects man. (To give you some idea of how rare it is, the movie was finished in 1983, spent several years in distribution hell and is nowhere to be found on DVD). Not unlike Thief and the Cobbler or Terry Gilliam's films, it's clearly a labor of love that shows dedication to the filmmaker's craft. It's satirical, it's whimsical, and its extensive use of Jittlov's famous visual effects inject a bit of comic energy into the whole affair.

Some films where the stars write AND direct can turn into an ego trip for the filmmaker--he always gets the best parts, everybody kisses up to his character, and the whole plot revolves around him. This film doesn't do that. This isn't a movie about Jittlov making movies, it's a movie about making movies--that anyone with a camera and an idea can go out there and tell the story s/he wants to tell. Especially true now that we all have video cameras built into our phones. Film buffs and filmmakers from professional to amateur status should seek this film out on YouTube and give it a look at.

Though he does get the girl in the end...

"Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue" (1978)

Nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea.
--Craig Bruce

It has been a longstanding notion of mine that people were very easily entertained in the 1970s, as a majority of the popular culture I've seen from that time was seemingly made to accommodate the lowest of the lowest common denominator. Oh, sure, this was the decade that gave us "Stairway to Heaven", Farrah Fawcett, Fawlty Towers and Star Wars, but on the other end of the spectrum it was also the decade that gave us "Disco Duck", Scrappy Doo, the variety show phenomenon, and one of the most reviled televisual offerings in the history of Farnsworth's box, The Star Wars Holiday Special.

(Of course, other decades had their low points, too - the '80s gave us Saved by the Bell, the '90s inflicted the Backstreet Boys on us, and have yet to recover from the reality TV show craze of the '00s - but the 70s seem to be more remembered as a good decade for bad ideas.)

Talking of Scrappy Doo, the 70s was also the decade where the animation duo of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, once known for popular characters like Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, went to crap. This was the decade where the quality of their creations were in flux, recycling everything from characters to show pitches to animation sequences to fill out entire broadcast network Saturday morning schedules before they had The Smurfs to fall back on. Carbon copy groups of teenagers with talking animals who weren't oversized Great Danes going around solving mysteries, a girl band and their entourage travelling haphazardly through space for no apparent reason, all of their characters from the 60s floating around in an ark battling personified social issues like smog and litter and vandalism, the Harlem Globetrotters as superheroes...

They used the wrong spelling of the word "revue". I have SUCH a good feeling about this one...

Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue was another such misfire, first airing on CBS on January 13, 1978, and like other crappy TV specials I can think of, has justifiably not been re-aired since. It was released on videocassette in 1986, but that's about all the attention it got after it aired. Time Warner probably owns it now, and hasn't seen fit to release it on DVD. (Don't strain yourselves, guys!)

Okay, here's the rundown - the special is supposed to be like a Dean Martin celebrity roast or something, only with ice skaters and ballet and stuff like that. Your masters of ceremonies are country singer and Hee Haw host Roy Clark and One Day at a Time star Bonnie Franklin, flanked by a cavalcade of actors dressed as some of Hanna-Barbera's most beloved characters (and the Hair Bear Bunch) to celebrate the 48th birthday of one Fred Flintstone of The Flintstones, the most popular prime-time animated sitcom ever to be accused of ripping off The Honeymooners.

There's only one slight detail - Fred is absent from this whole affair, as he is sitting at home watching the special on TV, thinking he was supposed to be on the next day, and only just realizes that he's supposed to be at the ice arena now, so much of the special is focused on this particular plot point.

To think many of those people had dreams of skating in the Olympics.

Roy and Bonnie are forced to fill up time to wait for Fred, and the guy in the Jabberjaw costume is not making life any easier for them, as he pretends to be Don Rickles, makes several failed attempts at wisecracks at the honoree's expense (this is a roast, remember) and insists that with the man of the hour nowhere to be seen, they should roast HIM instead.

What's Jabberjaw, you ask? Think Scooby Doo with a talking shark set in Al Gore's dystopian vision of the future, or in a world where the bad guy from The Spy Who Loved Me actually succeeded.

To make matters worse...apparently they couldn't get Frank Welker to play Jabberjaw as he did in the TV show, so voice acting duties went to Don Messick. And I have nothing against Don Messick, his voice is legendary--Scooby Doo, Papa Smurf, Hamton on Tiny Toons--but his attempt to sound like a shark who borrows shtick from both Rodney Dangerfield and Curly Howard comes out sounding like--ughh--his Scrappy Doo voice.

In a nutshell, it's Scrappy Doo once again trying to steal the spotlight from a character more popular that he. Only as a talking shark.

Sharks just aren't popular. Once Jaws came out, the market was pretty much oversaturated.

Variety shows aren't necessarily known for their plots, so here are some edited highlights:

Bonnie dresses up as a polar bear and sings "You Are My Lucky Star" while skating girls dance around and sing the completely unrelated "We're in the Money".

Then we're treated to an unusual comedy vignette from a duo named Course & Young, who I can't even find info on Google about. One of them tries to sing a song but gets distracted by the janitor, who keeps hitting him with a mop, knocking things over, then tries to blow him up and bites him in the leg.

I'll be over here crying for those poor baby seals if you need me...

A Jackson Five-ish group called The Silvers, of whom I have also never heard, sing a song titled "Disco Showdown" while all the dancers and costumed animals get day-yown on the ice.

Sashi Kuchiki, a shirtless guy in a badly-made thong, skates and jumps around with flaming torches while some men and women dressed entirely in yellow give us a fitness workout video.

Roy Clark plays the theme from that one movie Love Story whose name escapes me on the guitar while some lady dances in the background.

This aired during the family hour, right?

And also, for the purpose of entertainment and DEFINITELY not to pad out the special's running time, the audience is treated to some live-action vignettes from another recently-produced live-action Hanna-Barbera program, The Skatebirds. The Skatebirds, for those who don't know (i.e. all of you), was a Banana Splits-style supershow-type dealie starring a trio of live-action people in rollerskating bird costumes getting chased around by someone in a live-action rollerskating cat costume (rollerskating in an ICE skating special, go figure). I couldn't tell you anything else about it, apart from the fact that it gave us among other regular segments a cartoon called The Robonic Stooges, which is just...ughhh...oh lord...that'll take you to some dark places.

Why am I always forgetting which one of them is Fleegle?

Finally, the climax is a grand birthday tribute number where all the cartoon-character-costumed actors dance around with chefs for some reason paying their respects to the still-absent Fred. The Hair Bear Bunch trio tell jokes that stopped being funny in the third grade, some ice dancers in Wally Gator costumes dance around for a bit while one of the Bears chases after them with a flyswatter--why, I do not know--and finally a giant birthday cake flanked with dancing girls is brought out onto the ice.

During this whole farce we get animated updates on Fred's travel to the ice arena, as he and Barney watch the whole affair on a portable TV set in the car on the way there.

Okay, special, explain this to me. In the cartoon segments, which are clearly based in Bedrock, the "place right out of history" where The Flintstones takes place, we are clearly in the prehistoric setting, while the live-action ice skating segments were filmed in Bakersfield Civic Auditorium in 1978 A.D. California. How does this work? Did the ice rink suddenly fall through a hole in the time-space continuum and land 65 million years in the past? Did Fred somehow go through a wormhole and end up in the Bedrock of the late 20th century just in time for his 65,000,048th birthday?

Well, as it turns out, Fred doesn't make it after all, because when it seems that he finally arrives on stage, it's actually another actor in perhaps the worst character costume of the bunch. All the other costumes use fur, but Fred having no fur to speak of, has a head obviously made out of plastic. His mouth doesn't even close.

After that, the special ends and the credits roll.

Roy, get off the screen! You're distracting me from the pretty girl!

So...how does Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue stack up?

To answer that question, let's break down its title.

It isn't exactly "all-star", since not only does it include lesser-known characters like Jabberjaw and the Hair Bear Bunch (and of course the Skatebirds, whose show you can't even find episodes of on YouTube), but I've never even heard of ANY of the musical, comedy or ice skating acts in it. I barely even know anything about the hosts, other than that one of them sang country music and the other was on a TV show that starred Valerie Bertinelli.

And it also didn't have anything in the way of comedy, either. None of the gags were funny, Jabberjaw was just annoying, and the laughter, par for the course in a Hanna-Barbera production, obviously came from a can.

In fact, the only thing that Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Revue promises and actually DELIVERS is...ice. The one thing I can definitely guarantee you is that there is ice in this special. Ice that is both danced and skated upon.

And, honestly, the ice wasn't all that bad.

Fwed Fwintstone wuvs you DIS MUCH.

Casino Royale (1967)

CASINO ROYALE is too much...for one James Bond!

James Bond turned fifty last year. Though he hasn't even aged a day.

After twenty-three movies, six actors and so many women I'm surprised he hasn't picked up at least one sexual disease, people still love him.

Can't blame him, really. Good, bad or indifferent, there are so many awesome and memorable things to list from this long-running franchise. The fight scenes, the fancy cars, the innuendos, the elaborate gadgetry, the volcano hideout in You Only Live Twice, the amphibious car in The Spy Who Loved Me, John Cleese playing Q in that one movie, the bizarre henchmen like Jaws, Oddjob and Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, the women characters with suggestive names like Pussy Galore, Plenty O'Toole, and Holly Goodhead...

This week, however, we'll be looking at a James Bond film that nobody remembers--Casino Royale.

Actually, there are TWO James Bond movies that aren't part of the official canon--there's this one, and there's also the 1983 film Never Say Never Again, in which Sean Connery (at the age of 53) returned to play 007 in what is essentially a remake of Thunderball.

When Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli won the film rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and stories, there was one title they didn't get--the very first novel from 1953, Casino Royale, which had already gone to CBS for a 1954 episode of their Climax Mystery Theater series. When those rights wound up in the hands of Columbia Pictures, producer Charles Feldman originally wanted to make the movie WITH Saltzman and Broccoli, but ended up producing it by himself when they couldn't come to terms, and neither could he cast Connery himself to play Bond...so he decided to make the film into a comedy. Too bad he didn't tell most of the actors who genuinely thought it was a straight-up Bond flick. David Niven, Fleming's original choice to play his super-spy character, was given the lead.

This was not the only problem this film had.

Guess how many people directed it.

Normally one is enough, unless it's a Coen or Wachowski flick.

This movie had SIX DIRECTORS--SIX--each helming different parts of the film. One of them (who went uncredited) was the stunt coordinator in charge of the final sequence. Another one, Val Guest, was put in charge of piecing this whole thing into as close of a coherent story as it gets.

Now, any movie that goes through six directors would surely have some wondrous tales of production hell. And this film does not disappoint - Orson Welles and Peter Sellers never got along, and Welles' good friend Princess Margaret, the Queen's sister, did nothing to douse the animosity; the original budget was $6 million but eventually ballooned to twice that amount; Sellers and co-star Woody Allen made frequent contributions to the screenplay, as did others including film director Billy Wilder and Dr. Strangelove's Terry Southern, whom Sellers brought in to try and outdo Welles. The end result was a mish-mash of a film that led to reviews ranging from lukewarm to negative from critics who called it indulgent, lacking discipline, and hard to follow. Despite this, and unlike many of the films I've done, it did manage to make its money back in theaters.

Many people in this film have also appeared in official Bond movies, the most obvious guess being co-star Ursula Andress, the Bond girl from Dr. No. The list also includes Vladek Shaybal (From Russia with Love), Caroline Munro and Milton Reid (The Spy Who Loved Me), Angela Scoular (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), and Burt Kwouk (Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice), who also appeared alongside Peter Sellers as Cato in the Pink Panther movies.

Look for a guy in a Frankenstein's monster costume at the film's climax. That's David Prowse in his first film role. You know, the guy who would later appear on camera as DARTH VADER. (Yes, you read that correctly. Frankenstein's monster.)

And incidentally, who should design the opening titles of this film than our old friend Richard Williams.

The first scene in the movie shows Peter Sellers standing in a French pissoir meeting a police inspector who shows him his...err...credentials.

This really won't make sense without a picture, so here is one:

Nothing comes of this scene.

David Niven plays James Bond 007, the ORIGINAL James Bond as it turns out, who retired from the British Secret Service 50 years ago (didn't know the Cold War was running that long) and has been living in resentment of the gadget-obsessed, sex-crazed buffoon that MI6 gave his name and number to after he left. His old boss, M (played by John Huston, father of the Grand High Witch herself) visit him with representatives of the CIA, the KGB and French intelligence in hopes of coaxing him out of retirement to stop the evil organization SMERSH from eliminating their secret operatives.

(Before you think SMERSH is a silly made-up word, it was actually an umbrella name for the Soviet Union's counterespionage agencies. The name comes from the Russian phrase smiert spionam, meaning "death to spies", which many Bond fans may recall was a plot device in 1987's The Living Daylights. Here they've given the name to a SPECTRE-like global terrorist group, while I'm left wondering why the KGB guy is there.)

Anyway, when Bond turns them all down, M has his mansion blown up for some reason...and then apparently dies in the explosion. Even though it looks like it only just blew off his toupee.

Old guy, young lady...I think this was how Never Say Never Again went, come to think of it.

Bond travels to Scotland to console the widow M, who has been replaced by a SMERSH agent named Mimi (Deborah Kerr) who has also replaced everyone in M's castle home with SMERSH ladies in hopes of seducing Bond and destroying his abstinent image. All their attempts fail, and even agent Mimi falls in love with him and saves his life when the other girls try to kill him during an exploding grouse hunt.

Now the new head of MI6, Sir James (we'll call him Sir James for clarity's sake) returns to London, acquaints himself with Moneypenny...'s daughter (Barbara Bouchet), and is briefed that British spies all over the world are being killed in bordellos and geisha houses by lady SMERSH agents who are preying on their inability to refuse sexual favors. As a countermeasure, he orders that all remaining MI6 agents will change their names to "007 James Bond" to throw SMERSH off his--I mean, their trail, and establishes a program to train spies to resist sexual attraction. Moneypenny Jr. brings in a new trainee, a karate expert named Coop (Terence Cooper) who doesn't really do much of anything if I recall.

Meanwhile, retired agent/millionaire Vesper Lynd (Andress) finds an expert baccarat player named Evelyn Tremble (Sellers) to become another James Bond, go to Casino Royale and play some cards against a SMERSH agent known as Le Chiffre - in the more recent movie a terrorist mastermind, but in this movie Orson Welles playing a guy who embezzled SMERSH assets to feed his compulsive gambling habit.

Right now at least one part of him is violating the Official Secrets Act.

Meanwhile, in another plot point that goes nowhere, Bond looks up his estranged daughter Mata Bond (Joanna Bettet), his long-lost daughter whom he sired with Mata Hari (yes, THE Mata Hari), to infiltrate a spy school in East Berlin that is really a SMERSH cover operation. She finds that Le Chiffre is also selling embarrassing photos of world leaders at an "art auction" to raise the money to pay SMERSH back, steals the photos, flushes them down a toilet and escapes in a cab driven by Wilfred Mott from Doctor Who.

Back at the casino, after Evelyn/Bond must fight off a lady SMERSH agent by the name of Miss Goodthighs, he goes off to play baccarat, but not before learning that Le Chiffre wears a special kind of infrared sunglasses to help him cheat. The baccarat game is a clear metaphor for the feud between Sellers and Welles on set - Le Chiffre and Evelyn/Bond trade off magic tricks and comedic foreign accents almost like schoolchildren on a playground. When Vesper steals Le Chiffre's infrared sunglasses, Evelyn/Bond easily cleans him out, but his victory is short-lived when Vesper is kidnapped outside the casino and Evelyn/Bond chases after her.

Or at least I think he chases after them, because there is a bit of a jump cut after he gets in his car and is about to give chase. Suddenly he's strapped in a chair about to be tortured by a sore loser Le Chiffre.

And he is. Psychologically.

As he is hallucinating being attacked by bagpipers and more women in bathing suits, Vesper appears to rescue him...and then shoots him.

So...does that mean he's dead or something? I mean, we don't see him for the rest of the film, and I know Sellers walked off the set at one point, but is he killed for real if he's killed in his freak-out? That needed to be explained a bit.

"Excuse me, which one is directing this scene? ...erm...am I in the right movie?"

Equally inexplicable is what happens immediately afterward, when some SMERSH agents suddenly appear out of nowhere and shoot Le Chiffre in the forehead.

Meanwhile, in London, Mata Bond is abducted by a SMERSH agent posing as a Royal Guardsman on a horse and taken onboard a...flying...saucer?

Okay, this movie's not making any sense now.

Sir James and Moneypenny track her back to the casino, where some friendly SMERSH agents with guns take them to their basement headquarters and present them to their leader Dr. Noah (no relation) face to face--Jimmy Bond. Yes, it turns out Sir James' lesser-known, ill-regarded nephew, played by Woody Allen, is so jealous of the size of his uncle's metaphorical penis that he started up a supervillain club to kill off all the sexually attractive secret agents. He's also devised a biological weapon to make women more beautiful and to kill every man taller than 4'6", to make him the most desirable man in the world.

He's also got this second plan to have all the world's leaders assassinated and replaced with robotic clones that obey his every command, but, again, nothing comes of this.

I didn't know he first auditioned as a Bond girl.

He's captured this other lady James Bond we saw training Coop (Dahlia Lavi) and offers to make her his new queen, and she complies only to trick him into swallowing a pill he's developed that turns him into a walking atomic bomb.

The climax of the film...uggh...I have no idea what's going on. Sir James reveals Lynd as a double agent, suddenly some cowboys bust in and then a free-for-all breaks out. Every character who's still alive at this point as far as I know are there beating people up, and people are running around screaming and I think they're ALL supposed to be James Bond, a couple of seals are there for some reason, and then we get some Indians parachuting out of a plane and they start shooting everyone with arrows and dancing around and...there's also a chimp...and all the while Jimmy's walking around counting down the number of small atomic explosions yet to go off inside his stomach before he finally hits zero and blows up the entire casino and all the James Bonds die and go to heaven except for Jimmy.

They all die at the end. Yeah, THAT'S how much sense this film makes.

The 1967 Casino Royale starts out as a straightforward satire of the Bond films, genuinely playing on Bond's natural attractiveness and reliance on gimmicky cars and watches and things. Unfortunately, at some point into its running time, the movie sort of forgets all of that. Actually I'd go as far as to say that the movie loses all sense of coherence and descends into psychedelic, madcap nonsense. As an early entry in the spy spoof genre, it is well-intentioned, and the talent of its all-star cast is accounted for, but as you can expect from a film with six directors and too many cooks in the screenwriter's broth, the execution is rife with dropped subplots and useless characters and just falls apart. By the end of the film, the filmmakers just throw their hands up in the air and say "screw it, may as well end on SOMETHING."

Of course, little did anyone involved in this film know that at some time in the future, there would be a moment where people would be tired of the old formulaic structure of a Bond film--the sexy girls, the gadgets, the double entendres, and the witty postmortem one-liners--and decide that the franchise was overdue for a reboot. (I think it was probably around Die Another Day, which was so by-the-book it really stung.) And so, in 2006, one movie in the official series would start the story of Bond all over again. This time, with a more serious Bond, a more action-oriented Bond, a Bond who doesn't just shoot guys in a tux with a girl hanging off his leg while drinking a martini (shaken, not stirred).

And that movie would be called...Casino Royale.

And incidentally, THAT movie WAS just the right size for ONE James Bond.

What, another--oh, this movie can go to HELL.

Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)

Life's a piece of s**t
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true
You'll see it's all a show
People laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

If there is anything I will admit to being a die-hard fan of, other than Peanuts, it is Monty Python. I fell in love with the original Flying Circus TV series instantly when my parents rented some episodes of it at Blockbuster back when I was nine. I loved watching it as a kid. It was silly, it was irreverent, plus the fact that I was watching something mature and sophisticated for my age while everyone else at school was still watching cartoons and MTV made me feel kinda special. I have since collected the entire series on DVD, as well as most of the movies and many of the books. My older sister has given me a plethora of Python toys as Christmas and birthday gifts. I am that devoted.

And no, I'm not the kind of fan who annoys his friends by constantly quoting it in public. I'm not THAT devoted.

And since you've been such good little boys and girls during my "Trilogy of Imagination" ...trilogy, I have a little treat for you: this week, we're going to look at a Python movie.

No, not that one.

Yeah, I'm sure Google REALLY loves it when Blogger users put pics of topless women in crash helmets on their sites.

THAT'S the one, Life of Brian. The most controversial of their cinematic efforts.

While promoting Holy Grail in theaters, the Pythons were often asked what their next movie project would be, to which Eric Idle jokingly answered "Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory". He had even written a sketch with Terry Gilliam where Jesus is angry with some carpenters because they hadn't built his cross properly. They didn't do anything with the sketch, but the idea of a Python Bible story intrigued them, so they did a crapton of Biblical research and spent two weeks in Barbados hammering out a movie script.

After examining the Dead Sea Scrolls and life in Biblical times, however, the Pythons couldn't really find anything all that funny about Jesus. So they decided instead to satirize Jesus' followers, more specifically mainstream religion and its holier-than-thou figureheads. The original script featured Brian as Jesus' thirteenth disciple, the one who couldn't attend the Last Supper because his wife was having friends over for dinner, but eventually Brian became just a regular guy in 33 A.D. Judea.

This sadly didn't stop the film from being at the center of many religious protests, led by a lot of church bigwigs who claimed that Brian was intended to be a mockery of Christ himself without even having seen the movie. It was actually banned in several countries and geographic regions for decades--Sweden marketed it as "the film so funny it was banned in Norway". They may have received a sign of times to come when the EMI studio thought the script was too blasphemous and pulled their money out just two days before they were supposed to fly out to Tunisia to start filming.

Fortunately, the Pythons managed to get by...with a little help from their friends.

Former Beatle George Harrison was a good friend of Eric's and wanted to see the movie made, so when he learned about their financial problems he and his business manager founded the Handmade Films production company to provide the movie's £2 million budget.

I saw this film on TV when I was eleven and didn't think too much of the film's message. I'm older now, and having been born and raised in a moderate Southern Baptist family and attending a Unitarian church in a progressive college town in the most sanctimonious state in the Union, it does kinda hit close to home for me.

(DISCLAIMER: One of the problems of analyzing movies in such a format as this is that you don't want to give too much away to those who haven't seen it. Comedies in particular are a minefield; a bad comedy is easy because you can complain about how the jokes aren't funny and how it insults the audience's intelligence, but GOOD comedies...well, there's always the risk that one or two people who haven't seen it will stumble across it and risk me spoiling the jokes for them. For the benefit of those one or two people, we'll be focusing on the plot of this film instead of its humor, while mentioning where the jokes are in this film so that those who HAVE seen it will know what I'm talking about.)

At least he's not a bureaucrat.

Nowhere is this blasphemy allegation proven more wrong than in the very first scene, which sets up an all-too-familiar setting...

The Three Wise Men have followed a star to a manger in Bethlehem, where a Mrs. Cohen (played by director Terry Jones) nearly throws them out before seeing the gold, frankincense and myrrh they want to give her son for Christmas. Despite some confusion over what myrrh is, they bless the child and bestow their offerings to him, but no sooner are they out the door do they realize they've made a mistake, take their gifts back and head to the heavenly-glowing stable next door.

(In a famous debate on British television where Michael Palin and John Cleese defended the film against two Anglican religious authorities, it turned out they'd had a long lunch and were late to the movie, so they missed this first scene. Remember, kids, always finish your homework.)

About thirty years and a bizarre but nicely animated opening title sequence later, we cut to the Sermon on the Mount as given by Admiral Piett.

The boy whose name was Brian has grown up to be this man called Brian (Graham Chapman), who still lives with his mother and resents the oppression his people are suffering at the hands of the occupying Roman Empire. It is a fact proved early on when it is revealed that his father was a centurion and he wasn't quite immaculately conceived, if you get my meaning. This motivates him to sign up with the People's Front of Judea (not to be confused with the Judean People's Front), an anti-Roman resistance movement lead by one of John's, Michael's and Eric Idle's characters each, and also that he's fallen for another member of theirs, a young lady named Judith (played by Sue Jones-Davies, who lifted the ban of this film in a small Welsh town in 2009 by becoming mayor of it).

The People's Front of Judea can be best described as a faction that doesn't really do a lot of resisting. They just sit around and talk a lot of power-to-the-people stuff and about how much better they are than those other resistance groups, especially the Judean People's Front (splitters!). One of them is also fighting for his right to be a woman. Yes, HIS.

"Item four on the agenda, how all the other left-wing organization's mothers wear army boots..."

He meets the PFJ again at his day job selling food to patrons at the local coliseum. His first assignment is to paint an anti-Roman slogan on the front of Pilate's palace. This is one of the best gags in the movie, so I won't spoil it for you, but it ends with "Romans Go Home" written in Latin one hundred times on the palace walls in various font sizes. Suffice to say, he's as good as in.

Soon after, our little revolutionary is going on his first gubernatorial raid, in which the PFJ sneak into the imperial palace and attempt to kidnap Pilate's wife and hold her hostage until Pilate agrees to withdraw all Roman soldiers from Judea. (Well, except for those who contribute to roads, housing, education, public security, health...crap, did I just give away a good joke then? You one or two people forget you read this!) Things don't go exactly according to plan, thanks to the sudden appearance of a rival anti-government faction, and an argument over which of them came up with kidnapping Pilate's wife first has a hockey game breaking out between them leaving Brian the only one still standing when the centurions arrive.

Brian is brought before Pontius Pilate (think Michael Palin in a toga with an Elmer Fudd/Homestar Runner-type speech impediment) while he decide what to do with him. Or he would if he could, err...stop them laughing about...something that comes up when Brian mentions that his father was in the Roman garrisons...err...

REALLY hard to describe this without giving away a lot of the jokes in them. I'm not even sure I should have mentioned the "what have the Romans ever done for us" scene, even if it is crucial to the film's message.

Anyway, Brian manages to escape and runs up the stairs of a very high, unfinished tower to escape the guards chasing after him, but inadvertently runs off the top of it.

And then...this happens:

I am aware that this movie came out not long after the first Star Wars film was released, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Any landing you can walk away from. And never mention again.

After...that, the chase resumes as Brian retreats back to PFJ HQ with a legion of centurions right behind him.

Incidentally, the PFJ are headquartered at the residence of one Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath (played by John Young, who in an earlier scene was about to be stoned to death for blasphemy, but that went wrong, they just...let him go?). The balcony he is hiding in gives way to drop him right in a line of prophets and seers preaching to the masses, one of whom looks like Terry Gilliam in a potential Keith Moon role. In order to keep his cover, he pretends he is one of them, spouting off philosophical nonsense to a crowd of skeptical listeners who keep picking holes in his parables, and only when some centurions pass by is he suddenly struck with inspiration, and only then does this ruse work.

A little too well, actually.

In fact, his listeners are now convinced that he's their new Messiah, and he is forced to get away from them.

While fleeing from the multitudes, Brian loses one of his shoes (sandals?), which his new-found devotees interpret as a sign, thus kicking off a scene which the Pythons themselves have described as "the entire history of religion in two minutes." The only thing I can mention about it without spoilers is that British comic legend Spike Milligan cameos as the only man left behind when the Brianites run off in the same yet now separate directions.

Maybe it's Matthias' identical twin brother, Dingo.

Brian repeatedly tries to tell his new followers that he's not their new Messiah, but his many attempts to talk sense into them are interpreted as blessings or miracles or words of guidance. He finally tells them to, in a less polite choice of words, "copulate off", only for them to ask him how they should do so. They eventually leave him alone, carrying off a heretical naked hermit whose vow of silence was recently broken to be stoned or something, leaving Judith behind.

One passionate night later, Brian awakens stark naked to an even larger crowd of devotees outside his bedroom window.

Insert funny yet satirically relevant scene I can't tell you about here.

Things are no different at PFJ headquarters, where the sick and possessed have lined up to be healed by their new Savior. Reg has even struck a deal with a Mr. Papadopoulus (executive producer Harrison in an uncredited cameo) to let Brian speak at the Mount. Even Judith has caught Brian fever.

This never happened to the other guy.

Right about now, the Romans finally catch up with Brian (took them that long to chase him down?) and take him back to Pilate, who calmly sends him off to be "cwucified".

Pilate, in a festive Passover spirit, addresses the crowd with his friend from Rome whose name I can't mention for fear of giving away another joke, announcing that he will release one prisoner from his crucifixion party, which the crowd takes as an excuse to name as many 'R' names as they can to poke fun at his accent. After failing to get her comrades in the PFJ to get off their lazy asses and do something about it, Judith joins this crowd to call for Brian's release.

Meanwhile, the PFJ finally decide on a unanimous vote to get off their lazy asses and do something about it.

Mean-meanwhile, Brian has just been sent off with the rest of the crucifers...crucifixioners...crucifees...he's going to be crucified.

Not a lot of major jokes to give away in that lot.

"I will cwucify that wascawwy wabbit!"

Brian is eventually strung up on his cross along with 139 other criminals. The PFJ finally arrive...to wish him well on his martyrdom for the cause, and then sing and applaud for him.

The Roman rescue party show up to release him, but when everyone insists that their name is Brian ("I'm Brian and so's my wife!") they take the wrong man down instead.

A sudden appearance by the Judean People's Front's crack suicide squad (introduced in a deleted scene) goes about as well as you'd expect. Wish I could tell you about it.

Judith appears to say farewell after Reg tells her "what he was doing".

Even his own mother shows up to disown him.

So to summarize: Brian is now hanging on a cross, a long, torturous, horrible death awaits him and all avenues of rescue have pretty much left him to rot.

What more perfect time for a merry sing-along?

So that's Life of Brian. And how does it hold up?

Well, in this so-called enlightened age of Fox News pundits, holier-than-thou politicians, and religious types who spend more time in picket lines than in church...pretty well.

The extensive research the Pythons did for this film shows. The biblical look of the film is quite authentic, and the cinematography and Terry Gilliam's production design makes it all the more realistic. Man, it had ALIENS in it and it looked real. In fact, just about the only thing it gets wrong is that everybody in Judea is Caucasian.

Also...blasphemous? HOW?? Jesus appears in this movie twice, just before AND immediately after the opening credits, and he's the only person in the film who is actually played straight. The Pythons casually tiptoe around all references to him; the worst he gets is when Michael Palin's ex-leper calls him a "bloody do-gooder". The film doesn't outright tell you to abandon Christianity and become an agnostic, it's just saying think for yourselves and have some common sense, a message I'd imagine some mainstream religious leaders would have trouble wrapping their heads around. Message aside, it also has some of their funniest material. Those one or two of you who haven't seen this movie will love it.

Since its release, Brian has become a cult classic--not as popular as Holy Grail or as censor-baiting as Meaning of Life, even though you do get a brief glimpse of Chapman's naughty bits at the start of the "we're all individuals" bit, but it has a nice tinge of satire that the other two films lack. The controversy that surrounds it even now only adds to why people like it so much (look up "Not the Nine O'clock News" on YouTube sometime). It's basic Monty Python--humor that's silly, absurdist and at times sophomoric, but at the same time so sophisticated only the stupid amongst the stupid couldn't understand it. I'm quite proud to list this movie as one of my all-time favorites.

And I didn't even mention the best jokes in it, either.

Praise be to Brian, patron saint of satire, who died so that we all shall laugh.

Brazil (1985)

Welcome to part two of our look at Terry Gilliam's



All you latecomers can check my discussion of Time Bandits for a proper intro.
Then come straight back here, and head on over to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen afterward.
Everyone else...<hr> tag.

---

Dear Sid Sheinberg,

When are you going to release my film, 'BRAZIL'?

Terry Gilliam

This was from a full-page ad that Gilliam took out in a 1985 issue of Variety. It was addressed to Universal Pictures head Sid Sheinberg, whose company had obtained the U.S. distribution rights to Gilliam's newest movie Brazil, but were holding off on its release. The studio didn't think that the original ending of Gilliam's cut would test well with audiences and were toying with the idea of re-editing the film to give it a "happily-ever-after" ending to make it more marketable.

Gilliam disagreed with this idea, and for a while Brazil was left in cinematic limbo while the director fought with the studio. In the meantime, Gilliam held several unapproved private screenings of the film to Hollywood critics and to students at a lecture at USC. It managed to impress the Los Angeles Film Critics Association enough to be named Best Film of the Year, and with such praise Universal had no choice but to give in to Gilliam's demands and release it unedited.

The movie finally came out stateside in December of 1985, ten months after it premiered in Europe. Of course it wound up making more money there than it did here, but it's a cult classic now, so who cares.

And it didn't stop Sheinberg from releasing a 94-minute "Love Conquers All" version which actually made it to television.

We'll be looking at the original two-and-a-half-hour cut because a) I don't like watching re-edited movies, and b) I don't care much for Hollywood endings.

The film takes place, as the opening captions dictate, "somewhere in the 20th century", which would probably suggest an alternate timeline in world history, in a city not unlike that in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, where everyone has either a British or American accent. The Ministry of Information, the all-knowing, all-seeing body that rules over wherever this movie takes place, rules with an Orwellian fist thanks to its system of charging suspects for their incarceration and the information they interrogate them for.

It's a system which values efficiency, and little else...especially not building safety codes. You see many many ducts and pipes coming out of the walls and the ceilings of everywhere. It's very claustrophobic and I'm not even sure most of them are even for heating and AC. But they don't care. The movie even starts with a commercial advertising new designer ducts at your local Central Services showroom.

Oh yeah, and there's the classic 1984 tactic of setting off random explosions in public places from time to time so as to make you think there are terrorists about.

"Happy Christmas, everyone! ...oh, and OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA."

Jonathan Pryce stars as Sam Lowry, a white-collar employee working for the Ministry. Sam is a low-level government worker, no wife, no girlfriend, he's henpecked by his mother (Katherine Helmond), an overbearing woman who along with her friends is seriously addicted to plastic surgery. At his job, he is also prone to daydreaming that he is a winged knight sailing through the skies after a beautiful maiden in the clouds.

Truly a prime candidate for the Anti-Sex League.

And that he is also David Bowie.

On this particular day, Sam is assigned by his boss, whom Gilliam has reverently named Mr. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm) to look into a clerical error where a dead fly jammed in the printer has caused a typo on a government document regarding a Mr. Harry Tuttle, a rogue element, and the subsequent wrongful arrest of a Mr. Archibald Buttle, loving husband and father of two. Apparently they'd overcharged Mr. Buttle for what little info they got out of him, and Sam is told to rectify it as well as deliver a refund check to his grieving widow (apparently Buttle's heart condition never turned up on Tuttle's papers).

Meanwhile, the Buttles' upstairs neighbor Jill (Kim Griest) is trying to get to the bottom of this whole mix-up in hopes of discovering what happened to Mr. Buttle, but the higher-ups at the Ministry refuse to cooperate and have even branded her as an enemy of the state for trying to bring their administrative error to light. And, as it happens, she looks just like the girl in Sam's recurring daydreams.

"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you sign can and will be deducted from your bank account in a court of law."

Also, on one night where the heating system in his apartment breaks down, Sam is unexpectedly visited by the REAL Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade central heating repair guy who left the government payroll a while back because he couldn't stand the paperwork. Unfortunately, his presence makes enemies of two Central Services maintenance guys (played by Bob Hoskins and Derrick O'Connor) who rip out all of Sam's ductwork and then kick him out of his flat so they can "fix it."

Throughout, Sam's recurring dreams start turning Freudian as he now has to save his dream-Jill from baby-faced ghouls, monsters who look very much like Mr. Kurtzmann and Mrs. Buttle and her children, and a ferocious samurai warrior sitting atop a pile of rubble all lit up in neon.

And that's about the first two-thirds of the film right there.

Also, former Time Bandit Jack Purvis appears as a rival plastic surgeon to Jim Broadbent at one of Sam's mother's fancy parties. Thought I'd mention that for continuity's sake.

Holy crap. ...is that a shoe on her head?

Using his new-found government connections--his best friend Jack (recurring Python alumnus Michael Palin) and his mother's ties to Deputy Minister Jeremiah Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), a leader who talks a lot of nonsense, most of it in cricket metaphors--Sam finally gets to meet the appropriately freaked out Jill just as she is staring down several gun barrels hoisted by many heavily-armed policemen. What follows is a chase scene where Sam tries to confess to Jill and Jill tries to lose him while driving a truck through a construction site and finally escapes through a fancy department store during a conveniently-timed "terrorist attack."

He sneaks back into the Ministry to tamper with some records to have Jill declared legally dead and call off the storm troopers, and after that he finds her again and the two of them enjoy a passionate night of romance with Jill strangely wearing a wig making her look like the damsel in distress of his fantasies.

The next morning Sam and Jill are just about to make plans for Hate Week when they are rudely awakened by the sound of policemen barging in and surrounding them with machine guns.

At least Winston and Julia both got to live.

Read the book.

"I never wanted to be a bureaucrat anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack..."

Sam is charged with treason for abusing his position and is strapped to a chair inside of a nuclear cooling tower where his old (as in, ex-) friend Jack wears a baby doll mask from his dreams and is about to perform a very surgical interrogation. (Jill is revealed to have been shot while resisting arrest.) Suddenly a gaping hole appears in Jack's brain as Tuttle reappears with some similarly-dressed gentlemen to rescue Sam and blow up the Ministry. Guns blaze, more things explode, and we even get a nice Battleship Potemkin reference.

From this point on, things get very stream-of-consciousness. Tuttle disappears in a stream of papers, Sam arrives at a funeral for one of his mother's friends (who had died of complications from complications from complications from her latest facelift) and finds that his mom looks eerily like Jill and has become a cougar, he falls into the casket and runs through a world lifted from his daydreams with monsters and soldiers and things chasing after him, next thing he knows he's in a trailer truck with the very-much-alive-and-kicking Jill in the driver's seat. And so the two of them drive out of the city and off into the countryside, where they settle down together and live happily ever--

Hey! You! Get offa my cloud!

Oh. Err, okay. So it turns out that last bit was all in Sam's head the whole time. He's dreaming again. Jack and Mr. Helpmann observe, fear they've lost him as they exit the room and leave him alone with his thoughts, humming the title song/recurring motif.

Damn. So Big Brother wins. Again.

Or...maybe Sam does. Somehow.

Well, the audience wins, anyway, because Brazil is a freaking EXTRAVAGANZA. Screw its two-and-a-half hour running time, I loved it.

I don't see why Universal felt cutting the ending would make it a better film. It's about a guy who daydreams a lot. So what, the daydreams suddenly become real? His bosses and his mom and everything else made his life such a living hell that the fates decide to cut him a break? I haven't seen the "Love Conquers All" version, but I'd hardly think a boy-gets-the-girl conclusion would mesh well with the whole escapism theme. Besides, George Orwell's novel didn't have a happy ending either, and IT worked.

Also, typical of Gilliam's efforts, it is SPECTACULAR to look at, probably even more so than Time Bandits. A lot is made of the use of perspective in the camera work which makes for eye-popping cinematography, whereas the art design is a very unique blend of futuristic technology and retro film noir elements--I particularly liked the Ministry of Information interiors that resemble a 1940s newspaper office and the use of giant magnifying lenses and typewriter keyboards as a makeshift desktop computer.

AND its vision of modern society is frighteningly prophetic. Think about it--a consumerist people that's fanatically obsessed with money, credit ratings, and appearances, buried up to their eyebrows in red tape, plagued by invisible "terrorists" who may or may not exist, concerned with efficiency to the exclusion of most everything else including conscience or craftsmanship, and they'd never in a million years admit that they're wrong.

Not bad for a guy who admits he's never even READ 1984.

A pictoral metaphor two reviews in a row. You know I spoil you people.