p e n g u i n d e v i l

So I know that Terry Gilliam is one of the finest filmmakers out there. Four of his films are among my favorites and I like the rest of them too! (well, there’s one that I haven’t seen), but I still must ask… Why does anyone finance his movies? Is he a tax write-off? Or do production companies put aside some of the money they get from the tripe they put out and use it to finance really good films? Well, that said… Somehow I manged to miss the 4 week, 9 theater release of Tideland last fall. In an attempt to rectify that slight, I pre-ordered the DVD and, as rare occurrence as any, I actually watched the movie the day I got it. It goes a little something like this…

Tideland was a great film. I found it very engrossing. From it’s nutty beginning with Jennifer “the fun sister” Tilly and Jeff Bridges as whacked out rock’n’roll junkie parents raising their daughter to lots of time spent showing the girl running through wheat fields, there is lots of fun stuff to look at in this movie. But it’s certainly not for everyone. If you find it boring, don’t say I didn’t warn you! It is much more sedate than the usual wondrous and fantastical extravaganza’s he supplies us with. To use producerspeak, it is sort of Pan’s Labyrinth in the setting of Northfork. A tale of a young girl in harsh circumstances who lives in her own little world of imagination. Not in fantastical way with special effects and nutty make believe characters, she’s just kind of here in the wheat field, talking to the doll heads on her fingers. In fact, that’s pretty much the majority of the film. There is another farm house nearby with some rather odd characters who live in it. Sometimes they seem to be a bit too much, but you get used to it. The little girl, as tragedies and odd circumstances befall her, rarely wavers out of her fantasy land. She seems thoroughly blind to the reality around her as she makes things fit into her comfort zone; not too plot driven, more sort of a “day in the life” kind of thing. But it’s really just a film for watching and listening to. A beautiful landscape, nice cinematography, and enough odd happenings to keep you involved and wondering what sights you’ll see next!

The only downside is that Gilliam does a rather pointless introduction at the beginning of the film, where he warns that some people might not like it. Um? Who wants to be warned by the director that they might not like the movie they’re sitting down to watch? It reminds me of those olden tricks where they announce medical personal will be onsite for those who can’t handle the movie… It’s all right as a joke, but this seemed a bit too serious… And rather unneeded.

Once upon a time in Michigan, there was an eccentric fellow named Kellogg. In his long life, spanning the civil war to the second world war, he invented corn flakes, advocated enemas & vegetarianism, fought against the perils of onanism and the loss of ones precious bodily fluids, exercised, wrote books and advocated eugenics. For a time he directed the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Many decades later, T C Boyle made a comedic novel based around this fellow, his methods and the sanitarium. I don’t know if you’ve read the novel, I haven’t, but I might suggest that if a movie were made out of it by a talented director/producer/screenwriter with an ensemble cast of quirky stars, that it might make a pretty entertaining film.

And, yes, it does. So we took a trip down The Road to Wellville. Alan Parker turns this story into an engaging and fun little comedy. A couple (Matthew Broderick & Bridget Fonda) go off to the sanitarium to improve the husband’s ailing stomach. Under the command of Anthony Hopkins as the brilliantly wonderful, inspiring and ridiculous Doctor Kellogg, they become immersed in an environment of enemas, electric baths, exercise, vegetarianism, onanism, adultery, the good Dr. Spitzvogel’s “therapeutic massage” and all sorts of strange devices. Into the mix comes cereal business chicanery (courtesy of John Cusack), a woman turning green and hallucinations of clothes vanishing off of the ladies and the police and the fire department and a good half-dozen or so deaths. Doctor Kellogg’s story is relayed in an involving, interesting and very entertaining fashion. And most of it is true! A wonderful comedy with some great casting (John Neville!), great set design and a stranger than fiction story.

I also have some paranoias about Mr Unpronounceable. The character was supposedly played by an “Alexander Slanksnis” How do I know this? Because I waited for his name in the credits… In one movie scene, I was convinced that he was Mandy Patinkin. Well, no, this Slaksnis name came up. Still not convinced, I looked up this name. And I was basically able to find nothing. IMDB only lists one other credit for him, and I couldn’t find any biographical references on the web… Well, then looking up old Mandy, I see that he acted in the first Kellogg’s mini wheats commercial? Hmmm… Mystery Mandy look-a-like in a movie about Kellogg, Mandy made a Kellogg advertisement? Slaksnis? If you’re real, stand up and be counted!

Then my big failure. One that I think I have failed before so I swear I’ll dump this disc and forget about it. So I watched Autopsy. Another of those Giallo films, the most over-rated genre I know of… Another badly dubbed (the Italian soundtrack seems to have no subtitles), dull, 1970’s bad dream. At first it’s hard to make out what it is, the credits start rolling with sound effects that make you wonder if you are about to watch a porno or a haunted house movie and then it moves straight to images of solar flares and a naked lady slashing her wrists and some guy pulling a plastic bag over his head… and they say the moon makes you crazy! People killing themselves with submachine guns, killing their children… Yes, it’s just another day in Rome. As with most of these, they lay the “craziness” on soo thick it seems just really dumb. I mean, shooting yourself with a machine gun? That might work in a comic book, but not a movie. Before the feature even starts, you have to think, “Give me a break.”. And then they just boringly, badspeakingly and baddressingly try to unfold this murder mystery. Of course, it features a priest who’s an ex-race car driver, a lecherous old man, a medical student, corpses who rise up and smile… Oh yes, one thing this does better than most is the gore. The early morgue scenes are fun (if a bit too high on the dreaminess factor) and there are some interesting “suicides”. These scenes are fun, well-goried, well-done and plentiful. But the rest? It’s just too much fluff.