Word: fantastic
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Terry Gilliam is like the Grimm brothers: he knows all the tricks of the movie fantast's trade, but what he's after is magic. He wants to make pictures that cast spells, that turn today's jaded viewer back into a kid, gawking with wonder. He hopes The Brothers Grimm, which opens Aug. 26, is one of those mesmerizing experiences: "It may not be the deepest film I ever made, but I do think there's real enchantment...
...Gambon has played some monsters in his day - the gross thief in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," the tobacco company boss in "The Insider," the man everyone is dying to kill in "Gosford Park" - as well as the raging, pustulent fantast in Dennis Potter's miniseries "The Singing Detective." He can get at the agony of infamy as well as anyone, and does so here, though director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliott") has given him too many props; Gambon breaks the four-century theatrical record for the most cigarettes smoked ostentatiously in a single evening. Craig finds subtle...
...Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), Amarcord (1974) and 20 other films, overripe images spilled out of his cornucopia: clowns and courtesans, prelates and zealots, overripe creatures from a fantast's bestiary. At first they looked like outrageous cartoons of sensuality and sacrilege. But long before his death last week at 73, from complications after a stroke, it was clear they were previews of a moral system spun wildly off its axis. For 30 years and more, the word Felliniesque has defined not just the director's work but a style at the peacock end of film, photography, fashion, advertising...
...True, is the wrinkled old retainer of one of Fitz's broken dreams. And steering the vessel through precarious waters is Klaus Kinski, once the psychotic stalker of Herzog's Aguirre, Woyzeck and Nosferatu, now a Kodachrome picture of the imperialist as jolly fantast. It is one of the many odd pleasures of Fitzcarraldo to watch Kinski's 80 or so teeth, which are usually forged into a vampire's carnivorous sneer, here forged into the semblance of a Teddy Roosevelt grin...
...University in Manhattan; its centerpiece is a set of 23 wash drawings for Piranesi's intended remodeling of San Giovanni in Laterano. These rare sketches cast a fresh light on the unique junction that Piranesi maintained between Baroque and Neoclassical architectural thought. But it is still Piranesi the fantast and archivist, the obsessed historian with a burin, who holds the eye today. His testament is some 2,000 elaborate prints of antiquities, buildings, real or imaginary, sculptures and details, which he published between 1748 and his death...