Word: gilliams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Directed by Terry Gilliam Written by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam...
Monty Python Strikes Back at Star Wars. Crash of the Titans. Malice in Blunderland. The Gizzard of Odd. Is this what Gilliam and Palin had in mind? A nasty fantasy, an antiepic, a revisionist fable? Seems so: surely the pair of Pythonians who concocted this ragged film knew what they were about. If the scenario dismisses good ideas and stretches bad ones, if the comic timing in some sequences seems laboriously off, if the film manages to alienate the audience that might have been attracted to it-well, Gilliam and Palin must have wanted it that...
...Gilliam, the one American in the Python troupe, got his start in New York in the early 1960s as assistant editor of Harvey Kurtzman's humor magazine Help!, which specialized in live-action comic strips called fumettis (puffs of smoke). In Time Bandits, Gilliam is still the innovative graphic artist who brings strange worlds to extravagant life but cannot animate his actors. And he is still blowing smoke in the audience's face, literally and figuratively. Murk swirls through every setting with Bruegelesque squalor and Boschian doom; as a traveler on this time flight, the viewer is less...
...Perhaps Gilliam means that we have to temporarily dispose of reality to enjoy a fairy tale any more. Yet he returns to the present, and his cynical morality hits home. Kevin "wakes up" like Dorothy at the end and sees Sean Connery as a fireman (like her scarecrow). But he has uncontrovertible proof that Connery was Agamemnon; and his parents are just as oblivious as ever. Thus, he must conclude the opposite from Dorothy: He could not have been dreaming, and there are most assuredly places far superior to home...
...alright. The Pythonic theme--nothing you know is sacred or even really there--suddenly seems a huge, monstrous thing to impose on kids like Kevin; he is left with only a sackful of Polaroids and two piles of ashes where his authoritative parents once stood. Gilliam leaves us with Black Humor when all along his theme had been gallantry and inquisitiveness. The guest stars have their fun, the midgets get back their divine employment. But Kevin is on his own in the world, with only a stack of postcards--enough to tell him he was there, to confront him with...