Word: munchausen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN Directed by Terry Gilliam...
...truculent and never truckle, had earlier fought Universal Pictures when it was reluctant to release his film Brazil -- a masterpiece at a mere $15 million. This time he would run up a higher tab -- say, $17 million to $20 million over budget -- and into bigger trouble. David Puttnam, Munchausen's Hollywood sponsor, soon departed as boss of Columbia. Film Finances Inc., which stepped in to supervise the picture, threatened to fire Gilliam if he didn't scale back on the spiraling costs. A producer sued Columbia, claiming that five years ago it agreed to a Munchausen project based...
...Gilliam's picture worth all the fuss? Sure, because he has tapped the cinema's capacity for lying with a straight face. If you can create a vision onscreen, then it's true. At the start, Baron Munchausen (John Neville) strides onstage to recount his hoodwinking of a sulky Sultan (Peter Jeffrey), his dalliance with the Queen of the Moon (Valentina Cortese), his flirtation with the goddess Venus (Uma Thurman), his captivity inside a giant fish, and his long-odds battle with the Turkish army. Except for young Sally (Sarah Polley), his listeners don't know if he's telling...
...recitation of their histories as "organ recitals." Other somatizers sometimes deliberately fake illness, going so far, for example, as to rub a thermometer on a bedsheet to produce a fever, lacerate the skin to create lesions, or overuse laxatives to disrupt the gastrointestinal tract. In the bizarre Munchausen syndrome, which, according to one estimate, affects 4,000 U.S. patients, ailments are feigned so that the individual can enter the hospital. One man was so skillful at complaining about his abdominal pain, vomiting and seizures that he was hospitalized more than 400 times and submitted to 102 gastrointestinal tests...