Black Caesar

1973 // USA // Larry Cohen // February 19, 2010 // DVD - MGM (2001)

Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Black Caesar is this: Do Not Fuck With Fred Williamson. Not only can the man take a bullet in the gut and keep on coming for your traitorous ass, he will, as the above screenshot demonstrates, beat you within an inch of your life with a shoe-shine kit. I had been aware of ex-football star Williamson primarily from Italian dreck like Warrior of the Lost World and his campy performance in From Dusk Till Dawn. Little did I know that he had a significant career as a blaxploitation leading man, a career that this film kicked off. Intriguingly, many of Black Caesar's elements crop up in Scarface, and especially in Goodfellas (including that aforementioned shine-box, which a corrupt cop uses to humiliate Williamson before it is turned on him as a weapon). Do you think that De Palma or Scorsese would ever cop to cribbing slightly from the fellow who directed Q, It's Alive, and The Stuff? And by the by, that James Brown soundtrack? Pure gold.

Police, Adjective

Hurry Up and Wait

2009 // Romania // Corneliu Porumboiu // February 9, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

B+ - Corneliu Porumboiu's willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes. On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how people, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city. In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded. Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality). Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day. Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us. What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

The protagonist of Porumboius's tale—the narrative realities and general tone of the film prohibit me from describing him as a hero—is young plainclothes police detective Christi (Dragos Bucur). Diligent and soft-spoken, he peers out into the gray world over turtleneck collars pulled up high. He carries no gun, but takes meticulous notes on everything he sees and hears. When we meet him, Christi is on his eighth day of a petty narcotics investigation. Tipped off by a high school student who claims that his friend is dealing hashish, Christi spends much of his time following the boys on foot. The remainder of his professional day is occupied with filling out handwritten reports, dodging his obdurate captain (who we do not meet until the film's penultimate scene), and shuffling from building to building to joust with a succession of clerks, lawyers, and fellow police officers. What we observe of Christi's home life mainly consists of him pensively eating his dinner, either alone or with his new wife. Bucur's superb performance is so finely modulated that it barely registers as a performance at all. There is nothing exaggerated about his character; Christi is both serious and jejune, assiduous and ambivalent, a host of subtle contradictions bound within an unassuming whole.

Porumboiu presents roughly two days in Christi's dreary, regimented routine with a studious gaze. The director relies on the long takes that have become a hallmark of the Romanian New Wave, favoring static shots for interiors and a softly prowling handheld camera for exteriors, the latter mimicking Christi's anxious pacing as he watches and waits in the biting winter winds. Porumboiu's previous feature was 12:08 East to Bucharest, a work of wry brilliance that ruthlessly skewered Romanian society. Like that film, Police, Adjective features an extended scene in its third act that serves as, if not exactly a climax, at least a culmination of the dramatic groundwork that Porumboiu has been applying ever so gradually and evenly up to that point. The fact that much of this scene involves a character reading aloud from a dictionary underlines just how unhurried the rest of the film is. To be blunt, Police, Adjective is slow. Really slow. It's a film about waiting and observing and going through the little obligatory motions that enable us to make forward progress (or maintain the illusion of said progress).

Most crudely, then, Police, Adjective is a retort to the notion that police work is exciting. Porumboiu counters that it is, in fact, dull as hell, but his point is not merely to throw a bucket of cold water on a law enforcement myth. It's no accident that the film regards Christi's off-hours activities—slurping soup, flipping television channels, playing football tennis—with the same level gaze as it does his professional duties. The film suggests that police work is dull because, fundamentally, all human pursuits are dull, repetitive, and meaningless. It takes nerve to proffer such a disheartening premise, and it also risks boring the audience in the process of making one's point. Porumboiu avoids this pitfall, I think, due to his canny instinct for dribbling just enough drama into his story to stimulate our interest. Police, Adjective is not exactly a thrilling film, but it does harbor tingles of anticipatory energy. This energy swirls not only around the outcome of Christi's case, but around that inevitable meeting with the police captain that he is avoiding. Compared to the visual and emotional lifelessness that characterizes the films of Lisandro Alonso—who is similarly enamored with long takes and the absence of action—Porumboiu's film practically feels like The Bourne Ultimatum. To those uninitiated in the virtues of "Patience Cinema," however, it will no doubt seem glacial.

What makes Police, Adjective much stranger and more fascinating than it might have otherwise been is Porumboiu's decision to add a slathering of academic noodling about the nature and meaning of words. As such, what might have been a bleak portrait of the post-Soviet world becomes a kind of extended conversation, broken up across multiple characters and locales, about linguistics. In some scenes, this logophilia is unobtrusively enmeshed with the narrative. Variations on the phrase, "What do you mean by that?" pepper the script, and Christi's investigation calls on him to parse out what is hidden by innocuous (and misleading) words like "friend". Elsewhere the film's word-fixation is explicit. Christi has just two conversations with his wife that we see: one about a treacly pop song's nonsensical use of metaphor, the other about a recent change in a Romanian language standard. Most dramatically, Christi's eventual confrontation with his captain (a cooly menacing Vlad Invanov) revolves around a disagreement over the definitions of "conscience," "moral," "law," and "police".

Punching up one's languorous, revisionist police procedural with lengthy arguments about linguistics probably doesn't seem like a recipe for riveting cinema. What's remarkable about Police, Adjective is that these logophilic elements do enliven the story of Christi's investigation, and moreover, they blend fairly seamlessly into it, without coming off as tacked-on bits of graduate student pontification. Porumboiu skillfully draws a line between language and human experience, particularly where life's most unpleasant aspects are concerned. The film posits that, ultimately, words are the reason that Christi spends his days freezing his ass off, bored out of his mind, watching sixteen-year-olds walk here and there. Words like "criminal" and "duty," and the agreed-upon meanings of those words, have put him in this situation, whether he likes it or not. Admittedly, the film never discovers the sort of scathing commentary that Porumboiu's dissections of history and memory yielded in 12:08 East to Bucharest. The implications of Police, Adjective's grand thesis—that our everyday actions are dictated by the tyranny of language—are more philosophical than political. This is a letdown in some respects, as Porumboiu's film holds within it the seeds for a withering indictment of the injustices embedded in aspects of criminal law. It also makes the film feel chillier, slighter, and less humane than it might have otherwise been. However, this doesn't diminish the fact that Police, Adjective is still daring, cerebral stuff, and further evidence of Romanian cinema's capacity for novel, compelling storytelling.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans

Bad Bad, Not Good Bad

2009 // USA // Werner Herzog // February 7, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

C - Full disclosure: I have never seen Abel Ferrara's pitch-black 1992 character study, Bad Lieutenant. Neither has German film-maker and madman Werner Herzog. Unlike me, however, Herzog has directed a film titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, so he perhaps needs a better excuse than my all-purpose cover for any patch of cinematic illiteracy, "It's in my Netflix queue." If the reports are to be believed, Herzog does not regard his new feature as a remake, reboot, re-imagining, or anything of the sort. He claims that he doesn't even know who Ferrara is, and that the film's producers dictated its title. All this makes me much more comfortable approaching tBL:PoC - NO (yeesh, it hurts to type that) as a standalone work, rather than a tribute to or riff on Ferrara's film. Unfortunately, even if one regards Herzog's film as a wholly original work, there's no way around the fact that it is his sloppiest film in years, especially when compared to his last narrative feature, the lean, propulsive Rescue Dawn. Did I mention that the corrupt, degenerate, possibly psychotic police lieutenant of the title is played by American actor and madman Nicholas Cage? Letting Cage run loose in such a role might have been a nutty stroke of genius, but alas, Bad Lieutenant proves to be just another Bad Nick Cage performance, surrounded by a tonal and thematic muddle.

In a prologue set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans detective Terence McDonagh (Cage) reluctantly saves a man from drowning in a flooded police station holding cell. He is promoted to lieutenant as a result, but he also severely injures his back, setting him up for a lifelong addiction to painkillers. Six months later, McDonagh is the lead officer on the murder of a Senegalese drug dealer and his family. Despite the police procedural window dressing, Bad Lieutenant is not, in any conventional sense, a crime drama. McDonagh deduces fairly quickly that the murderers are a local drug kingpin and his goons, and there are no unexpected twists in this murder mystery thread. Bad Lieutenant is truly about McDonagh himself, and about his downward spiral into an abyss of drugs, sex, gambling, corruption, violence, and madness. The murder case is but one aspect of his festering life that the viewer has the privilege of touring. McDonagh is addicted to prescription drugs and also to cocaine, but he isn't averse to partaking in a little weed, heroin, or crack, as the situation warrants. He has a prostitute girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes), who is also addicted to drugs and occasionally lets him shake down her customers. McDonagh has rung up a sizeable debt with his bookie (Brad Douriff) by betting (badly) on college football. He steals from the property room, and extorts drugs and sex from young club-goers by threatening them with arrest. His widower father (Tom Bower) is a drunk who has married another drunk (Jennifer Coolidge).

Herzog gives all of these elements more-or-less equal weight, signaling that the character of McDonagh is his focus, rather than the story per se. This isn't to say that the narrative isn't compelling in its way; it's just that the film-makers are less concerned with what happens than how McDonagh reacts to those events, and we're bound to follow their gaze. The film presents the lieutenant's existence as an undifferentiated tangle of rotten situations, all of which are colliding. As with many addicts, there are no banal moments in McDonagh's life: everything is always teetering on the edge of giddy victory or utter disaster. There is a kind of mesmerizing, frantic quality to the script, as one calamity leads to another and then another, and then the whole situation reverses with an unexpected stroke of luck, and then reverses again. At times, the story leans a bit too heavily on coincidence, but this arguably meshes with the film's surrealist touches (more on those in a bit).

Herzog's only clear objective seems to be to present a slice of this repulsive man's life in sickening detail. There's nothing intrinsically objectionable about this sort of character-based voyeurism, especially when the character in question is a compelling antihero (e.g., Taxi Driver, There Will Be Blood, or even...I don't know... Aguirre: The Wrath of God). However, a film-maker working within this mode should at least take a stab at articulating the antihero's understanding of themselves. Neither Herzog nor screenwriter William M. Finkelstein permit us to glance into McDonagh's inner life. There are whispers of Catholic guilt, childhood nostalgia, unresolved racism and class envy, and other tidbits sprinkled here and there, but these elements have no functional relationship to the events we are watching. The lieutenant's behavior is erratic, which is unrealistic--addicts don't behave erratically, as their whole lives are tightly organized around getting high--and also prevents us from getting a handhold on what's going on behind the sweaty, coke-addled histrionics. This being Herzog, there are some suggestions, in the dialog and through a recurring reptile motif, that McDonagh sees himself as an cold-blooded survivor, as single-minded as a predator on the prowl for its next meal. However, this cynical, amoral take on the character is not developed, and it frequently collides with other anemic themes. Elsewhere, Bad Lieutenant seems to be striving for a kind of ironic redemptive message, complete with a romantic embrace of the American Dream. Still elsewhere it is suggested that a prankster God is playing a direct role in manipulating events for His own sadistic amusement. Contradiction isn't always a flaw, but here it just feels like the result of slipshod storytelling that possesses neither a clear conception of its protagonist nor a coherent thematic thrust.

If Herzog deserves much of the blame for this confusion, Cage's distinctive brand of distracting silliness surely doesn't help. To their credit, both actor and director don't pull any punches; McDonagh is the center of the film, and boy do they want you to know it. Dressed in wrinkled, cream-colored suits a size too large, Cage slouches through the film with his chin slung low, looking like a cross between a sweaty southern lawyer and Frankenstein's monster. He glowers, sneers, screeches, bellows, and laughs maniacally, delivering the sort of So-Bad-It's-Good performances that is delicious fun to watch, but can't really be called "acting" in the sense one normally would mean. I haven't seen Cage in a film since he decided to dedicate himself to obvious rubbish like National Treasure and Ghost Rider, but the right feature can, on occasion, channel his broad, heedless style to great effect (e.g., Wild at Heart). Here the actor's presence just serves to segregate his character from the rest of film, as though someone had spliced Cage's cartoonish thrashings over a modulated, revealing performance by another actor. It's entertaining as hell, sure, but it also torpedoes any chance that Bad Lieutenant might discover its thematic or emotional foundation within its central performance.

I am willing to entertain the notion that Bad Lieutenant is a farce, but if this is the case, then the film is an even more conspicuous failure than I am willing to believe. There are too many overtly grim moments, too many scenes suffused with vividly expressed grief and rage, for the film to read as a work of black humor. Granted, what humor the film possesses is decisively black in character, and Herzog is adept at both alleviating and amplifying the threat of violence with absurdity. However, the laughs that the film elicits are most frequently of the unintentional sort, usually courtesy of an outlandish line or gesture from Cage.

Herzog drizzles the film with surrealistic flourishes that provide a welcome jolt from McDonagh's often suffocating descent into depravity, even if those flourishes often seem digressive. When McDonagh hallucinates that iguanas are crawling around a stakeout location, Herzog lingers indulgently on a lizard's-eye view of the detectives. In what proves to be the film's most inspired moment, McDonagh envisions the spirit of a slain gangster as a breakdancer spinning to zydeco music. "Shoot him again," the lieutenant murmurs, "His soul is still dancing." It's exactly the sort of weirdness that the film needs. Unfortunately such moments are too far and few between for them to provide a convincing fabric of magical realism, and they just end up resembling isolated whimsical gestures.

Longtime Herzog cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger does a marvelous job of capturing a distinctive look for New Orleans and its environs, one that relies on neither a tourist's rosy conception of the city nor a clichéd noir atmosphere. Zeitlinger's approach seizes upon the city's decay, but disregards the colonial or antebellum grandeur. Bad Lieutenant's New Orleans is gray, wet, and rust-flecked. You can practically smell the mildew, the rotting fish, and the ripe body odor of relentless, humid summers. In one of the film's finest shots, the camera crawls low over an asphalt highway, passes sputtering magnesium flares and skid marks, discovers a dead alligator with its entrails smeared, and then pans up to reveal a terrible multi-car auto accident. It's a superb visual that just screams Louisiana, but Herzog and Zeitlinger manage to make it feel anything but gimmicky.

That sort of visual artistry makes it difficult to accept what seems obvious under an honest assessment: Bad Lieutenant is a Bad Movie. It's never dull, and it's often downright thrilling, but there's just no getting around that it's a complete mess in all the ways that matter, and right at the center is a slab of thespian excess that simply cannot be taken seriously. In the past few years, Herzog has made some of the best documentaries in the world, which is why it's tempting to give a pass for something like Bad Lieutenant. However, the director proved just two years ago with Rescue Dawn that he can still create effective narrative features. Bad Lieutenant, by comparison, just feels careless and slightly embarrassing.

Crazy Heart

Play It Loud Enough to Keep the Demons at Bay

2009 // USA // Scott Cooper // February 3, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B - When you strip Scott Cooper's directorial debut, Crazy Heart, down to its skeleton, there's not much that's original about it from a story standpoint. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a broken-down musician must come to terms with his personal demons before he can rise from the ashes and regain some of his former fame and fortune. Alas, Cooper doesn't bring anything especially cinematic to these deeply rutted roads. Sure, Crazy Heart was filmed on location in the American Southwest, and that lends it an agreeable sun-beaten texture, but Cooper's direction is undistinguished.  Based purely on the look of the thing, Crazy Heart could pass for a television movie-of-the-week rather than a limited theatrical release boasting high-profile actors. Fortunately, those actors are all in fine form, especially Jeff Bridges, who portrays the aforementioned broken-down musician, a grizzled country veteran named Bad Blake. The glib cynic in me would like to believe that the movie's genesis lies some anonymous individual's observation, "You know, put the Dude from The Big Lebowski in a cowboy hat and he could pass for the lost brother of Kris Kristofferson..." Blessedly, Bridges' performance amounts to much more than canny casting. He and Cooper turn a familiar story, executed with rote efficiency, into something haunted and ultimately worth watching.

Bad Blake is a going-on-sixty former giant of the outlaw country movement, now reduced to schlepping himself around the desert in an old truck and playing gigs at bowling alleys. Perpetually drunk, creatively stymied, and flat broke, Blake is keenly aware of just how low he's sunk, but seems unwilling to do anything about it. Into his sad life of bourbon and fleabag motels comes Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a Santa Fe music reporter and single mom. He warms to her beauty and interest, she warms to his legend and folksy charm, and into bed they tumble. It's around this time that Blake is strong-armed into opening for his old protégé, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), despite the older man's palpable envy and resentment of Tommy's country superstar status.

Bridges is a cunning choice to play Blake, in part because he's such an affable on-screen presence. Cooper, who adapted the film from a novel by Thomas Cobb, does a marvelous job of using his leading man to fake us out, pressing his case strongly at first that Blake is a pitiable fallen talent and just a kind-hearted crooner at bottom. The story of Crazy Heart—about Blake's romance with Jean and his attempts to re-start his career—isn't especially compelling in and of itself, but it's fascinating for what it reveals about Blake. What Cooper uncovers, gradually at first, and then with heart-breaking swiftness, is that Blake is a stupid, selfish fuckup, and his genius as a songwriter and performer doesn't mitigate that one lick. The drama of what happens in Crazy Heart is less essential than the drama of this dialogue between the viewer and the film-makers. The revelation that Blake is ultimately the antagonist of the tale is a potent one, made all the more affecting because the people in Blake's life—Jean, Tommy, and Houston barkeep Wayne (Robert Duvall)—treat him far kinder than he deserves. To her credit, Jean hustles out of Blake's life as fast as she can once it becomes obvious that he can't or won't change, irrespective of all his professions of devotion and his sweet, easy manner with her son.

Without overstating its case, Crazy Heart eventually stands up and claims its mantle as an Addiction Story, one that ultimately ends in recovery and redemption of a sorts, although not in the tidy fashion that a more wobbly film might have attempted. Despite the film's striving for the authentic grit of country-fried Western life, its message extends to all artistic spheres. Cooper's aim is to annihilate the Hemingway Myth, the idea that an artist—especially a male artist—needs to habitually abuse alcohol or drugs to achieve greatness. Crazy Heart presents a sorrowful and wrenching contravention of this notion, illustrating that addiction turns creative talent into selfishness, negligence, and destruction. The casting of Colin Farrell highlights the film's slyness in presenting this theme. Before we even meet Tommy Sweet, we have been taught to loathe him, because Blake is seething with distrust and antipathy for the man. When Tommy shows up, we think, "Hey, Colin Farrell. Now I know Tommy's going to be a dick." But wait: Tommy is shown to be generous, respectful, and affectionate towards Blake. The latter man's animosity is revealed as the self-absorption and bitterness of an old drunk who screwed up his own career and can't stand to see a younger talent succeed.

As a character study, Crazy Heart is captivating stuff. By maintaining the focus on the audience's perceptions of his lead rather than the narrative, Cooper subtly alters the parameters of a well-worn template and lends the story resonance. As cinema, Crazy Heart is nothing special. It's not inept, certainly, but Cooper makes little effort to put his own spin on the visual language of the film, and cinematographer Barry Markowtiz—who once lent Sling Blade such a sticky, gothic-Southern look—doesn't do much that's memorable here. Pure utility need not be the standard in a low-key, character-driven film such as this, but one gets the sense that Cooper favors the writing process over direction. This is a film-maker who plainly adores actors, and privileges story because of what it can tell us about human behavior. Crazy Heart is just the sort of first feature that one expects from these impulses: fascinating to think about, but never truly exciting to watch. Thankfully, the former is more than enough, especially with the force of Bridges' scruffy humanity behind it.

Vanishing Point

1971 // USA - UK // Richard C. Sarafian // January 31, 2009 // Netflix Instant

Vanishing Point definitely plays like a work from another era, in the worst and best sense. The "Can't Drive 55" spirit that the film seizes upon—which it shares with the much zanier The Cannonball Run—unfortunately dates the film as an artifact from an era when a national speed limit was a hot political button. That said, what's most appealing about Vanishing Point is how eagerly and even joyously it strives to present a generous, oddball-ridden slice of early 1970s America. The on-location shooting lends it a documentary look and texture, but the characters are so deliberately out-there, it never feels remotely like realism. I mean, c'mon: the naked biker girl; the faith healers; the blind, black DJ in a shitheel desert town; the old rattlesnake catcher who turns up out of nowhere? Delicious stuff, if you can stand it. And for all the hurtling cars, this strangely-placed, slow-motion shot of a basket of snakes flying through the air is what most caught my eye.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Smoke and Mirrors

2009 // UK - Canada - France // Terry Gilliam // January 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

C- - When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn't say that the only attraction is their design, but I'd be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing. Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.) Gilliam's new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into his oeuvre, yet like all of the director's weaker efforts, it's also a mess from a storytelling perspective. It's debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam's own hand, but it's also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively. At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film. There's something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.

The plot is a convoluted thing. Many centuries ago, the titular Doctor Parnassus (Chistopher Plummer) was a Buddhist monk of great mystical power who made a bet with the infernal Mr. Nick (Tom Waits, ingenuously cast). Parnassus prevailed and won immortality by coercing more souls than Mr. Nick with a message of enlightenment. However, Mr. Nick, always more interested in the game than actually winning, offers yet another deal: Parnassus can have the woman he loves, provided any children sired by their union become Mr. Nick's upon their sixteenth birthday. You and I might call this a sucker's deal, but Parnassus takes it. Fast-forward to the present: the now-widowed doctor and his just-shy-of-sixteen daughter, Valentina (the oddly doll-like Lily Cole), are wandering London in a precarious horse-drawn wagon that converts into a gaudy theater. With the help of stagehands Anton (Andrew Garfield) and Percy (Verne Troyer), they offer curious onlookers an opportunity—for a small fee, of course—to journey into a magic mirror that links with the mind of the meditating Doctor. Within the mirror, the interloper discovers a dreamscape fashioned out of their own desires, and there they are eventually offered a choice between the virtue of Parnassus and the vice of Mr. Nick. (The original bet is long concluded, but Parnassus seems to be out to prove something about the inherent goodness of humanity. Or something.)

Although her birthday is only days away, Parnassus hasn't got around to breaking it to his daughter that she will soon become a bride of Satan. For her part, Valentina just wants to leave her father's odd little sideshow and lead a normal life, while Anton just wants Valentina to notice him. Into this mix comes a wild card in the form of mystery man Tony (Ledger), whom the troupe finds hanging from a noose under a bridge, just barely alive thanks to a old rogue's trick. Improbably enough, the amnesiac Tony agrees to assist Parnassus with his show for the time being, at least until he sorts out his past, which has something to do with a children's charity and the Russian mob. It's around this time that Mr. Nick appears and suggests an escape hatch to his previous deal with Parnassus: the first man to collect five souls before the sweet sixteen deadline will win Valentina. Fortunately, Tony proves to be a charismatic pitchman for Parnassus' show, turning Valentina's head and prompting the Doctor to suspect a Mr. Nick double-cross.

Predictably enough, this elaborate story is really just a vessel to get different characters into the magic mirror, so that Gilliam can indulge his own fascination with bizarre vistas and screwball logic. And for the most part, the forays into the mirror do indeed work as loopy set-pieces, filled with memorable sight-gags and surrealist flourishes. Gilliam, who was once known for his fascination with practical effects and traditional animation, adopts computer wizardry whole-heartedly here, but he employs it in the service of his own self-consciously kooky sensibility, rather than attempting modern slickness. While his peculiar digital landscapes have a flat, cartoonish quality, I'm inclined to regard this as a feature rather than a bug, given that it fits so neatly into Gilliam's own animation legacy. Indeed, some of the scenes within Parnassus' mirror resemble nothing so much as Monty Python cartoon shorts brought to life, with Gilliam privileging detail and motion over realism. (In this, the look of Imaginarium inclines towards the Wachowskis' vastly underrated Speed Racer, although its aesthetic is nowhere as cohesive and successful as in that film.)

The fatal flaw is that the movie surrounding these demented cartoon shorts is comparatively dreary, drifting, and vaguely conveyed. The problem is partly structural: by lashing his film to the magic mirror conceit, Gilliam has essentially thrown out the Long Journey aspect that has made his most successful fantasy features jitter with storybook energy. Granted, the stories in Time Bandits and Baron Munchausen often don't make a lick of sense, but they at least are honest-to-gods adventures that involve the heroes galloping from Points A to B to C. (Indeed, dallying too long in one place or another is frequently treated as a crises in both films.) Imaginarium breaks this mold, but the result is dismal rather than daring. No matter how amazing the sights within Parnassus' dreamscapes, we eventually have to pop back into murky London and its confusing real-world story.

It doesn't help that Gilliam neglects to provide a clear, appealing protagonist, which is sort of a necessity when you dabble in settings with elaborate fantasy rules. The negligent Parnassus, vain Valentina, and whiny Anton are all too vaguely drawn and distasteful in one way or another to be the hero of the tale, and Tony deliberately remains a cipher until the third act. Gilliam seems to have forgotten to give us a truly interesting character to grasp amid all the weirdness. Waits' performance is ticklish fun, but Mr. Nick is never as enthralling or as menacing as, say, David Warner's Absolute Evil in Time Bandits. I hesitate to speak ill of Ledger's last performance, but suffice to say that it just doesn't leave an impression. Gilliam worked around his star's death with a little fudging: when he ventures into the mirror, Tony's appearance changes to match the aspect of the personality that is dominant in the current fantasy, whether suave object of desire (Johnny Depp), ambitious golden boy (Jude Law), or celebrity asshole (Colin Farrell). To Gilliam's credit, the casting plays subtly off each star's public persona to nice effect, but the game of Musical Actors only highlights the story's conspicuous seams (perhaps unavoidable given Ledger's passing) and the essential colorlessness of Tony as he is written.

While Imaginarium, like any Gilliam feature, has its pleasures, the outlandish visuals and funny-pages silliness can't hide the careless nature of the film's fundamentals. In neglecting story and character, Gilliam leaves us with little more than a few whimsical doses of hallucinatory distraction, surrounded by a distressingly sloppy film.