Anyone who didn’t – at some bizarre, childhood level – dig this film obviously can’t cope with Terry Gilliam. I’ll admit to having difficulties with some of this films – Brazil for instance – but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see everything he makes just for the sheer brilliant weirdness factor. Go ahead, try to tell me that Peter Max on his most hallucinogenic day had the weirdness in his little finger that dripped from every frame of one of Gilliam’s animated Python shorts.
Bah. Fuggin’ hippies.
I will happily bitch and moan about the leads. I thought pretty boy, whatshisname-not-Orlando-Bloom was damn good. Absolutely perfect for the role he was expected to play. Matt Damon was not teeth-gratingly terrible but not nearly working up to his admittedly limited potential. But British Accents? On German storytellers? Is that just some sort of catch-all “Look! They’re not American!” accent? How brilliant would it have been to hear some serious gutteral Bohemian or whatever the hell they were claiming to be? I give major props to the all purpose filthy European bad guy dude, at least he retains his nigh-unintelligible accent in everything he does. Even, oddly enough, American prison shows.
But I suppose the two pretty boys speaking Bostonian and Aussie would have been even weaker. Although it’d have been a hoot to hear the one dude stammer something about the bad sheila.