O Homem que Matou Dom Quixote

Along with the opening credits, Don Quixote delivers a speech explaining who he is and why he is such a great man. This is the first of several fine performances of the character. Don't get the idea this film will be easy to follow or understand.

Don Quixote No. 2 attacks a windmill. Again, a great job and very funny.

There's nothing normal or predictable about this movie, and what else would you expect from a member of Monty Python? I discovered their brilliant work some years ago on PBS, long after they were still popular as a group. I wasn't actually thinking about who wrote this until I saw the credits at the end. But it's a brilliant job if you're not looking for logic.

I've heard of Jonathan Pryce, and I've heard he is quite a good actor. What he does here is Oscar caliber, not just because he is quite funny, but because later in the movie Javier comes to realize people laugh at him, and not in a good way, and yet he struggles to keep his dignity. He even seems to realize that he is in fact not Don Quixote. It's a brilliant job.

Adam Driver does a fine job as well as Toby, having to go through so many different situations and emotions, and doing all of this admirably.

If I have to single out any other actors, it would be Joana Ribeiro as Angelica and Olga Kurylenko as Jacqui.

And I didn't quite know where to include this, but there is one funny scene where one of the Don Quixotes attacks a trio of giants. That's quite a funny scene, actually.

There were so many locations listed in the credits, which were too small for me to really read, but wherever this was filmed, it looked great. Wonderful outdoor scenery, an impressive castle, even what appeared to be the ruins of a once fine church. Set decoration should have been considered at Oscar time.

And the costumes! So much of this movie looked like it took place when Don Quixote lived. I won't explain why but it will all eventually make sense. You should find out on your own whether someone was dreaming or fantasizing or whether you were seeing a film or something else.

And let's not forget the music. This was supposed to be Spain, and it had plenty of flamenco guitar which was quite good. Background music was appropriate for an adventure and sometimes sounded like a circus. And in the castle, there were even African drummers and dancers which didn't get shown nearly enough.

Is this family friendly? Even cleaned up for TV, I doubt it. There was one scene where so much was bleeped there wasn't really anything left. But what violence there was didn't have a lot of blood, and some was just funny. A few people die, but in some scenes it's not certain what happened. And one person is shown being burned and then from another angle it's just fabric and what must be fans making it look like flames.

My only explanation of why this movie wasn't mentioned at Oscar time is to compare it to Carrie Underwood in "The Sound of Music". A fine job, but so many others in that production were so much better. And I guess this happens when movies get Oscar nominations. There are just so many great ones.

Maybe it helps to be familiar with Terry Gilliam's canon of work. But as a whole The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a multi-layered story of the Ages of Man. The Dreamer and the Raconteur living in parallel lives.

What's fascinating is how the meanings of each of the characters and their story arcs fold into each other from the director, Terry Gilliam's own life to Adam Driver, playing a Gilliam figure all the way to Jonathan Pryce's man who's seemingly lost his mind. Part of me wonders how much of this is a farcical documentary or auto-biography.

Still as heady as it can be it still entertains. The acting is great, the characters are fully realized and the settings, cinematography and production design are signature styles of Gilliam: hand-crafted to bend to the will of his vision...as mad as it may be.

This is not a run-of-the-mill linear movie. It's not a popcorn flick. There's a lot to interpret and involve the audience so, don't expect instant gratification. To a lot of reviewers it seems they were overwhelmed by an unclear story. Which that may be true for those who don't want to be involved in the story. It asks a bit of self-reflection, it asks a bit of trust that the characters, working on several levels of psychosis, dreams, hallucinations and madness will all come to a natural conclusion in their story arcs and bring the global story of the film into one single point of focus:

We all had dreams once and we got lost. We may remember those dreams in our middle-age and yet in our old age we may become consumed by the dream to point of dreaming of our own existence.

If you like BRAZIL or THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS you will like this film.

I don't know what people were expecting from this movie and I really don't get the low scores. This movie was fun, adventurous, well acted and above all else very different and unique, with a brilliant twist on the Don Quixote story. This film did not come out of Hollywood's movie spewing machine so I would guess audiences nowadays are too dumb to comprehend a good work of art. A metaphor. An analogy. An intricate story that blends fantasy and real, history and present, fact and fiction.

This film was wonderful and I smiled all throughout. It is similar to films such as Holy Motors (2012), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) so if these ring a bell please give this film a chance. You will thank me later.

I rated it a 9 because so many people rated it so low and, honestly, it's at least a 7. Considering the fact I smiled all throughout the film I give it a 9 but objectively it as an 8.

The history of the making of this movie is ultimately more interesting than the movie itself. A disaster-prone adaptation of Don Quixote eventually gets made about a movie as a director sucked into the book's world. The script was rewritten, year after year, so it's surprising that the end result feels a little under-baked.

The film follows a director, Toby, who while filming the windmill scene from Don Quixote discovers a copy of a student film he made on the same topic. He goes in search of his actors, finds his lead has taken on the role permanently, and finds himself floating between reality and fantasy.

Toby is a fairly awful and destructive person, and to some extent the movie follows the trajectory of awful person gets a chance to look at his life. But that part isn't especially convincing. The movie is mainly notable for Jonathan Pryce's spirited take on Quixote, the decadence of the castle scenes, and the shifting realities. But while all these things are good on their own, they never quite fit into a cohesive drama. Joana Ribeiro is appealing as the damsel, but her motivations are murky and she always seems more plot device than fleshed-out character. And the ending is just lazy and unconvincing.

Parts of the movie are enjoyable, but at the end my reaction was a big "so what."

Totally bonkers, dreamlike, vintage Gilliam and in the end even Lynchian weird. When it works it's brilliant, when it doesn't, it's baffling and sometimes boring. But even when the script doesn't work, the movie is saved by the incredible cast. It's among both Adam Driver's and Jonathan Pryce best work. Also, I'm in love with Joana Ribeiro.