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This movie begins with a shot of Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) brooding, and in the following hours (probably fewer than two, but feeling like many more) Josh keeps brooding and brooding and brooding some more. Not even the trace of a smile ever crosses his face. No matter whether he broods outdoors or in a car---he spends half the movie in a car, now as a passenger, now as the driver---his emotional repertoire is extremely limited. To use Dorothy Parker's famous words, he gives "a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B." Come to think of it, maybe he got stuck at A, and never even got to B.

Thematically this movie runs its gamut of ideas from the sophomoric to the inane. In brief then, avoid it if you can. If you choose to waste your money on this movie, don't say you were not warned

I first saw "Münchhausen" in my native Romania as a child during the war (I mean WWII) and the scene of the baron's landing on the moon and having a conversation with the head, lying on the ground, of a woman who left the rest of her body in her lunar home, made such a powerful impression on me that to this day I remember it in all its funny details. It was also the first movie in color I had ever seen; yes, those were the days when movies, as a rule, were in black and white.

Revisiting the movie now, as a euphemistically labeled "senior citizen," I was surprised that it holds up quite well. It amuses, it surprises, it is well acted, the dialog is clever, written after all by the famous novelist Erich Kästner under a pseudonym to cover up the fact that the Nazis saw themselves forced to employ him after burning his books.

There is something quite disturbing in hindsight about this movie. Why was it made? It was released in the year between the Battle of Stalingrad and the Allied Normandy Invasion the two events that were to seal Germany's fate. Was it an attempt to sustain both at home and abroad the far-fetched illusion that the war was going so well that all the German people cared about was laughing at the Baron Münchhausen's lies? Or was it an attempt at showing that Babelsberg could produce a grand spectacle just as well as Hollywood? And if a spectacle was being offered, why, in a country in which mass murder and deception were the order of the day, was even the hero to be a liar?

I am asking these questions because much in this movie is disturbing for reasons related to them. Take the Baron himself, played in this movie by Hans Albers, the greatest star, the Clark Gable of German movies in those years, yet by the time of this movie a man in his fifties pretending to be irresistible to females. It is as if MGM had cast an aging Adolphe Menjou as Rhett Butler in "Gone With the Wind." Now Albers is a fine actor, but to enjoy the movie you definitely have to suspend disbelief and pretend that the aging actor riding the cannonball is not bothered by arthritic pain.

The sets look more like cheap nouveau-riche furnishings and the costumes are cut from wartime stock. Ilse Werner, as Princess Isabella d'Este, is as beautiful as ever, and as Count Cagliostro we get to see Ferdinand Marian, the actor who just a few years earlier had disgraced himself by playing the lead in "Jud Süss," the most disgusting anti-Semitic propaganda film ever made, a fact that ultimately led Marian to alcoholism and a DUI death at war's end, considered a suicide by many.

Now, one can say, let's just watch the film for what it is, and not in its historic context. But then, Marian's acting of Cagliostro, a swindler, is crafted with the same mannerisms he used in creating the Jew Süss. In short, the undeniable artistic qualities of this movie are infected with the severe moral deficiencies of its makers, and this surprisingly renders the movie more interesting than it has any right of being. This is what disturbs me.

The old chestnut about having to experience life before being able to be a true artist is rehashed in the case of a psychotic ballerina. Trouble is, beautiful Natalie Portman, the actress portraying this ballerina is no great dancer, and therefore the dance sequences are being filmed either in a now-you-see-her-upper-body closeup, with her arms executing over and over the same ballet-101 gesture, or in a now- you-see someone's feet closeup, or finally now-from a greater distance-you-see-a ballerina in a pas-de-deux. It makes for clumsy filming and we get too much of it. Add to this that her male dancing partner lacks the good looks one expects of the Prince in "Swan Lake," and then, he turns out to be a klutz to boot. All the characters come in two one-dimensional variants, which might as well carry tags of "I am good" and "I am evil." True, this reproach could also be leveled at the scenario of that superb ballet, "Swan Lake," but then most people watch it for story told by Tchaikovsky's music, and not for its silly scenario by Begichev and Geltser (you can look this up in Wikipedia, like I did, for if you are honest, you will have to admit that, like me, you have never heard of either of them). The ballet is rescued by Tchaikovsky, but no, even remotely comparable, genius rescues this silly movie. The horror of the hallucination scenes has been done to much more effect by Roman Polanski in "Repulsion."

To my mind, the only thing that could save this movie would be a remake as a Woody Allen comedy under the title "The Meshuge Swan"