New Gilliam!?

Yes, it sucks that I haven't gotten to see Tideland yet (when's it coming out on DVD, anyway?) but the great news is that there's a new Terry Gilliam movie in the works. Maybe. Possibly. It's written by Gilliam in collaboration with writing buddy Charles McKeown, and has the beautifully Gilliamesque title of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Doesn't that title make you want to see it now? It does me!

The script opens with a typically Gilliam juxtaposition of the banal and the wondrous, as 'four big horses' pull a 'hulking great wagon' - windowless and apparently driverless - down an urban terrace, then on past a couple snogging in a parked car and into a 'dingy backstreet'. This is where the wagon first astonishes us, opening 'like a dark menacing flower unfolding its petals', transforming into 'an old fashioned and very shabby travelling theatre' - the titular Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

We now meet the players of this eccentric show: Percy, the dwarf (yes, of course) ; Anton the clowning, sleight-of-hand expert; the beautiful young Valentina; and her father, Dr Parnassus. Their audience at this first engagement proves to be a rabble of drunks piling out of a nightclub to the rather unexpected sight of the Imaginarium and cast.

While Parnassus meditates atop a glass plinth - to give a cheap, cheesy illusion of levitation - Valentina, Percy and Anton play out a scene and make the audience an offer. As Anton puts it:

Ladies and Gentlemen... Step up! Step up!... I, Mercury, the messenger of the gods, invite you... tonight, for one night only... at this very venue... to enter the mind, the very great mind, of Doctor Parnassus!

The review gives some good detail on the plot and setup, and from the opening description above, I immediately thought "This reminds me a little bit of MirrorMask." Then the reviewers go on to compare the special effects sequences as being written to accomodate a MirrorMask-style green screen animation. Which instantly got me thinking about how cool it would be for Gilliam and Dave McKean to work together. The review also points out that Dr. Parnassus mines Gilliam's unproduced script for The Defective Detective somewhat heavily for themes and ideas, even if the scenes themselves are original interpretations. In a way that's sad, since it effectively closes the book on Defective Detective ever being filmed, but by the same token, at least we get something from that material, as the earlier script has been effectively dead for more than a decade.

To reiterate: New Gilliam! Yay!

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