chirons daughter
Registered User
(9/13/05 11:14 am)
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Re: Some delight in magic beans
Kelpies or waterhorses are the creatures you stick to the backs of, once they lure you to mount them, I believe.
Well -- I adore Gilliam, so I went not once but twice, and the second time was easier to enjoy, because the muddle of the plot was sorted. I do agree it is not the movie Gilliam wanted, and that the writing was terrible. (CG mavens say it wasn't very good, unfinished in appearance. I am not as critical about that, but it may have been a bit clumsy.)
The main thing for me that saved it, other than Gilliam's visual horror vacuii style that I actually rather like, was the relationship between the brothers. I agree Heath Ledger really put on the drifty, fidgety "lost middle child" thing in his whle body, and it was charming. (Never liked Matt Damon, but the character called for the cockiness I don't like, so even that worked.) How they used the fairy tales was an odd but kind of funny attempt to suggest how the original stories have all kinds of rough idiosyncratic edges that eventually get tumbled and rounded into archetypes with the telling. Or so I thought.
The running joke/non-joke of the magic beans, that Will abuses Jake with, I thought worked very well -- a little sexually sly, as when Will is trying to lure his brother up to have a little fun with the twin girls in the tavern (beans, Jake! and you'll get up the beanpole, if you're lucky,) and terribly mean as well. Really, sibs re-enact old stuff like this all the time. It's a little odd to see the fairy tale tropes as the vehicle of it, but why not?
Eh -- for as much as anyone knows about how the two of them related to each other, it's one vision. Muddled, yes.:)
But I'd say give it a chance.
Edited by: chirons daughter at: 9/13/05 11:46 am
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