I know most people love Time Bandits, but I’m still a bit surprised it doesn’t get more worshipful adulation than it does. To me, it’s one of those beyond perfect movies. In fact no movie mocks the entire idea of a “perfect movie” more than Time Bandits because it’s so unwieldy and messy and chaotic and yet any attempt by Gilliam to have wound any of that back would have made it a lesser film.

The cast is obviously impressive,…

I honestly think it’s not ridiculous to claim that this movie helped me not grow up a racist. I mean, I’d like to think I would have naturally realized how stupid racism is anyway, but this was definitely a formative factor in my development into someone who is intensely interested in and embracing of foreign cultures.

That probably seems like rationalization after the fact, but it’s definitely true that my childhood in rural communities of Australia was immersed in profound…

I've been revisiting a few of my favourite Terry Gilliam films over the last few months. I've been a fan for ages - he was one of the first directors I ever took notice of - first taking an interest just because he was in Monty Python but later because I started to understand that directors can be artists in their own right and I think Gilliam really has an appealing aesthetic to young discoverers of film art. But I…

This is hardly the most polished piece of documentary film making you're ever likely to see but boy is it fascinating. Essentially a bare-bones videograph, this is the result of Terry Gilliam approaching documentarians Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (who went on to make a huge splash with their documentary feature Lost in La Mancha - another behind the scenes document on a Gilliam film) and asking them to follow him everywhere as he went about the task of making…

Hooptober6 – mosQuito-thewinged-dragon-serpent #81

Rule 5: Films featuring the work of Carlo Rambaldi - second of two movies

I don't really know where to start when talking about Alien. I just think it's one of the greatest horror movies ever made - some might think it's over-rated, and that's fine because my love for this is a pretty subjective thing. I've always been a sci-fi nerd as much as a horror nerd (I'm ambinerdstrous) - so this movie just captured…

I committed a bit of a faux-pas. A friend of mine said he wanted to have a movie night and he suggested Blade Runner because it's his favourite movie. I'm not going to say no to watching Blade Runner, but I suggested a Philip K Dick double feature, with Total Recall as the B movie. Problem is, I sent him an Outlook calendar invite titled "Dickfest" which triggered an alarm in his work's security software and gave his wife a…