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The child mind (and true evil)
This is a codicil to the previous entry, so read that first.
I forgot to mention that we saw The Phantom Menace for a second time this weekend. This time, since I wasn't distracted by all the flash and glitter, I was able to look more closely and realize that it's got deep flaws - if you're analyzing it as a movie for adults.
Gilliam insists that Time Bandits was conceived as "family entertainment," and he should know. He says, actually, that's why they couldn't find backing (George Harrison mortgaged a building to get the production money) - only Disney was doing anything like that then, "and they were in their Herbie Goes Bananas phase."
Gilliam cast a little boy as his protagonist because that was the target point of view - and since he didn't think the little boy could carry the story by himself, surrounded him with other people his own size.
But the thing is, Time Bandits may be a movie children can watch and love, but there are things in it for the more adult sides of our brains as well. In The Phantom Menace you really must turn off the adult part of your head in order to get the maximum mileage from the movie. The other Star Wars films were not like that. Well, not to the same extent.
This time I had more of the adult part of my mind working. The first time, the child part was dazzled by all the fun and didn't let the adult part have a look. The film is very different the moment you let your critical eye wake up.
I still don't find Jar Jar Binks as annoying as everyone else does, by the by, but he was more annoying this time. Doubtless he'd get more annoying if I were to watch the movie a third time - but I don't want to. Whereas I need to see the original trilogy every couple of years just to keep my hand in, this one doesn't inspire that. And, ultimately, that's the big difference. I am no Star Wars junkie, and yet even I can sense this disturbance in the Force.
But I was talking about myths, wasn't I?
Here's Gilliam:
I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg - I don't usually admit this publicly - because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic ....
I spent some time talking with George Lucas up at Skywalker Ranch after Brazil, and I realized that he really believes Darth Vader is evil. I argued that he's not evil, he's just the bad guy in the black hat, who you see coming a million miles away. Evil, on the other hand, is Mike Palin in Brazil: your best friend, the nice-guy family man who, for reasons of his career or whatever, will torture and do awful things. You just don't know where evil is coming from. That for me is truly worrying, whereas what George and Steven are doing are cartoons - good ones, certainly, but they have pretensions to something deeper, which I feel is never delivered. Their bad guys are like Disney's ones, who were always the best fun.
If you think that sounds basically like what I said at the end of the previous entry, I agree.
© Columbine
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