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Lost in La Mancha
... movie reviews
mon 2005-may-30 12:24:33 pdt
... permalink
Friday night we watched Lost in La
Mancha. It's a documentary about Terry Gilliam's ill-fated
attempt to make a film of Don Quixote...
It's an amazing story of everything that can possibly go wrong going
wrong -- the kind of true story of which people say "you just can't
make this stuff up". (When you think about it, that's rather an odd
statement since people make up comparable stories all the time... I
think what they really mean is just that it might seem contrived and
unbelievable if it were made-up -- in other words, they say "you can't
make this stuff up" of true stories which, as fiction, might receive a
comment like "that could never really happen". How odd. But I
digress.)
Anyway, as a film in itself, the documentary is a little slow. It
spends quite a while on the last several weeks of pre-production, when
not very much goes particularly wrong. The really amazing
one-thing-after-another, kick-them-when-they're-down disasters begin
when filming begins, more than halfway into the documentary.
So basically I thought it was worth seeing, but, like many things,
would have been better at about two-thirds the length (about an hour
instead of 90 minutes). Some might even say it only warranted about
one-third the length, but I think there were a lot of details that
were worth including, that couldn't really have all fit into a half
hour.
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