Last night we went to see Lost in La Mancha at the Enzian Theater. Now, in spite of my outwardly hip appearance (shut up), I'm pretty much a basic, American suburbanite. We go to the mall for our movie watchin'. We don't do alternative cinema. But the Enzian is practically across the street from where I work. I pass it at lunch time almost every day. So, it's been calling me to give it a try ever since we moved down here in 1994. We keep meaning to go to the Florida Film Festival, but it just hasn't happened.
Finally, the trigger came in the form of Terry Gilliam. Even if he weren't one of the comic geniuses behind Monty Python, I love the movies he's directed since then: Time Bandits, Brazil, Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, and Twelve Monkeys. (I still haven't seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I'll get to it eventually.) So, when the Enzian booked Lost in La Mancha - the documentary based on his disastrous attempt to film a version of Don Quixote - and when my ultra cool son said, "We have to see this movie," we decided it was time to venture into the land outside the multiplex.
Will Rogers said, "Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else." Never is that more true than with watching this documentary. It chronicles the ill-fated Quixote production from mishap to mishap. As one of the crew put it, "You couldn't have scripted more disasters than this movie had. Nobody would believe it." Everything from booking a god-awful sound stage (the last one in Madrid) to having the opening days' shooting take place near an active NATO base with jets constantly flying overhead to a flash flood washing away the equipment to - finally - the incapacity of the film's star doomed this picture. It was like watching a train wreck. Yet, through it all, Gilliam keeps pressing on, finally admitting defeat when the Assistant Director quits and the insurance company takes possession of the production.
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