Calvin: I wonder where we go after we die.

Hobbes: Pittsburgh?

Calvin: You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?

— Calvin And Hobbes

Well, Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story seems to have an answer to Calvin’s quandary.  After death, suicide victims are sent to a purgatory as dreary as the Pennsylvanian industrial city. In fact, the backdrop of the film is very much like Michael Cimino’s classic The Deer Hunter. It is set in an oppressively bleak, dead-end town consumed by ennui and apathy. But unlike The Deer Hunter where the living are only deceased in spirit, the living in Wristcutters: A Love Story are actually quite dead. Read more…

Tom Waits as 'Mr. Nick'

Terry Gilliam is fascinated by the power of the imagination. In Brazil he presents a Hollywood happy ending that only exists within the protagonist’s unconscious mind. With Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he shows us what the imagination can turn the real world into when under the influence of heavy hallucinogens. With the Fisher King a catatonic homeless man played by Robin Williams hallucinates attacks from a dark knight. In 2005′s Tideland, a young girl uses her imagination to escape the horrors of her own life. Now with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam once again explores the imagination to its most convoluted and perverse depths. This may be his most surreal work to date. Read more…

Throughout his career, Terry Gilliam has been met with polarized responses; he has been applauded for his distinctly imaginative visual style while being criticized for the lack of cohesive plot structures within his films. He has inspired a legion of cult fans that ritualistically watch Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen while enduring many critical and box office failures. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus will surely continue this trend of divisiveness.

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