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The introduction posits an intercultural welter of fables, as befits the American Monty Python alumnus: A spoof of Spielberg's suburbia and an intimation of C.S. Lewis bursting through the wardrobe, a booming visage out of The Wizard of Oz segues into the cine-folklore of Powell and Korda. Amid all the cross-references, the simple charm of a gaggle of clerks savoring a wee spree and the simple reverie of having Sean Connery for a stepdad. "I think it has something to do with free will." The prepubescent bookworm (Craig Warnock) has no use for TV shows, more his speed are the tiny renegades (led by David Rappaport) who use his bedroom wall as a portal into another century. A cosmic map allows them to crash across time and space, each pit stop a boisterous Terry Gilliam revue: Castiglione burning down while Napoleon (Ian Holm) is engrossed by "little things hitting each other," cheerfully condescending Robin Hood (John Cleese) in starched greens amidst medieval beastliness, Katherine Helmond playing New England housewife to Peter Vaughan's midlife-crisis ogre. A pitch of Satyricon introduces Connery's King Agamemnon, then champagne aboard the Titanic and a few tinted seconds of A Night to Remember. (Michael Palin and Shelley Duvall embody British romantic repression through the ages, tweety courtships forever interrupted.) Dreaming boy and wandering dwarfs (cf. Bergman's The Silence), a lovingly handcrafted fancy on the cusp of the blockbuster decade—the "new technological dawn" so eagerly waited by the Evil One (David Warner)? Either way, Gilliam cherishes the ways "the fabric of the universe is far from perfect," all the better to savor a galley's transformation into a tattooed colossus' hat or the producer-like impatience of the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson). "All right then... back to creation." With Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Malcolm Dixon, Mike Edmonds, and Tiny Ross.
--- Fernando F. Croce |