The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)

Sorry, this movie sucks

One of the worst movies I've ever seen

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

If you know the story of Don Quixote, the Man from LaMancha you will find this film to be very clever in its layering of the original tale intertwined with a new tale that is infused about a narcissistic director (Adam Driver) who has lost his creative mojo whilst filming a feature film about Don Quixote in Spain. True to its original intent, it is a hybrid of reality and fantasy with the cruelties of the world as a backdrop to what could be with a touch of madness. It has much to say about youthful and brave creativity, and the artistic freedom that comes from true independence and the necessity of reframing your reality to match your circumstance. Love, passion, friendship, empathy, and generosity of spirit are explored in a modern version of the Spanish Inquisition. The jailhouse sequences are sublime in their mash up of real and unreal. It is a clever, witty and multilayered script with much for the literate fan to digest and plenty for newcomers to the tale to learn. Jonathan Price is perfect as Don Quixote and Adam Driver manages to deliver skepticism, narcissism and empathy along an increasingly complex tightrope with ease. The script is a marvel and the directing and edit are to be applauded. I don't know what the film offers people unfamiliar with the original story- but as I've been waiting for many years to see this film I can say it does not disappoint, I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time. Well done Terry Gillem

Let me start by stealing a line from another review: "Quixote reminds us of the romantic ideal that the world needs dreamers who dare to defy convention. "Terry Gilliam has always been that dreamer. And so have I. And that's why this movie made me sad. It's both an ode and a swansong to the world of dreamers. Moving along the same lines as the fantastical Baron Munchausen or the embellishing of Tim Burton's Big Fish, Don Quixote mixes fantasy with reality, fiction with fact and gives both hope and warning to dreamers in this world. It's not without its flaws. But reality never is.

Terry Gilliam has battled long and hard to make this film. I for one and grateful he persevered. It is not only beautiful to look at, but is at times funny, at times surreal, at times touching, at times dreamlike, but at all times involving of both the brains and hearts of the audience. Adam Driver is the Hollywood brat given a huge budget to make a movie about Don Quixote in Spain. One day he realised that he close to the village where he made his student version of the story, using locals. Curiosity gets the better of him when he sees a sign pointing the way to Don Quixote and discovers the man he cast in his student film has since stopped being a cobbler but believes himself to be the real Don Quixote. When the brat frees him from the prison his wife has him locked up in as a tourist exhibit, they embark on a series of adventures that mix up dreams and reality, and show the young man the damage he inflicted on those he used in his student film. The dreams and reality seamlessly overlap and provide the audience with non stop inclusion in what is going on. I absolutely adored this film, and went back to see it a second time only a few days later, knowing I will have missed a lot first time around, so full of images and colour and character that it is. Bravo Terry! And thank you.

Why Don Quixote? Why today? Gilliam answers brilliantly. Because cheap factory-churned romance still exists, and it deserves equal parts love and parodic rebuke. Because the Inquisition still exists. It's called ICE in America, or the Spanish national police evicting undocumented migrants from their already precarious homes. Because the duke in his castle still exists. He is a Russian magnate that has bought up entire hamlets in southern Spain; he is Putin and Weinstein and Trump rolled into one. Because there are many young women in the "me too" world world for whom the justice these dukes have to offer means exactly nothing.More than a personal obsession, beyond the self-deprecating and amusing meta-fiction and self-referentiality, this is a movie, much like the notoriously difficult to film source material, about the value of anachronism. About the value of allegedly bygone ideals and ethical principles in a world that too often seems to say to want to be 'over' them. A "post"-modern reflection on the contested value of prefixes. Is Don Quioxote really so old and out of place in our 21st century, as he already was for the 17th century, that we should want to throw him out like last year's iPhone?The fact that there are still inquisitions and galley slavers alive and well today may make us think twice. That the very idea of "justice for the downtrodden" should be called anachronistic by so many may make us think twice.The making of the film itself became something of a quixotic enterprise, and that itself seems poetic. In perfect resonance with the source material, which much like Gilliam's film, also happened to be made at a time of incredible violence and censorship toward the most vulnerable among us.The film can seem opaque at times to those who have not followed Gilliam's exploits or read Cervantes' classic. But being an unapologetic fan of the second, I can confidently say this is an act of careful reading and imaginative reinterpretation for our precarious present: the only kind of reading that matters in the end. Rest easy, Mr. Gilliam. You did good.