** Longitude
** The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Not many movies this month. Longitude was a film adaptation of a book I’d had mixed feelings about in March (liked the story, was pretty iffy on the author’s take on it). The movie was better, perhaps because it had Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon in it. We did get more focus on the principal characters and the amazing clocks, but it was still a little heavy-handed on the whole melodrama of who’s trying to sabotage whose efforts etc. In the end, I enjoyed it much more than the book and felt more satisfied with what I’d seen of Harrison and Gould and of Harrison’s clocks.

The imaginarium was kind of a hot mess of a movie, like most Gilliam efforts. Heath Ledger’s last, with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell filling in as alternate versions of him to finish after he died. The various-people-playing-Heath-Ledger thing worked fairly well, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that it wasn’t the original intention if Ledger hadn’t died. That said, it’s not that often that you see something strange and nonsensical in a Gilliam movie and think to yourself “that’s too strange for Gilliam to have intended it that way.” Overall the movie was… interesting. Not really sure what the point was supposed to be, and at the end I wasn’t really sure what I’d just seen, and mostly not in a way that involved wanting to go back and see it again. Not that I didn’t enjoy it while it was going on, but it didn’t make a lasting impression.