First there was the fact that someone recently got the movie assigned from my Flickchart in the Facebook group Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, where each month you are assigned to watch the highest ranked movie you haven't seen from another member's chart. The person really liked it -- I suspected she would from her tastes -- and the comments section engendered a bit of a discussion about the movie's ending, which multiple people found troubling. (It's a head scratcher to be sure, but I've never had a problem with it.)
Then there was Friday night's viewing of Jabberwocky, and yesterday's writing on The Audient about that disappointing viewing, which whetted my appetite for another Time Bandits viewing as a point of contrast and a bit of a palate cleanser to rid myself of the bad taste of Jabberwocky.
But the clinching reason I watched Time Bandits Saturday night was that I have a very periodic series on this blog called Random Rewatch, in which I use a random number generator to choose a movie on my Flickchart to rewatch, and once I've watched it, I do it again.
Sometimes it takes years for me to watch the next movie. This time, it took a little under a year. Last June I rewatched Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, and drew Time Bandits as the next movie. A very favorable draw, since the movie currently ranks 29th on my chart, but because I'd only last rewatched it in 2020, I was not in a hurry to put it on my schedule straight away.
But the confluence of recent events promoted it to the top of my viewing queue, and now, at the end of me writing this post, the next movie in the series can be selected.
Because I've written about Time Bandits a lot over the years -- including most recently yesterday -- I thought I would just give you a few takeaways from this viewing, even if they are thoughts I may have expressed in the past.
1) Yesterday I talked about how Jabberwocky was missing a good appearance by John Cleese, which Time Bandits does have. In fact, the appearance is so good -- even if it is over inside of five minutes -- that Cleese actually gets top billing in the movie. In fact, his name is the very first image of any kind against a screen of black when the movie starts. Either Cleese demanded it to do this favor for his friend Terry Gilliam, the co-writer and director, or Gilliam just thinks that highly of this brief contribution.
2) The actor who should actually be first-billed, if we were going only by the main character of the movie, is Craig Warnock as Kevin. Two things about this. One, I find it interesting that I had to wait for the closing credits to learn/remember his name. I am fairly likely to know the names of kid actors from formative movies for me in the 1980s. For example, I could tell you the name of every actor or actress in The Goonies. But for some reason, Craig Warnock is never a name I committed to memory -- and that could certainly be because Warnock never had much of a career after this, while Goonies like Corey Feldman and Sean Astin did. The other thing about this character is that Amazon's synopsis for the movie -- I rented it on Amazon as a convenience instead of having to hook up my old computer to watch it on DVD -- shows his name spelled as "Keven." Fortunately, I checked other resources and this seems to be just a typo.
3) Speaking of Gilliam as a co-writer, want to know his other co-writer? Michael Palin. That appears to be a course correction from Jabberwocky, which Gilliam wrote with some person named Charles Alverson. No wonder this is an infinitely better script. Alverson is listed in IMDB as an uncredited writer for Brazil, though nothing after that. Maybe that's why I don't love Brazil.
4) Speaking of Palin, I laughed the most during the two exchanges between him and Shelley Duvall, one in the Middle Ages and one aboard the Titanic. That's not news. But I did have a new takeaway about this, which is that the rule of three would have ordinarily meant they placed these two actors, with their various embarrassing physical issues (she's got "an enormous --" and we never hear what), in one more scene, either in the Battle of Castiglione scene with Napoleon or in the Ancient Greece scene. They didn't, and I think that's to the movie's benefit. They have priceless comedic timing and chemistry and one more might have ruined it.
5) I'm pretty sure the best comedic performance in the entire movie, though, belongs to David Warner as the Evil One. I relished it this time as much as I ever do. I don't have anything specific to say about that, but I thought five takeaways was a good round number.
You know I love Time Bandits. Let's let that be it for today.
But there's one more piece of business, which is to choose the next movie in this series.
There are currently 6477 movies on my Flickchart, so that's the number I am plugging into the random number generator as we speak. Let's see if I get something more challenging than my top 30 movies of all time.
Ooo, much more so. I got 6012, so this is going to be a movie I really don't like. And that movie is ...
The animated movie Doogal from 2005, which is based on a property my wife watched as a child.
I don't see anything to be gained from watching Doogal again, but rules are rules. I'll put it on the schedule sometime between now and 2030.
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