The guy just can’t get a break, can he? He really has suffered too much for his art over the years – the Brazil experience (which ended up resembling something straight out of the film itself) would probably have finished off a lesser director, and then when you take into account the lack of funding he’s experienced when compared to people like Brett Ratner or Tim Story or Len Wiseman or Paul WS Anderson who seem to have cash just thrown at them I wonder exactly how he keeps going. Hell, even Uwe Boll seems to get more funding than TG does nowadays, and everyone agrees his movies suck.
Come on, pan-and-scanning a film to 16:9 is simply unacceptable, especially when it’s a film by a director like Terry Gilliam who knows exactly what he wants in his frame and where (and where to use an idiosyncratic aspect ratio). I thought we’d got past the days of pan and scan by now, in this age of DVD as standard and HD on the horizon, but it seems that it lingers in the independent sector. The one bright spot here, oddly, is that this issue appears to affect only the US and some Canadian editions – the British edition has the Gilliam-approved master, and apparently so does at least one of the available R3s, so American TG fans are now working out where they can buy a multiregion player. Welcome to our world.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 