Final Films and Devil Worship!

You know, the Cap'n was worried there for a second. I was beginning to think that this movie didn't actually exist, and that Terry Gilliam had been showing us production art and setting up an elaborate ruse about the actual "final" Heath Ledger film. To be fair, I was basing this on the fact that - like Solomon Kane - in the year or so I'd been hearing about Parnassus online, there wasn't so much as a frame of actual footage featuring Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, or Jude Law to be seen.

Actually, I quite like the look of Tom Waits as the Devil, even if my earlier concerns that only die-hard Gilliam fans will see this aren't rattled after the trailer. Yes, I'll see the movie, and most of you reading this will (or very likely will), but I contend that much of the moviegoing public is "over" Heath Ledger after the Oscars, and accordingly won't see this since they're "said goodbye."

Of course, most of the moviegoing public helped give GI Joe fifty four million of their recession-dollars this past weekend, so the Cap'n clearly speaks for an irrelevant market.

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While it may not be one of his best movies, I certainly didn't hesitate to pick up a copy of Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate on Blu-Ray for BD Cheap*. I've actually revisited the movie a few times on dvd and find that the problem is entirely in the ending, which essentially unravels the narrative and feels like it skipped over something important.

On the other hand, if you watch the movie knowing that the last "twist" about false pages is going to fall down, you can at least enjoy the detective story that Polanski sends Johnny Depp's Dean Corso down before things get silly. The ending tends to overshadow how good the rest of the movie is, and while of the two I'm more likely to revisit Repulsion in the near future, The Ninth Gate is welcome in the collection.

Cutthroat Island, on the other hand, can stay at Target forever as far as I'm concerned.

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One box away from being dvd/BD unpacked. It's the horror box, of course, so that the demons can kill me during an appropriate shelving. These things just happen, you know...



* BD Cheap = DVD cheap last year, which is to say $15 or less for a new release.