The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Now take in to consideration that I work at a movie theater when I’m not typing up ridiculous reviews and amateur at best podcasts. My experience in the entertainment business had taught me a great number of genuine facts about people and motion pictures alike. Consider how most overweight people will most likely order an array of gold nugget priced foods, or the probability of a diet soda being ordered by notable individuals compared to those who order a regular. Simple highlights of the job sure, but also consider how incomprehensible and unpredictable people are, how lazy they are when we clean up the $250.00 dollars worth of snacks up from our theaters, or the carelessness when an employee finds a valuable such as a wallet of phone sitting in the still warm seat. People have been unbelievable for centuries on end and still do not disappoint. Never do our feature films, whether they are good or bad are clearly up to the audience. Nobody on this planet except 13 year old girls and crazed 40 year old virgins go to see Twilight and think it’s a good movie (or a majority of gay men). The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a movie that is hard to put into a category itself, let alone a feature with an outnumbering of good qualities to bad or just the opposite.
I personally have been wanting to see this movie ever since it came out, which happened to be before Christmas hit, and well I’ve been waiting a good time I suppose. What I found surprising though was this movie hadn’t really been credited or rated by viewers and professionals alike. This is probably the only reason why I saw this review being note worthy. Working at a movie theater I see as many movies as I want free of charge, if that concept was taken into any job I’d be working at Panda Express for free rice and chicken or die trying, so clearly I’ve seen basically every movie that’s been presented for the past year almost; even before then I was seeing a great number of movies. You could say I’m relatively reliable when it comes to the red carpet and big screen.
The Imaginarium is a very well executed movie, involving many great stars and special effects that will blow your mind out like the average teenager in Seattle. It’s graphics aren’t quite those of Avatar, but aren’t meant to match at the same time, and as a bonus Heath Ledger plays one of the various main characters in the film; that’s a good tens points for the film considering they finished this thing after his death. Each character throughout the entire movie plays a spectacular role, the story (or stories, as later explained) is incredibly developed and the movie’s plot is unique compared to most modern movies these days. Let’s face it, Indiana Jones 4 doesn’t cut it for originality basically because after the original there is no more originality and the directors usually use ideas off of gum wrappers; which is what I find to be the usual case. And movies based off of older versions of those said movies are not original in any way taken that the concept was already used once before if not ten times before. Don’t even start me on romances and action related movies, which of most are masked titles of movies already done but given a new name, story and characters but still feels like you’ve already seen it a hundred times over (probably because you have).
Back on subject, The Imaginarium is original, with great acting and wonderful graphics, the movie is definitely one to see before it disappears off the silver screen. Especially if your a person who enjoys a good level of language in a movie, this movie is full of creative sentence structure and relatively fasinating conversations. But that is not what we’re here to read, this is not what we want to listen to, we want hard facts that make the movie bad. Why we shouldn’t see this film (which I highly recommend not doing, unless of course you’re a red neck out for Indiana Jones 5) and the faults it takes as every movie does.
First off, the story and plot is fantastic and all, but there are way too many stories to follow. At first there is the question asked “Who is Doctor Parnassus and what is this traveling circus of his?” which inevitably leads into our first story of our dear doctor himself. But soon after that leads into the story of his daughter who wants an escape out of the world she is provided, which leads to the story of her stalker-like friend whose only wish is to run away with her, which leads to them all finding a mysterious man hanged by the next under a bridge. His story is a blank page as he wakes up from amnesia, a total cliché that brings this film down a few points for “a weak character introduction”. Did Tony Stark of Iron Man suddenly wake up from amnesia one sunny afternoon and discover he was a billionaire to a weapons company? Hell no he didn’t, so why should this man, one of our follow up main characters, be any different from an original story like Tony Stark. First off because he isn’t firing missiles at terrorists and giant robot duplicates of himself but also because this isn’t Iron Man. Still the same general concept applies, but whatever because we don’t care about a good beginning introduction, especially when it plays a somewhat decent part later in the movie (SOMEWHAT, but this not the top cut of the cheese). This leads into more stories and soon we have a buffet to choose from on which story looks more appetizing and which looks like it’s been sitting under the hot lamp for a good couple of hours waiting to be eaten by the homeless guy who managed to somehow sneak in. Too much action for Die Hard even, not in the sense of bullets flying through the next guys head multiple times but in a sense that we should probably stick on the tracks rather than flipping the train off of them.
This movie is completely surreal, it has those moments where the visual effects come into play and dazzle us beyond belief, but only during a good number of scenes. In the beginning we get a couple good looks at what this abstract world looks like, but then it slowly dies out and we don’t get another spectacular moment for a good half an hour at least. I came to see some crazy visuals that would make me feel as if I had just worked in a “Herbal Medicine Shop” for the past eight hours. They did of course, but for both a limited time during the scenes (for the most part) and for only a select few scenes. Otherwise the visuals were low on end and had little attention to the whole of the movie rather than becoming the movie itself, it was more like an arm and a leg but not the entire body.
The characters had little development or change within the confines of all the unbelievable acting and emotional conception. This makes sense, each character does a better than satisfactory job and this seems to cover up the fact that most of the characters find no real salvation or personal solution during and by the time the movie ends. This presents no moral values really, even when an amazing amount of thought provoking ideas are introduced up into the end. We want heroes that find themselves, not lost individuals that remain lost, such as the series Lost that has lost every bit of entertaining value.
Speaking about characters, there is one thing that pesters me continously and on a high level when it comes to two of our main characters. The daughter of Parnassus is turning 16 and up until that time she keeps on flirting with our other main character Tony, who is somewhere around 25-30. Not only does this feel somewhat like a Michael Jackson senerio, but it just seems too American and all the same wrong. I can't say that Tony is a petefile to be exact, since the age of consent is technically 16 in this movie, but the age difference is beyond looking past in my case. I guess love is love, even when its total trailer trash love, its still sadly love alike.
Another problem I had with the characters is after you get past their personalities you realize how typical they were made to be. The character after Parnassus's daughter is in fact a teenager who just hit puberty and if he doesn't get his way he of course goes into emo mode and crys about it for awhile. The daughter is dreaming of better things and lets her hormones take the best of her; kind of like how guys function regretfully. The Devil who is nickname Mr. Nick is your typical Devil, sinister, tricky, loveable and resourceful. I could go on, but I rather not, don't expect too much acting other than what has already been done.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is already a pretty unique title and with a unique title comes naturally unique structure. Some of which is the symbolism inside the ever so flowing body of this growing tale. Much of the symbolism is obvious for obvious reasons, other symbolism actually makes you think a bit, but there is symbolism within the movie that I have agreed with myself on that just doesn't have any real purpose. What I'm saying is "I think the director said screw it and just added random objects and effects in oder to enhance the movie." but nothing more than that. Moments such as this felt as if you were watching The Godfather and suddenly a gay stripper appeared covered in bright rainbow colors with a couple of fashionable uzi's and joined in on the fun, it just seems stupid and pointless.
This is the just of my ranting, if you can tell it was somewhat hard to dissect the bad from the good in this movie, but across any extremity of good is a pit of sludge that is the fault line of any and every movie. Diving into this sludgy pit is not fun, neither is it appealing or satisfying but it is alone something that must be done. Until next time, go see this movie and be excited for my next review.