God Bless Jami Winans and his filmmaking team.

Their indie effort ‘Ink’, a fantastical mish-mash of children’s bedtime stories, surrealistic imagery and sci-fi action is an honest to goodness sleeper. You won’t see it, or its emotional impact, coming. It’s been some time since a film this low budget achieved so much in regards to what ends up on screen. The world of Ink is like 80’s Spielberg meets Terry Gilliam by way of Neil Gaiman. At the same time, it has originality and heart. Plenty of that last one.  

Most of the film is set in an invisible world that exists underneath our own. While the physical realm sleeps, the ethereal ‘Storytellers’ (who are envisioned as an ethnically diverse group of  grungy punks) roam the night planting happiness, hope, encouragement and solace in the dreams of humanity.

Behind them, sometimes trailing and sometimes stalking are the subversive and malicious Incubi, creepy phantoms who resemble The Strangers from Dark City with one cosmetic difference: they wear deceiving masks that look like black-and-white view screens featuring leering human faces. The Incubi instill doubts, fears, jealousies and night terrors into their victims. They are, more or less, the architects of bad dreams.

Taken on its own, this idea is almost eye-rolling simplistic and dramatically silly. However, Winan has designed a very specific and detailed environment around this supernatural facet of the film. The Storytellers travel in teams, have real and identifiable individuality and behave like your average low-pay courier workers. For the most part, they are a happy lot unless something gunks up the job. When they aren’t dream tinkering, they hang out in a wooded glade that evokes the mythological Elysium. The Incubi, on the other hand, work as a single, malignant unit and if there is one, there are likely to be hundreds more right around the corner. Their world is linked to ours by a dark, ephemeral corridor and the land on the other side looks like ravers took over an abandoned Radio Shack.

One night, a shadowy, cloaked figure sneaks into the bedroom of young Emma and snatches away her soul. His name is Ink, and underneath that cloak there are suggestions he is a deformed wretch; the audience can only see his beak-like nose protruding into the light. The Storytellers try to apprehend him before he can pull Emma from the house. There is a struggle, and he escapes with the girl into a portal.

They fear he will take her to the Incubi, for what purpose no one rightly knows. It is implied that Incubi and Storytellers cannot impact the physical world directly, unless an earthly creature passes into their realm via death or spiritual kidnapping, as in Emma’s case.

At this point, the narrative of the film has been pulling in two directions. Winan follows Emma’s dad, John, a man obsessed with his high-level corporate work and who has been estranged from his daughter since his wife’s death. This real world sequence is glimpsed mostly from his perspective, with the Storytellers hanging out in the background. It could well be the kind of emotionally redemptive tale that films like 2007’s Bella aspire to tell. It works, but it occasionally slows down the more fantastical sections that focus both on The Storytellers trying to motivate John towards Emma and the relationship between Ink, Emma and Liev, the woman who has come to save the little girl from her abductor.

As a visual experience, Ink is truly impressive. While the film isn’t as polished as a multi-million dollar project might be on the fx, set design and acting fronts, that doesn’t matter so much because Winan is a very talented and  resourceful director. The shots have been intelligently and thoughtfully staged throughout, and the soundtrack, an immersive ambient score that reminded me of the work of Clint Mansell is seamlessly grafted onto the film’s emotional identity. The acting is occasionally amateurish, but all performers manage to capture the spirit and struggles of their characters. In particular, the trio of Ink, Liev and Emma has a well-rounded dynamic and they walk the tightrope between playing symbolic ideas and real, flawed people. Ink, in particular, hides more under his menacing visage than is originally guessed.

In the end, I came away most surprised by the way the film works as an adventure. There are opportunities for the three parallel stories to derail, and the action sequences to underwhelm, not to mention the film getting mired in its own layered view of spiritual warfare and existential redemption. But, instead, the story actually unifies these pieces and we are left with a film that stimulates the senses, challenges the imagination and satisfies on an emotional as well as sensory level.

When the Storytellers and the Incubi have a massive Matrix-style cat and mouse battle within the shadow-drenched corridors of a real world hospital, while John wanders about looking for his daughter, unaware of the war around him, Winan captures one of the most kinetic and intriguing portraits of good vs. evil that I’ve recently seen. Ink, created outside of the studio system with passion and dedication, is the kind of movie we often crave but rarely find: a good story well told. And it has plenty of worthy subtext to boot. It’s a fantasy lover’s dream.

Ink is now available on DVD and Bluray.

Next week on ‘The Overlooked’ it’s vikings vs. aliens with the science fiction throwback, Outlander, starring Jim Caviezel, Ron Perlman and John Hurt. Check out the trailer here:

Here it is at last: the last Heath Ledger performance that the world will ever see.

This performance is encased within a meticulous and frantic dream world, cobbled together by the half-mad Terry Gilliam and complemented by the addition of three generous performers who stepped in after Ledger’s death. For fans of Gilliam, the movie is a delightful and often sublime return to form. For fans of Ledger, there may be some disappointment.

Heath’s character Tony is more of a secondary player and for the sequences taking place within the titular Imaginarium, he is portrayed by Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. Depp does the least speaking but looks most like Heath, Law’s is the most sympathetic and multi-layered, and Farrell hits most closely to what I think Gilliam was going for with Tony. And what of Ledger himself? He’s good for sure — one of the many ‘what ifs’ of Parnassus is what the film would have looked like if Ledger had been Tony for the duration. My suspicion is that it would have only improved things and added a unifying thread that the movie doesn’t quite have right now.

With that out of the way, though, let me say that The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a welcome surprise from Gilliam, who has long been one of my favorite directors, languishing amidst the zaniness and difficulty of his own projects. The last great movie he made was 1995′s Twelve Monkeys. Parnassus is no Monkeys, but it has that same delicious sense of the surreal, the absurd and the mythic with forlorn dreamers struggling against the grain and grit of the all-too-real mundane world.

Dr. Parnassus, played to obstinate, irritable perfection by Christopher Plummer, was once a monk who now wanders the Earth in his painful immortality due to a bargain he made with the Devil (Tom Waits) centuries ago. In the shabby backstreets of London, he and his entourage run a smoke and mirrors production referred to as The Imaginarium. Parnassus’ secret is that behind the dime store mirror is a world where the subject’s innermost fantasies are tweaked and twisted by both the doctor and the Devil in a war for their souls. Parnassus’ daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) becomes the next object in the bargaining war, and  the first one to claim five souls wins Valentina’s.

Heath steadies the sequences around the Imaginarium, and the colleagues who take over for him add elements of needed humanity to the overstuffed fantasy set pieces. But on the acting front the movie is won by Plummer’s Parnassus and Tom Waits, a black-hatted, pencil-mustached Mephistopheles who looks like Ron Perlman but sounds like Dennis Leary in need of a lozenge. They are playing mythical archetypes — the wily, old man and the deceiving trickster — but inasmuch as they can, they give their parts a playful sense of camaraderie.

Lily Cole is extraordinarily beautiful and the odd juxtaposition of her childlike features and womanly body work well for Valentina’s character. Her acting is good too and the chemistry she shares with Andrew Garfield as Anton lends her spot in the picture a sweet romantic light that doesn’t shine anywhere else. Verne Troyer has been given that thankless job of the little person in a Gilliam film (Percy) but he doesn’t play it that way. Instead, he’s Parnassus’ conscience, and rises to the fore in scenes with Plummer, which isn’t an easy thing to do.

The script is a strange nuts-and-bolts concoction that never feels completely thought-out at the story level, but has a certain rightness as a fantastic fable. Gilliam, for whom narrative cohesion is usually an albatross around the neck, sticks to the tale as much as he needs to and uses the Imaginarium as his outlet.  Jellyfish lift people out of the air and into a hovering, phosphorescent world, while children wander off across ephemeral vistas that look like Candyland, constructed by Salvador Dali. The moving parts of this vast dream world are mostly CGI, and Gilliam has yet to comfortably nail that technology, but his fierce imagination wins the day.

In the end, Dr. Parnassus is another odd love letter to the power of storytelling as viewed through Gilliam’s off-kilter lens. I fancy he sees a lot of himself there within Parnassus, the old man who wants the whole world to dream with him and keeps being disappointed by the demanding reality of life that nibbles the edges off his enchantment. When he pulled Ledger in to help him realize his vision, he couldn’t have imagined how the path would end. But here we are, and this Imaginarium is one that both Gilliam and Ledger may be quite proud of.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

While his performance in The Dark Knight earned Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar, it won’t have the distinction of being the last movie to star the late actor.

On December 25th, audiences will be able to see Ledger on screen one last time in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Ledger’s death came during the filming of the movie, and caused production on the film to be temporarily put on hold.

At the recent premiere of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Ledger was lauded by the film’s director, Terry Gilliam, who addressed going forward with the movie without Ledger’s presence.

Gilliam’s interview speaks very openly about the impact of Ledger on the cast and crew, and speaks highly of the actor saying, “We weren’t going to let Heath’s last work just disappear.”

And thank goodness for that.

To hear more of what Gilliam had to say about Ledger and the film, watch the video below.

2009 and 2010 will see the release of two films by master visionary directors — Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus by Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam. In a world that’s full to the brim of remakes and reboots, unoriginal thought after unoriginal thought, you’d think we’d be happy to see some artistic ingenuity. And before you start: yes, I’m aware that Alice in Wonderland is in no way a “new” idea, but it’s been quite a while since it has been brought to life on screen effectively.

This got me thinking though, with the release of Alice in March and Parnassus this coming December, that here we have two directors whose stylistic flair is almost inseparable from their body of work. Each has had their share of blockbuster successes as well as flops. When they flop, they tend to flop hard. I’m looking at you, Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

However, there seems to be a double standard at play: Burton has suffered through a vast amount of criticism in the past decade or so for continuing to adhere to his style of gritty, scratchy curvature and the grotesque, while Gilliam is associated with the word “visionary” as much as any working director today. Why is this? Is there some landmark in the directors’ bodies of work that justify these claims, or is it simply a matter of personal taste?

Gilliam gets praise immediately for his association with Monty Python — his artistry and involvement with the group that revolutionized comedy in the modern age solidifies his status as “important.” His Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an absolute classic, as is Brazil. He got some of the best performances out of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt with 12 Monkeys. But then he’s got others: the aforementioned Munchausen, the critically panned Tideland, and the horrible Brothers Grimm.

Burton’s career kicked off with a bang — Edward Scissorhands is often considered his finest, followed by the blockbuster Batman and its sequel. He’s often associated with The Nightmare Before Christmas (a film he didn’t direct, but had incredible stylistic control over). But somewhere between those films and Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Sweeney Todd, he fell out of favor with many.

This doesn’t seem to be a matter of possessing a classic embedded in your name — I would consider Nightmare, despite how Hot Topic culture has soiled the name, to be a classic of Burton’s. It seems to be a matter of engineering your films in a manner that matches your style. Gilliam has always been able to evolve his visuals — the design of 12 Monkeys is nothing like Holy Grail, but both are characteristically Gilliam. On the other hand, Burton collides his aesthetic with the subject material in ways that don’t necessarily congeal — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an example of a story that simply doesn’t benefit from his designs.

I have a lot of hope in both Alice and Parnassus, though — the latter seems to be a wonderfully diverse film with Gilliam’s prevalent sense of bravado, while Alice seems to be diminishing Burton’s usual flair in an effort to capture the essence of the original story. This is Tim Burton’s chance to prove he’s an excellent storyteller once again, and not simply a great artist with an acquired taste. To see both of these directors go head to head within four months of each other is an exciting prospect.

Director Terry Gilliam’s latest feature from Sony Pictures Classic comes a mysterious yet mystical tale known as The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Starring the late Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, this story is about a traveling theater company that goes through parrallel worlds in order to rescue the doctor’s daughter. Here is the US theatrical trailer below, set to come out this Christmas Day in limited theaters:

Follow your nose.

Though played to mixed reviews at Cannes, Terry Gilliams’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has one thing going for it: Heath Ledger’s final performance. Sure…part of the film is faux-Ledger mixed with CGI, “movie magic” Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, but the late actor is there. Somewhere.

In the present day, immortal 1,000-year-old Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) leads a traveling theatre troupe that offers audience members a chance to go beyond reality through a magical mirror in his possession. Members of the troupe include a sleight of hand expert, Anton (Andrew Garfield), and a dwarf, Percy (Verne Troyer ); Parnassus had been able to guide the imagination of others through a deal with the Devil (Tom Waits), who now comes to collect on the arrangement, targeting the doctor’s daughter (Lily Cole). The troupe, which is joined by a mysterious outsider named Tony (portrayed by Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell), embark through parallel worlds to rescue the girl.

Parnassus, despite the Ledger hype, is still having trouble finding a distributor for its U.S. release. See three clips below at what American audiences may be missing: