Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe, 2002)
Ho-hum documentary only a tiny step removed from those bland, promotional “making of” docs slapped on mediocre DVD’s. The subject–Terry Gilliam’s disastrous aborted production The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which left his investors $30 million in debt–seems to promise Quixotic acts of filmmaking hubris on top of bureaucratic nightmares right out of Brazil, but what we eventually find out is that the movie fell apart pretty much because they had bad weather for a few days and the lead actor was too sick to show up. The rest of the running time consists of a not-very-revealing and (one suspects) overly generous portrait of the filmmaker, padded with Gilliam-style animated interludes and a repeatedly shown clip of three “giants” from the movie that’s funny but not that funny. Not horrible by any means, and certainly a must see for Gilliam fanatics, but I’m failing to understand the acclaim it’s received. B-
