Pun Salad

Turns out (spoiler) the man who kills Don Quixote is also the guy who killed Han Solo. Did not see that coming.

On occasion, I have to say: the Netflix prediction algorithm thought I would like this a lot better than I did. IMDB deems the genres to be "Adventure, Comedy, Drama". Fine, I guess, but I have a genre of my own: "Apparently Made Under the Influence of Substances, Probably Most of Them Illicit".

Adam Driver plays Toby, a once-renowned movie director, recently relegated to doing commercial hackwork. But (somehow) he's gotten a green light to shoot his epic flick about Don Quixote, a project he had to abandon a decade previous.

Alas, things are not going well. Toby needs to recruit a wizened local shoemaker (hey, underneath the grime and scruffiness, that's Jonathan Pryce) to appear as his star. Who rapidly gets into his role by imagining Toby to be Sancho Panza. And they proceed to leave the moviemaking behind ("or do they?) as they traipse into rural Spanish hinterlands where they still remember the old movie… Things become surreal and nightmarish (sometimes disgustingly so) for poor Toby.

A consumer-note downside: the DVD has subtitles available only in Spanish. That's a real downer for a movie where people talk fast in various heavy accents.

You might like it better than I did. Because it's Terry Gilliam; Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce are great actors; and a lot of stuff may have gone (insert high-pitched whizzing noise here) right over my head.