The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1988)
Terry Gilliam's retelling of the classic story about the baron with the bit too wild imagination will go down in history as one of cinema's most memorable flops. For the time, the movie had an insane budget, but nobody seemed interested in actually watching it. A shame, for sure!
Baron Munchhausen is a highly imaginative movie, telling the tale of a man who claims to have battled giant sea monsters, to have taken trips to the moon and who also says he has danced with Venus. Gilliam let loose entirely, sparkling the movie with the visual wit apparent since his Monty Python days and making sure that every last cent of the budget was visible on screen. And the movie is filled with big name actors, people like John Neville, Eric Idle, Robin Williams, Oliver Reed, Jonathan Pryce and Uma Thurman. So where did it go wrong? Probably because it was all a little bit too creative for it's own good. Movie goers did not know what to make of this and decided to skip it, in favor of the more generic Hollywood blockbusters playing at the time. Still, I advice you to try and find it on DVD if you have never seen it before, so you can become entranced by this wondrous and wonderful misunderstood epic.
****
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