Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania • Page 80

18 -PITTSBURGH POST-IMTTt FRIDAY, APRIL 11, 2003- Film captures end of 'Quixote1 dream BY BARBARA VANCHERI POST-GAZETTE STAFF WRITER 17 erry Gilliam's $32 million movie was called "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote." Little did he know how prophetic the title would be. 1 MVj iU I He didn't kill his dream project about the man who tilts at windmills; it was felled by forces largely beyond his control. By F-16s shrieking over his idyllic and middle-of-nowhere set in Spain. By torrential rains that left the set a muddy mess with darkened landscape colors no longer matching the footage in the can. By a courtly leading man stricken initially by panic and then health problems that caused his face to register pain and then his body to surrender.

"Lost in La Mancha," now at the Regent Square Theater, is subtitled "The Un-Making of Don Quixote" and it's a behind-the-scenes documentary about a movie that didn't get made. Oh, it had all the usual trappings: Cast, crew, costumes that Gilliam suggests might win the designer another Oscar, budgets, beautiful storyboards, timetables, hope and creativity. Gilliam, the director of "Time Bandits," "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," "Twelve Monkeys" and "The Fisher King," tells filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe that he's been fantasizing about this for a very long time. "I've made the picture in my head," he says, and you easily believe him. As we hear from narrator Jeff Bridges, Gilliam decided to produce his movie in Europe rather than Hollywood, and we join the action in late summer 2000, two months before filming is scheduled to start Seventy- of shooting, they realize they're in the flight path of fighter jets.

Gilliam says they're doomed (using a more colorful word), but his assessment is premature. Thunder, darkening skies and rains of biblical proportions arrive the next day, and Day Three dawns in a shroud of fog By Day Five, it takes two men to gently maneuver the ailing Rochefort off his horse and another 40 minutes before he can walk to the car. And things go downhill from there. Although there are obvious holes in this documentary we never hear from Rochefort or Depp about the project's collapse or see any press or trade reports about the demise it pulls back the curtain more than I might have imagined. And it looks as if Gilliam's adaptation might have been spectacular, judging from the tiny bit of footage shot, the drawings that spring REELWORLD GOING UNDERGROUND Tonight's Underground Cinematheque program at The Andy Warhol Museum features three short films about sexual images ol women.

"Angel Beach," directed by Scott Stark, compresses 3-D photos of bikini-clad women into two-dimensional space, triggering a visual dance and a troubling voyeurism, "Removed," directed by Naomi Uman, bleaches the images of women from a European porn film of the 1970s, leaving them to exist only as empty animated space. "Finished," directed by William E. Jones, is a detective story and a love story described as "pornographic yet chaste." Admission is $5. The program begins at 8 p.m. BIG TIME? Former Pittsburgher Kevin Burte is one of 10 semifinalists in the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival.

Burke, who describes himself as a former special projects producer for WPXI-TV and onetime producer-director for Bethel Park Public Access Television, qualified for the semifinals with his short film "Sit and Spin," about a young man who turns his back on adulthood and decides to live in "perpetual adolescence" until the one person he cares about needs his help. The winner of the Chrysler festival, to be announced this fall, receives a $1 million film production deal and guaranteed distribution of the finished product. RonWeiskind 'LOST IN LA MANCHA' RATING: for language DIRECTORS: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe year-old Jean Rochefort spent seven months learning to speak English to star, and Johnny Depp is cast as his sidekick. The cast is unavailable until the last minute for costume and makeup tests, and the only available sound-stage in Madrid is an unfinished warehouse that seems to attract noise instead of blocking it When cast and crew relocate four hours north of Madrid for the first day men raid a gay dungeon sex club (named and slay their main suspect by pounding his head off literally with a fire extinguisher. That's mild compared to the rape itself, which comes later in an excruciatingly long (15-minute), sickening, graphic depiction.

The incessant profanity is mind-boggling, even in subtitle form. It is horribly photographed, the camera swinging back and forth like a pendulum, larger in dizzy darkness. But it is terrifyingh well acted by Vincent .1 j'Jh P. I i Johnny Depp in the behind-the-scenes documentary "Lost in la Mancha." to animated life and the headless marionettes dancing before our eyes. "Lost in La Mancha" is a lesson in how a movie unravels, one calamity at a time, and how the insurance adjusters and investors can pull the The parallels between Don Quixote and Gilliam are obvious, though the director is left with a tiny measure of hope by the end.

He may still be feverish with imagination and desire, but he's ready to face the giants again. Barbara Vancheri can be reached at or 412-263-1632. IRREVERSIBLE' RATING: Unrated but in nature for graphic sex and extreme violence STARRING: Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Albert Dupontel DIRECTOR: GasparNoe found St. Francis a sissy and physically dragged me from the theater. "Irreversible" represents a personal milestone: It is the first and only film I ever willingly walked out on midway in protest and irreversible revulsion.

nimj nira i-irn. iw TVfwnvn in a is I 1 1 a tn 'Irreversible' gives new meaning to sick and repulsive BY BARRY PARIS POST-GAZETTE FILM CRITIC Run, dont walk, in the opposite direction from "Irreversible," the sickest French(Freedom) flick ever to pollute a Coalition-of-the-Willing screen. It purports to be a kind of horror-crime thriller, set in the seedy sexual underworld of Paris: When a woman is hideously raped, her ex-husband and a psychotic pal seek violent vigilante vengeance. Inspired by "Me- mento," it's told out of sequence. flie tut the fw muMcuS Writer-director Caspar Noe's prior films include "Sodomites" (1998) and "Une experience d'hypnose tele-visuelle" (1995), with which I am blissfully unfamiliar.

Under the pretense of making us face "brutal reality," he is testing the extremes and the limits of audience tolerance how much can we take? But he luridly relishes every vile, prurient 'moment It's a virtual porn-snuff film. In 35 years and 2,000 films, I never left one before the end with the technical exception of "Brother Sun, Sistef Moon'" (1973), when my wife t- 1 iff" '1H Vm1 ii.il i i i i i i la i 1 1 'i.