Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce play two men who think they’re reenacting the misadventures of the famous Spanish knight in Terry Gilliam’s dream project.
In honor of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’s 25th anniversary, let's celebrate its staggeringly talented cast by pitting them against each other to see who comes out on top, much as the characters they play do for an hour and forty minutes onscreen.
Christmas has been around for hundreds of years, but our version of Christmas began with a very small novel, written by a probably average height man. Charles Dickens is credited with coming up with the very Christmas-ness of Christmas, that holiday spirit that drives people to light candles and gather family and drape pine branches and holly berries all over their furniture. With A Christmas Carol, Dickens revolutionized our portrayal of the holiday season, an evolution that will be dramatized by Dan Stevens and Dan Stevens’ wig in The Man Who Invented Christmas.
There are troubled productions, and then there are troubled productions, and then there is Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. A Monty Python alumnus and the visionary filmmaker behind projects like 12 Monkeys, Brazil, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam has been working on his modern day retelling of Don Quixote for over 20 years. The film was originally set to go into pre-production back in 1998, but setbacks and a series of freak accidents — all covered in the acclaimed documentary Lost in La Mancha — tanked that production and have kept Gilliam in production limbo ever since. The Daily Beast put together a detailed history of the film earlier this year; it seriously makes Apocalypse Now sound like a Troma Entertainment production by comparison.
Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote movie, the production history of which could itself best be described as the very definition of the word “quixotic,” has officially begun production this week. The film has been in the works since its ill-fated first attempt in 2000, and Gilliam has been hard at work trying to make it happen ever since.
It’d be difficult to imagine someone beside Jonathan Pryce earning the High Sparrow’s fiery Game of Thrones end, but harder to envision anyone but Anthony Hopkins puppeteering that wild Westworld finale. That said, it seems Mad Men and The Crown alum Jared Harris was at one time up for either part, as revealed in a fascinating new interview.
Ahh, Christmas. Hollywood has made more movies about the Christmas spirit than about any other holiday, but it has yet to go back to the roots of the season to see why we celebrate it the way we do. No, I'm not talking Passion of the Christ here, I'm talking Charles Dickens. During the Industrial Revolution, Christmas as an institution had kind of fallen out of favor, due to growing modernism and mid-1800s Puritans, to whom any whiff of happiness is suspect. Enter Dickens, who rocked the world with A Christmas Carol, his tale of joy, family, and forgiveness that breathed new life into a deteriorating holiday. Now, Dan Stevens will take on the role of Dickens for The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film based around the six-week period during which he wrote the book.