Imagine if you will...

Even though it came out a little while ago, I didn't get to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus until I bought it on DVD a couple of nights ago. I thought that I should give my two cents on it, however, because it really deserves the attention. The shadow looming over this movie is that it had the misfortune of being the movie Heath Ledger was working on when he passed on a couple of years back, before it was completed. Terry Gilliam, the brains behind the movie, was reportedly not sure whether he wanted to finish the movie without Ledger, but thank goodness he did, for I found the movie to be outstanding. The story is a little tweaked, bizarre, and in a word very-original. It's a twisted tale about Doctor Panassus who makes a bet with the Devil (or should I say a man called Mr. Nick), and then another bet, and another, and so on and so on, yet he doesn't seem to learn from one bad decision to the next. Now living on the outskirts of society as a kind of wandering performer with his daughter, his conscious, and another guy, Doctor Parnassus is joined by a stranger with secrets of his own and those secrets just might prove his salvation or his eternal damnation. That's just the surface, and there is a lot more to the story than that, but I don't want to give too much away. All in all I thought it was a great movie and well worth viewing.