Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

By Terry Gilliam

This is probably as good a time as any for me to make a full confession . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780062477972

Reviews for Gilliamesque

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Anyone who has seen any of Gilliam's work won't be surprised by this inside look at his bizarre mind. Sure, he will continue to make stunningly visual films, with very strange plotlines, but many of his films seem to get lost in themselves and forget where they originally wanted to take the viewers ... if he really ever had a firm structure in mind. But I do love his work. My favorite phrase from college: BIZARRE. BIZARRE. BIZARRE

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir" seems something like an episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." There are episodes of wild, funny and often disjointed narrative with regular interludes of off-the-wall artwork by Terry Gilliam.Yet Gilliam strikes me as a bit too angry for his book to be as much fun as Monty Python. He neither forgets, which is good for someone writing an autobiography, nor forgives, which is not so good from someone looking back on a long and productive life. He can laugh about his own failures, however.He writes of a "shockingly happy childhood" in Minnesota and later Southern California. He went to church and Bible school, read Mad magazine, attended summer camp, loved Disneyland and received a scholarship to a Presbyterian college. Yet though he boasts at one point about being a non-conformist, simply because he never took LSD, he soon conformed to the spirit of the radical Sixties and has never looked back. Interestingly, however, he twice decries the fact that people today are "losing touch with the Bible." Bible stories, he says, are the "building blocks of culture" and children, his own included, suffer by not being more familiar with them.Gilliam has lived in England for most of his life, from even before the Python years, and denounced his U.S. citizenship several years ago, although he continues to depend on U.S. audiences to make his movies profitable. He refers to Osama Bin Laden and George Bush as two of "the world's most irrational despots," but he has nothing good to say about Margaret Thatcher either.He doesn't discuss Monty Python or the many movies he has directed as much as we might like, although I did greatly enjoy reading about the making of my two favorite Terry Gilliam films, "Brazil" and "12 Monkeys." Something I never realized is that Gilliam worked with Harvey Kurtzman on Help! magazine right after college. That magazine was a favorite of mine during my teen years.As interesting as the text of the book is, I suspect Terry Gilliam, being Terry Gilliam, devoted most of his attention to the illustrations, which alone are worth the price of the book.