The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I’m writing this while my students take a test! While I can’t see my list of blog topics, I know one SUPER OLD ONE on the list is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, so let’s see if I can’t make a blog post out of that while I’m here.

Many of the tabletop RPGs that I enjoy list a roleplaying game based on this movie, by the same name, as a huge influence. Thus, it made me interested in what the movie actually was. When I was visiting Brer (man, that seems forever ago now…) we saw the movie in the movie rental place. He had seen it, and thought I’d enjoy it, so we gave it a rent and a watch.

Man, that sure is a Terry Gillam movie, isn’t it?

Munchausen seemed like it was trying to do quite a lot of things that I completely and utterly agree with. It was trying to create crazy stupid layers of show within a show, story within a story, which let the entire reality of what was going on be incredibly flexible. Of course, sometimes that bending of reality was used to have a floating Robin Williams head be annoying, but, you know. I was actually surprised that the movie gave up on the show within a show as fast as it did, but it seemed to do so only to highlight that the movie itself was a show, and it was inside of it. Eventually you get to the point where the Baron is going around, and you get flashbacks to a realistic battle that he is supposedly trying to stop by gathering his old team of super-powerful dudes once again. You have these moments of seeing the world as real, and seeing what would be happening if the Baron were actually doing these things. Then you flip back to fantasy, with him having tea with Vulcan or whatever. It’s… it’s bold, especially when he does somehow save the day in this fantasy world, and then dies, and nobody has the fantasy to bring him back.

There’s also some level of “modern progress ends the old ways” about the film. The fantastic adventures were before science was really a huge thing, and you feel the analitical world crushing the Baron and what he does, which is probably what ultimately ends him. He dies not in a dramatic way, but from a sniper shot via hired assassin. By that new modern world. There’s something there, too.

It’s a movie that, overall, feels like it’s trying to make a point, and be fun while doing it. However, I just don’t feel like it completely works. It just didn’t seem to get the “fun romp” right, and instead tended to just be really weird. I never really got a good sense of it and what I should be making of it. Clearly, this is filtered through having watched it some time ago, but I just don’t remember it as fondly as one would hope. It’s an experience I’m glad I had, certainly, as I was wondering about it. But yeah. I can really see why it was kind of a flop. I’m just glad it existed to spawn the kind of games I am totally into.