My dad and I had a movie tradition, because there is always time to watch a movie and catch is weather dependent.

This was one of the movies he took me to see as like the father-son bonding time. And I can understand why, no one loved pulp novels more than my dad and when it came to picking things the word "Adventures" really played to his pulp trash sensibilities.

I might have inherited a bit of that.

This was my first introduction to Gilliam, and from there it opened up Monty Python and all kinds of craziness right down to effecting some of my reading habits. So, as a child, this movie had a profound effect on me.

It was funny, it was an adventure, it was silly, it was deep (deep enough where even an 8 year old can sense there was more going on than he could understand at that age) and it was one of those movies that dad and I could both enjoy as father and child, for two different reasons...

.... now, however, that's probably an inappropriate thing to do and I am certain that if I bonded with my kids the way dad bonded with my sister and I, I'd get arrested for taking them to see a movie like this.

So we watch these things at home. Because, whatever, I have complete and total faith my kids are smart enough to know what a movie is and emotionally equipped enough to deal with this type of fun.

At any rate, this was brilliant and I still hold it in high esteem because it introduced me to Gilliam and that opened a lot of doors for me.

Terry Gilliam's troubled, over-budget portrayal of a Quixotic nobleman and his fantastical adventures. The notorious Baron appears in the audience during a stage production dedicated to his life, scolds the company for missing important details and sets the record straight in a series of farfetched recollections.

Served with Gilliam's characteristically twisted sense of surreality and lavish visual know-how, _Munchausen_ is a creative playground with no limitations. This lack of oversight frees the former _Monty Python_ animator to get as conceptually crazy as he likes - Robin Williams drops by to play the disembodied, floating head of the ten-story-tall king of the moon, for example - but also cuts its tethers, allowing the plot to sail away like a lost balloon. The result is a sort of fairy tale theater; dreamlike and contradictory, it changes shape and meaning on the fly. The idea is to frame the whole saga as a staggering, meandering fiction, improvised in a pinch by a confused old man. Which works in theory, but also leads to a foggy finished product that doesn't connect many dots and long overstays its welcome.

It all plays like a project that leapt into production without a finished screenplay, built a number of imaginative sets and costumes, recruited many of the director's famous friends and then tried to wing it under the bright lights. Exciting ideas don't always remain that way if they aren't developed into something coherent.