Rating: 
Summary: Fantasy par excellence!
Review: Fantasy (in film) is apparently a dirty word. I do not understand why. Of all the people to whom I showed or recommended this film, only 3 enjoyed it. Normally, we (those with whom I would discuss films) like the same stuff.
Ah well. This is one fantastic film. Baron Von Munchausen, historically real and mythologised, was/is the world's greatest liar. So, the story opens with a theatrical cast in a dilapidated theater, in the midst of war and shelling, putting on a play about the life of the baron. The real Baron walks into the theater, and tries to set the story straight. Then he, in his explanation of the reality as he sees it, illustrates for us, in real life, what was portrayed on stage, but on a much grander scale, to most magnificent effect; not to mention the added adventures that are woven-in.
I first saw this piece on video in the mid nineties. Now, post September 11th horrors and excess, the story has added resonance. The antagonists of the story are bureaucrats who believe they represent the fullest expression of Reason in life and government. They have everything compartmentalized practically and rationally, including the days on which they can shoot at the enemy, and the enemy at them. And they can't accept that the war eventually has been won. "Don't open the gates!"
And then there is the fantasy: A balloon made of ladie's silken underwear, a flight to the moon. The king and queen of the moon (the king is Robin Williams) with their detachable heads to pursue intellectual pursuits while their bodies... A sea monster... the spectre of death...
The story is well told, the cinematography beautiful, the dialogue witty and compelling. There are enough layers to keep the viewer from being lazy, and yet, one doesn't have to stare at the screen and lay heavy on the rewind to understand the film. Just watch it.
The Baron, on one of his many death beds, laments that the world has gone to Reason and science, and has no room for "cucumber trees", and indeed, there are too few yarns so imaginatively told on film these days. This is one of them. A great afternoon flick, or something for after the bars,when it's still too early to go to bed.
Rating: 
Summary: visionary
Review: It is impossible to articulate how incredible this film is. Anyone who disagrees has the simple problem of beeing short-sighted and narrow minded. Watch this movie and open your eyes and realize that the child inside of you is a whole lot more powerful than the adult on the outside. Watch this movie. It's mind-blowing.
Rating:
Summary: Who cares what the critics said?
Review: For just the scene of death taking a swipe at the Baron during his midnight cannonball ride, it gets all the stars I can give it. Wonderful, imaginative and based on the stories I used to read as a child (I didn't know they were all the baron's stories at the time, really).This is not really a child's movie. It keeps getting billed as a child's movie because there is a little girl in it. There are a lot of scary things in here that may not be suitable for those under 10 sitting alone watching it, so sit next to your little ones as they watch and explain why people's heads are flying around and death is looking for the baron, etc. Kids will probably like it, and adults will get a lot out of the symbolism and depth of the stories and personalities. It's the details that make the difference!
Rating:
Summary: a decent movie
Review: I have to say i liked this movie, however compared to some of the other movies in this genre this is a good one not a great one. Not that the plot isn't good, its just that there are better ones out there and I can't rate it as their equal.
Rating:
Summary: all the elements of grand success
Review: I just saw this film on the big screen last night, but have seen it numerous times in other media. It is a beautifully made movie with a message worth heeding. The over-arching theme is the dichotomy between reason and logic on one hand and emotion and faith on the other. The villain of the film is a heartless government official, a Mr. Jackson, played by Jonathan Pryce (complementing his role as the government's victim in Brazil) who claims to be motivated entirely by logic and reason, but is engaged in a perfectly idiotic war. One thing that the film doesn't really make clear is that reason can be (and really must be) animated by imagination. Mr. Jackson has no imagination whatsoever and therefore operates according to a very base form of "reason". The Baron is the personification of emotion and faith and he is quite literally animated by imagination. The more completely that the little girl Sally believes in the Baron, the younger and more vigorous he gets. Sally must also at one point get the Baron to keep believing in himself. Gilliam seems to be saying that our own imagination is capable of testing our faith in itself. Sally and the Baron's adventures involve a trek in four stages, each of which is themed by one of the four elements of the ancient Greeks: air, earth, fire and water. To begin with the Baron makes his escape from the beseiged city in a hot AIR balloon improbably made of ladies underwear. He then flies up above the clouds through the AIR to the moon. The EARTHy part (in both literal and figurative senses) of the quest takes place on the Moon, which is pretty good joke in itself. They descend from the Moon into a volcano, which of course involves a lot of FIRE. Their departure from the volcano is into a whirlpool which sends them through the center of the earth to the South Seas, where after paddling around in the WATER they end up inside of a very large fish (which is very wet indeed). Along the way Sally and the Baron recover his four faithful servants, who, if you stretched this a little could also each be paired with one of the four elements (e.g., Gustavas has remarkable hearing and can blow like gale of wind; Adolphus is a remarkable marksman and rifles involved "firing" etc.). The fact that this structure survived the editting involved in the legendary budget crunch and political quagmire that dogged this movie is simply amazing. The film is absolutely brilliant and leaves you feeling like you ought to spend a little more time getting in touch with what ever's left of your childlike wonder at the mysteries of the world. That can't be a bad thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Gilliam's Wild Imagination
Review: "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" begin with the title "The Age of Reason" and it's immediately followed by scenes of war. This dicotomy never works and establishes the mood for what's to come, a narrative that never finds its place among the breathtaking visual effects that populate the entire movie. There are some good segments, though, as when the Baron's sadness touches the viewers when he says that the world has no longer place for men who live their dreams. It seems that Terry Gilliam's unability to restrain himself proves that inventiveness and imagination can't always work when the directors want to go further without any narrative basis. I can only recommend it for its triumph in art direction, make-up, costume design and special effects.
Rating:
Summary: Something that needs to be watched much more often
Review: This is another one of those films that are not watched only because they have either only one copy at Hastings or Blockbuster or you'll only find them at rare film shops. If films like this were made more readily available, everyone would watch them. Like Time Bandits, the dialogue is funny. The setting may seem a bit grim at first, but don't let that fool you. Wonderfully fantastic preformances from John Neville, Uma Thurman,Robin Williams and Monty Python veteran Eric Idle make the already-funnybone-tickling lines even more fun to watch and hear. Enjoy films like this while you can folks, they're hard to find these days, when the closest you can get to "comedy" is gross-out films like "American Pie".I can only hope that there are more Gilliam films in our midst to dig us out of this plotless rut of cash wasters we're stuck in now.
Rating:
Summary: ray di tutto
Review: another great movie by cinematic genius terry gilliam. the special effects were quite ahead of their time, yet this movie was considered somewhat of a flop when it came out. go figure. the picture quality is great. although the sound is good, i wish this was remastered into 5.1 or dts and for its price it would be nice to have a couple extras or a docu on the effects or something. robin williams is great, and his portion of the movie provides, by far, the most laughs.
Rating:
Summary: THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN!
Review: This is one movie you do not watch to enjoy by PROXY! A VISUAL DELIGHT from director TERRY GILLIAM, who revives the legendary TALL TALES of the 17th century German Adventurer BARON MUNCHAUSEN! With JOHN NEVILLE in the title role and a young SARAH POLLEY as brave little Sally Salt, who joins with the Baron as he travels to the MOON and back to save a besieged city! And who plays the KING OF THE MOON? Why ROBIN WILLIAMS! Who else did you expect?!? Toss Eric Idle, Uma Thurman, Oliver Reed and Jonathyn Pryce into the merry mix of MADNESS and just GO ALONG FOR THE RIDE! But do not surprised if your kids do not enjoy this one as much as you do!
Rating:
Summary: Attributed to Baron Munchausen !
Review: There really was a Baron Munchausen. His full name was Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Munchausen, and he lived from 1720 to 1797 and fought for the Russians against the Turks. He was, it is said, in the habit of embellishing his war stories, and in 1785 a jewel thief from Hanover named Rudolf Erich Raspe published a book in England which claimed to be based on the baron's life and times. The real von Munchausen apparently did not complain about this book that made free with his reputation, even though it included such tall stories as the time the baron tethered his horse to a "small twig" in a snowstorm, and discovered when the snow melted that the twig was actually a church steeple. I remember the illustration that appeared with that story when I read it as a child: The baron on the ground, looking up in perplexity at his horse, which was still hanging from the steeple. I remember asking my father how the horse was going to get down, and my father speculating that he would have to wait until it snowed again, which seemed like a bleak prospect for the horse. And so I asked if the baron could feed his horse in the meantime by climbing up the steeple with hay. The mind of a child is wonderfully literal. And one of the charms of seeing "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" was to see some of the baron's other impossible adventures, looking for all the world as if they had really happened, thanks to extraordinary special effects. For adults, this is a "special effects movie," and we approach it in that spirit, also appreciating the sly wit and satire that sneaks in here and there from director Terry Gilliam and his collaborators, who were mostly forged in the mill of Monty Python. They have not made a "children's movie," but children may find it fascinating, because these adventures involve castles and sultans and horses and knights and the man in the moon - subjects that seem fresh, now that the high-tech hardware of outer space is taken for granted by most kids. Terry Gilliam's film is, in itself, a tribute to the spirit of the good baron. Gilliam must have had to embellish a few war stories himself, to get Columbia Pictures to spend a reported $46 million on this project, which is one of the three or four most expensive films ever made. The special effects are astonishing, but so is the humor with which they are employed. It is not enough that one of the baron's friends is the fastest runner in the world. He must run all the way to Spain and back in an hour, to fetch a bottle of wine and save the baron's neck. And he must be able to outrun a speeding bullet, stop it, and redirect it back toward the man who fired it. These adventures, and others, are told with a cheerfulness and a light touch that never betray the time and money it took to create them. It's one thing to spent $46 million; it's another to spend it insouciantly. The movie begins when the baron indignantly interrupts a play that is allegedly based on his life, and continues as he tells the "real" story of his travels - which took him not merely to Turkey but also to the moon, to the heart of a volcano, and into the stomach of a sea monster so big that people actually lived there quite comfortably, once they had been swallowed. The baron (John Neville) is accompanied on some of these adventures by his friends, including not only the world's fastest man, but also the world's strongest man, the man with the best hearing in the world, and another friend who does not have great eyesight, but owns glasses that allow him to see almost any distance. Even when he is separated from these comrades, the baron travels in good company: when a Venus appears from a seashell, she is played by Uma Thurman, the young innocent from "Dangerous Liaisons," and when the man in the moon appears, he is Robin Williams, with a detachable head that is able to spin off into the night on its own. Some of the effects in this movie are actually quite wonderful, as when the baron and a friend return from the moon by climbing down two lengths of the same rope again and again, while the markings of a celestial globe apportion the sky behind them. In another scene, a giant feather falls softly onto a vast plain, while the baron tries to understand what strange new world he has found. Neville, a veteran of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, keeps his composure in the midst of these special effects, and seems sensible and matter-of-fact, as anyone would if they had spent a lifetime growing accustomed to the incredible. The wit and the spectacle of "Baron Munchausen" are considerable achievements. I wish only that Gilliam, who co-wrote the screenplay as well as directed, had been able to edit his own inspiration more severely as he went along. The movie is slow to get off the ground (the prologue in the theater goes on forever before we discover what it's about), and sometimes the movie fails on the basic level of making itself clear. We're not always sure who is who, how they are related, or why we should care. One of the things you have to do, when you fill a movie with extravagant fantasies, is to explain the story in clear and direct terms, so it doesn't fly apart with intoxication at its own exuberance. I was confused sometimes during "Baron Munchausen," and bored sometimes, but this is a vast and commodious work, and even allowing for the unsuccessful passages there is a lot here to treasure. Gilliam says it is the third part of a trilogy. His first film, "Time Bandits," was about childhood. His second, "Brazil," was about adulthood. "Baron Munchausen" is about old age. He may be telling us the truth. He may also be telling us he has tethered his film to a twig in a snowstorm.
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