Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Full disclosure: I'm a Bob Dylan fan. I don't just mean I appreciate his 1960s topical folk songs. I like his recent stuff a great deal. Everything from Time Out of Mind onward anyway. I like his life story and the bizarre turns his career has taken over the years. I've read his memoirs. His songwriting is usually phenomenal and his artistic vision is generally unique and forward-looking. Still, everybody makes mistakes.

"Masked and Anonymous" is set in a dystopian future where a corrupt concert promoter (John Goodman) has decided to put on a benefit concert of sorts to, somehow, heal the nation's psyche. Due to John Goodman's corruption, the only artist that they talk into playing is Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) a late Bob Dylanesque figure whose fortunes are in serious decline as he has to be sprung from jail to play the concert. The main problem with the movie is that the pacing is so slow that the story, told in this paragraph, drags out over the course of a full length movie. There are a couple of performances mixed in. It kind of makes the whole thing seem like a long, strange, conceptual Bob Dylan music video.

Val Kilmer appears only briefly in the film. He's listed as an "animal handler" in the credits, but he actually plays more of an exotic animal bbq concessions stand attendant who delivers a long rambling speech that more or less sums up everything wrong with this movie. Take a look.

Prince of Egypt (1998)

Val Kilmer plays a cartoon Moses. Yes, Moses. Also, God. There is of course a part in the biblical story of the Exodus where God talks to Moses. This is Kilmer talking to himself. The movie has a totally star studded cast for no good reason. Sandra Bullock? Really? For brevity's sake and to keep the blog moving I'm totally skimping on this entry. Whatever.

Willow (1988)

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a fantasy tale about a mystical land in which a village of half-sized humans encounter a foreign object sought by an evil foreign power that will burn the world down to get to this potentially game-changing object. The half-sized critter cursed enough to find themselves tasked with the burden of carrying this object is encouraged by a wizard to take it on a great and perilous journey in order to preserve goodness in the face of the spreading forces of evil. Thankfully, the helpless and moderately annoying half-sized guy meets a mighty human swordsman of mysterious origins who helps them to fight off the armies of evildoers. The swordsman finds himself in the midst of a complicated romance with a princess of sorts. Also, an evil sorcerer and a benevolent wizard fight it out by magically flinging each other through the air of the evil wizard's tower. The half sized guy survives all this and returns heroically to his boring little village.

Obviously, you'd think I was talking about the "Lord Of the Rings" trilogy, but you'd be wrong. It's "Willow." "But they ripped off LOTR" you will protest. Alas, you're mistaken, I will assure you, for Lord of the Rings was not released until 2001, a full 14 years after "Willow" got its nerd on in theaters. Directed by Ron Howard and 'written' by George Lucas, I'm amazed that I hadn't really ever heard of it before. Dear readers, I must inform you that if that comparison to Lord of the Rings is allowed, Val Kilmer, as Madartigan, is the Aragorn of this shit.


I could spend the whole post going through point by point how the script (written by George Lucas, so you know it'll nuke the fridge!) is um... inspired by (read: directly ripped off from) the J.R.R. Tolkein Lord of the Rings Trilogy. But that would be boring and reveal the depths of my own nerdiness in a way that I'm just not comfortable with right now. So let me take it in a more general direction.

Willow is the name of the hobbit-like main character. He's played by a real-life tiny guy named Warwick Davis whose filmography reads like a fantasy based bookstore gone bad. At this time he would have been fresh off his success at playing Wickett the Ewok in "Return of the Jedi." He rescues a baby, Moses-style, from a riverbed without knowing an evil queen is looking for it. The hobbits are called "Pecks" by humans but I think we're suppossed to assume it's mildly derogatory, I'm not really sure. So Willow and some other Pecks take the baby over the hills to deliver it to the first human they see, who happens to be Val Kilmer in a cage. Kilmer is a swordsman named Madmartigan who is a soldier for no real country and kind of a total badass. Kilmer ends up helping Willow try to keep this baby from falling into the hands of the evil queen Bavmorda's forces. These names... seriously George Lucas, what were you thinking? So Queen Bavmorda sends her general and warrior daughter after this baby which has been prophesized as a threat to her empire. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh yeah, that's almost what happened with Jesus. So let's expand the source material of Willow to include the New Testament.

Most of the movie consists of a threat chasing after Willow and Madmortigan and Willow shouting in an annoying manner something along the lines of "Madmortigan, hurry! They're coming, Madmortigan!" Val Kilmer slices a bunch of evildoers down and is ruggedly charming. He seduces the evil queen's daughter. The evil but easily seduced princess is played by Joanne Whaley who would soon thereafter marry Kilmer for twelve years and mother two of his children (in real life).

There's so much more going on in this movie but it all kind of requires a big explanation (the good wizard is stuck in an animal's body but can talk... ?) so I'm going to summarize it by saying that because George Lucas touched this, good triumphs over evil and they all live happily ever after. Also, of the Kilmer movies I've seen so far, I enjoyed this one the most.