Though the film is not quite finished yet, a post-production teaser/behind the scenes video for Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus has arrived online via QuickStopEntertainment. Watch as Gilliam introduces his fantastical new world -- showing artwork, set design and brief glimpses of actual scenes -- all while briefly explaining the film's bizarre storyline ("it feels like some of the films I made when I was younger," he notes).

Gilliam says, "The film begins in modern London. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a thousand years old. Parnassus as the power to expand your mind beyond anything you've ever dreamed of. For centuries he's been traveling the planet with his traveling theater, The Imaginarium. Parnassus is a prophet; he has a secret he made once long ago with the devil -- and that secret will possibly destroy all their lives or possibly save them. It depends on who they meet ... and who they meet is a man named Tony (Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law), hanging from a bridge in London. They save his life. Is he there to save them? Or is he working for the devil? These are the things we unravel as the story unfolds."

Yup. Makes about as much sense as most of Gilliam's work, but the visuals he reveals in the video look amazing and beautiful and definitely pique my interest. Not to mention the Tim Burton-esque score quietly playing underneath it all. Check it out above, and thanks to Matt for sending it our way. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is due in theaters next year.

In a combined effort to boost its box office receipts enough to become the highest-grossing film of all time (which it won't) and boost its awards profile enough to garner some Oscars (which it might), That Juggernaut Which We Call The Dark Knight will be re-released this coming January, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

It's the month when the awards rush is high and the mainstream competition is low, and any chance to see it in the IMAX format (had ye missed it, for shame) should be relished regardless of the DVD's December arrival.

And no, even if it doesn't best Titanic, director Christopher Nolan and the Brothers Warner are still looking at the cusp of a billion bucks worldwide. Yeah, so far as consolation prizes go, I've actually heard of worse. Hell, with numbers like that, maybe they could still sway Phillip Seymour Hoffman to climb aboard -- or at least help Michael Caine get his story straightened out...

While Heath Ledger's role as Joker in The Dark Knight might go down as his last (and greatest) complete role, technically his final performance will come in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. In a weird way it's almost fitting that Gilliam -- who's been cursed for years now -- would wind up being the filmmaker to last work with Ledger. Not only has Ledger's next-to-last film broken almost every box office record to date, but folks are so afraid of a Gilliam flick that even with the marketing machine that is the death of Heath Ledger, Hollywood still doesn't want to go near Dr. Parnassus.

A story in The Hollywood Reporter last week claims Ledger could be in a "position of having one of the biggest- grossing movies in Hollywood history out at the same time he's in a movie hunting for an domestic distribution deal." And the scary part of this is that when Ledger passed away, Hollywood heavyweights like Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepped in to finish the film for their deceased friend. With ALL THAT, it's still a risky movie to get behind. One "distribution guru" added, "For all the elements in this film, it is a Terry Gilliam picture, and as much as you want a movie of his to be good, you have to be careful." Poor Gilliam ... the guy just can't catch a break.

Well, unless you want to see Dr. Parnassus. Wouldn't it be kinda spooky if one death helped revive another's career? If we, as an audience, had the ability to choose between the doom and gloom of mourning an actor's death or the light and joy that comes with helping a beloved filmmaker get back on track?

For me, it started with the deaths of comedic greats like Lucille Ball and Jackie Gleason. Death had become real and tangible, making the world and showbusiness finite. Since then, the numbers have gradually increased. We're slowly walking into the period where memorials and tributes aren't relegated to actors before our time, but to the names and faces that shaped our views of entertainment -- the people who we have spent so much time with on the big screen, and within the comfort of our own homes.

But we're not just losing people to age. 2008 has been a heavy year for Hollywood, losing both rising stars and big names with long careers. Considering the fact that we just lost two more, I wanted to take a moment and look back at this year's shockers. Some of these men were young, some of these men were older, but all of them have left this earth too soon.

An editorialist named Eric P. Lucas says in Friday's Los Angeles Times that since Heath Ledger's death was the result of his own recklessness, he therefore should not win an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight.

"It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger," Lucas begins. "He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death. ... Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who's had the courage to stick around."

Lucas asserts that Ledger's performance isn't all that great anyway -- "a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia," he calls it -- but that's irrelevant to his larger point. It would seem that even if Ledger's Joker truly did represent the finest acting of the year, his personal behavior should disqualify him from Oscar consideration.

To Lucas I say this: Wanna watch me make this pencil disappear?

I actually agree with a lot of what he writes about how certain people's drug- or alcohol-fueled deaths make them more iconic than they would have been otherwise. Did Kurt Cobain's suicide rob my generation of its greatest poet? Nah. I think the only group that really suffered a major loss when Cobain died was the heroin industry. And I think it's silly when people talk about getting emotional when they see Ledger in The Dark Knight, as if the death of someone they never met still makes them misty-eyed all these months later. So let it not be said that I am not a heartless bastard.

By: Kim Voynar (original publish date: January 22, 2008)

(With the Cine-staff off on a late-July mini-vacation, we thought it'd be fun to bring you some of our favorite pieces from months past. This would probably rank among our LEAST favorite stories of all time, but it certainly was a memorable one.)


Cinematical's staff would like to take a moment to share our thoughts on Heath Ledger, who passed away today after an apparent overdose.


Although Heath Ledger's best known film to date is Brokeback Mountain, my favorite of his films was Candy, in which he starred opposite fellow Australian Abbie Cornish. His performance in Candy, as an artist and heroin addict in a mutually destructive relationship with Cornish's nice middle-class girl, was so riveting and raw, and it's one of those fest films that I've thought about often since I saw it. Like most everyone who's here working Sundance, I was deeply shocked by the news of his tragic death today. He touched us through his films, and we are saddened by the loss of his life, and the films he would have made in the future. His family, especially his young daughter Matilda, will be in our thoughts and prayers.

-Kim Voynar

My original feeling about Heath Ledger -- after films like The Patriot, A Knight's Tale, and 10 Things I Hate About You -- was that he was yet another handsome and likable matinee idol ... but not much more than that. But over the last several years, I was proven wrong ... several times. My favorite performance of his was the lead role in the underrated Casanova -- and I'll be giving that film a second spin as soon as I get home from Sundance. He was a very fine actor who clearly took a lot of pride in his work, and I believe that the movie world has just lost a good soul. My heart goes out to his friends, his family, his fans, and also to the departed Heath Ledger; (If his death is ruled a suicide) I'm deeply sorry that he was so unhappy. (Regardless of the reason for the actor's death, it's a stunning tragedy.)

-Scott Weinberg

Look, I thought The Dark Knight had a lot of strong selling points: Combine a deft pace with thoughtful characterizations and a whopping IMAX design that turns the entire experience into a plot-driven theme park ride, and you've got one hefty dose of Batman adrenaline.

Still, comparisons to The Godfather Part II notwithstanding, The Dark Knight isn't foolproof -- in fact, no single movie in history is foolproof. The subjective experience of movie watching ensures that nothing can be universally liked by everyone, and rules of civility insist that humanity respect that truism. It's acceptable to feel passionately about a great work of art, and defend that perspective with rigorous argumentation, but much of the outrage over the minority perspective that The Dark Knight isn't any good has made such practical thinking impossible.

Deemed the first critic to pan the movie, New York's David Edelstein went out of his way to list the allegations against him sent along by various Batman fans. The House Next Door editor Keith Uhlich, meanwhile, fielded over a hundred rants in the comments section following his astute critique of director Christopher Nolan's questionable portrayals of violence. What's particularly shocking about this frightful deluge of negative responses is that many of these people began posting their disapproval before they even saw the movie.

Right about here is where all the gushing and excitement and enthusiasm should begin, because I'll tell you right off the "bat" that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is cause for celebration indeed. But then you'll figure out -- after only one sentence -- that I pretty much loved this movie, and then you'll head off to another, more unpredictable film critic. But it's the WHY that interests me so much. What I enjoyed about Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Hellboy 2 could probably be covered in one lengthy -- and inevitably nerd-tastic -- conversation between the two of us. But The Dark Knight... Well, clearly we're approaching a whole new level here.

Several of the pre-release gushings are accurate. Some say "Scorsesian" and others reference Michael Mann. Many spend paragraphs on the (truly amazing) penultimate performance by Heath Ledger, while others will revel in the grown-up tone or epic scope of the film. What amazed me most about The Dark Knight, among several things, is that the flick's got more layers than an onion farm -- and yet it never loses touch with the idea of FUN. True that we're talking about a comic book fun that's decidedly more melancholy than the cinematic exploits of The Marvel Gang, but dang if TDK isn't supremely satisfying for about a dozen different reasons.

In the last twenty-four hours alone, countless news articles have compared the late Heath Ledger to James Dean. Of course it helps that the two actors -- whose careers lie fifty years apart -- bear physical resemblances to each other. The real reason for the frequency of the comparison, however, revolves around the possibility that Ledger, like Dean, might end up with a posthumous Oscar nomination.

Other than Dean, whose death in a 1955 car accident was preceded by two nominations back-to-back, six actors have landed the distinction -- but only one, Peter Finch, actually won (for Network in 1976). However, Ledger is now perceived an actor who possessed a potential he never quite realized, while Dean was already an icon by the time of his death (and he still didn't win the prize). If Ledger gets nominated for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, the award will also acknowledge the great career that never was. Dean surely would have followed Giant with other wonderful performances, but his brief filmography also allowed the actor to reach a level of prestige that Ledger would have needed a few more movies to attain. So does this comparison really hold up?

The media certainly seems to think so. "Like Dean, he could endure as a mythic figure of talent silenced before his time," writes the AP. "People are aflutter over seeing the final performance of a new James Dean," reports The Huffington Post. " One quality that Ledger and Dean did share is rapid growth," notes the Baltimore Sun.