The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was two hours and ten minutes to begin with, and I kept getting up to go do other things, so it ended up taking me about four hours to get through it. By the time it ended, I was tired of it and of doing laundry, but at least I had finished making this birthday card for my sister.

I knew the movie was famous for being Heath Ledger’s last movie, but I don’t really know who Heath Ledger is (no, I’ve never seen Brokeback Mountain or The Dark Knight), so I had to take a break right away to go look it up and see which character he was. Later there were other actors playing his character, but I didn’t really even notice that, except to think at one point that Heath Ledger suddenly looked a lot like Johnny Depp, so that tells you how much I care about Heath Ledger, and, I guess, how much attention I was paying to the movie.

The film was visually interesting, as you’d expect from Terry Gilliam. I liked the atmosphere of the “real world” scenes, where modern London still felt like the 19th century. In fact during the opening sequence I hadn’t noticed the cars in the background as the imaginarium lumbered along, so I was thinking it was the 19th century and was jolted when people were suddenly spilling out of a modern nightclub.

Here’s a TARDIS picture because I can’t find a good imaginarium picture

I loved the imaginarium itself–the giant traveling theatre that also housed the living quarters and, like the TARDIS, appeared to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. That was one of my favorite things about Dr. Who: the fact that the Doctor traveled with his own completely self-contained world. I was fascinated by the idea and liked the episodes where we got to see glimpses of the TARDIS outside of the control room. I always wanted to see more. What did the Doctor’s bedroom look like, for example? We saw a companion’s room a few times, but never the Doctor’s. (Speaking of companions, I was amused to learn several years ago that Romana II (Lalla Ward) is now married to Richard Dawkins. Why is that amusing? I don’t know.)

Meanwhile, back at The Imaginarium, though I liked the imaginarium itself, the imaginary world found through the imaginarium’s mirror struck me as much less imaginative. The cartoony feel of it just wasn’t that interesting to me. And unfortunately neither was the story of the movie, which was uninspired and hadn’t much in the way of character development. I didn’t care about any of the characters or what happened to them, except for Tom Waits’s  devil, who was the most interesting person in the movie. Maybe Valentina should have ended up with him. Or with the dwarf.

I was left thinking about Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I also saw recently. At only 87 minutes it was still too long by at least 40 minutes and had the same problem as The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: nice visuals dragged down by a failure of storytelling, with a thin plot and characters I didn’t care about. Wes Anderson has been a disappointment ever since Rushmore, which I loved but am afraid to go back and watch again for fear that I will discover I was an idiot when I saw it the first time.

My rating for both movies: Meh. Shrug.