Altered Realities

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus mysteriously appeared with no fanfare at the little theater downtown this Friday. I'm not sure when this movie was released, and I'm pretty sure it didn't come to the bigger, modern theaters at the mall and the new town center here. This is Heath Ledger's last movie, the one in which he died during the filming and Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Collin Ferrell replaced him in the Imaginarium through-the-looking-glass parts. My expectations were probably too high for this movie -- I anticipated fantastical special effects, an unusual set of characters and situations, explanations that made sense, and good acting, but none of those expectations were met. When one steps through the imaginarium, scenes unfolded that seemed no better than the 1960s-ish effects from the scenes in the Mary Poppins movie in which Mary Poppins and friends sing with the penguins, fishes and carousel horses. Maybe that was supposed to make it charming and old-fashioned, but it seemed gritty and unimaginatarium-like to me.
The following day I watched "The Wolfman," for which I had no expectations. I suspect this movie had a bigger budget, because the scenery was beautiful and dramatic, the characters were believable, and Anthony Hopkins was just a little bit terrifying. In both movies, reality was changed by the supernatural, but in very different ways. There are those movies and situations in real life when our realities are altered, sometimes as if by magic or the supernatural. Some people crave that altered reality and some people steer as far away as possible from it.