Lost in La Mancha (2002)

Cervantes' Don Quixote seems like it would be a perfect fit to Terry Gilliam's eccentric style. The director spent a decade trying to make it. He almost succeeded. But a collective of unseen forces decided it simply wasn't meant to be, even though a production that had life-size puppets and man-size giants absolutely deserved the audience it was never destined to have.
Providence, however, gave us La Mancha, a visual record by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. It captures the tragedy that befell a production that, truth be told, was on shaky ground from Day 01. It shows Gilliam as both a hopeless idealist and a perfect dreamer, two sides of one coin, eliciting feelings of incredulity and sympathy in a viewer that are often inseparable.
There's no reason to suspect that Gilliam's final product would've been any more or less successful and divisive than his previous works had been, but I for one would love to have seen it come to fruition, nonetheless.

3 false starts (and at least one act of god) out of 5