As far as I’m concerned, Time Bandits is Terry Gilliam’s best movie.

I like 12 Monkeys and Brazil.  Others have a soft spot for The Fisher King.  But it is Gilliam’s fantasy adventure satire comedy that I can watch over and over.

It perfectly combines Gilliam’s surreal visual style (which always creeped me out in his Monty Python short animation) with his penchant for spinning moralistic fables.  Layer on the ridiculously sublime humor that was also a Monty Python hallmark (and can be found here due to an assist from troop-mate Michael Palin on the script), and you’ve got a near perfect movie.

One of my favorite exchanges:

“It’s some kind of invisible barrier.”

“Ah, so that’s what an invisible barrier looks like.”

Yes, it is that easy to make me happy.

But wait there’s more.

John Cleese as a spotless and chipper Robin Hood with a band of reprehensible thugs.  Palin and Shelley Duvall as doomed lovers throughout the ages with unspecified physiological problems.  Kitchen appliances cast as the most fabulous object in the world.

Half a dozen midgets who used to design plants and shrubs for the Supreme Being — “You mean God?” “Well, we don’t know him that well.” — get demoted after designing a 800-foot-tall pink tree that stinks and end up in possession of a cosmic map of all the holes in the universe.  So, of course, they use it to travel through time and pull off robberies.

And what does the Evil Genius, who is standing in for the Devil, want?  To recreate the world, but to start with cell phones and computers and videocassette recorders (this was an 1981 movie after all) this time.

Oh, did I forget to mention that it might actually have been intended as a kids’ movie.  A truly demented kids’ movie in the mold of Roald Dahl.  This is a flick where a boat turns out to be a hat on the head of a giant.

Another exchange:

Kevin: “Why do we have to have evil?”

Supreme Being: “Ah … I believe it has something to do with free will.”

Yup, that pretty much sums it up.

And it’s got Sean Connery in it as Agememnon.  And Ian Holm as Napoleon.  And  a really dark, bizarre, non-sequitur of an ending.

And George Harrison contributed a peppy little silly song for the closing credits.

Best.  Movie.  Ever.