Lost in La Mancha (2003) Rated R Starring: Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp, and Jean Rochefort Rating: out of

For film industry buffs, Lost in La Mancha is a treasure trove of information and examples of what not to do when making a movie. For everyone else, it will deglamourize the job of a director. Apparently, when you're on a film set, you're on the phone with insurance agents and investors a lot of the time -- at least on the Man Who Killed Don Quixote set anyway.

Without getting into the myriad of problems that Quixote ran into, Lost in La Mancha has several problems of its own. It's more akin to a bloated "making-of" promotional short than a full-blown documentary. I walked away from the film with a sense that film production is an incredibly complex and extremely frustrating process but not much else. I realized that the reason there are so many shots of Gilliam in meetings and on-the-phone is because this wasn't planned to be a real documentary. It was supposed to be a "making-of" promotional film.

Things liven up a bit when Johnny Depp arrives on the set to film his scenes, but he's on-screen for less than 1/8th of the movie. The Quixote production was so plagued with problems that there is very little footage of the film in existence. What is present in Lost in La Mancha made me yearn to see the finished product.

There's no doubt that what happened to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was an unforeseeable set of events that could only be described as extremely bad luck. However, the documentary about those events could have been a bit more concise and quite a bit shorter. Still, it does merit viewing if you're a hardcore film production buff. If you're not, you may want to steer clear of Lost in La Mancha.

Trivia: Although the U.S. home video version has a listed running time of 93 minutes, the version on the DVD runs only 89 minutes. (Source: The Internet Movie Database)