The filmmaker Terry Gilliam celebrates his birthday today. His surreal films have contributed a playfully unique darkness and salient wry humor to the annals of mass consciousness commonly known as popular cinema. His masterful sense of wonder and outlandish embrace of the fantastic have become a signature aesthetic. After the 2002 documentary, Lost In La Mancha (a “making of” movie about the production of a Gilliam film beset with disaster and never completed, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), he became an emblematic hero to me. A visionary who is not afraid of – yeah, plagued by – failure.