I've noticed my past number of reviews have been fairly positively slanted. This changes NOW.
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I consider myself a man of culture and taste. I enjoy a good film. I enjoy an ARTSY film. Surreal objectivist journeys through the human subconscious as a metaphor for a broken heart? I eat that shit UP. And as surreal auteur filmmakers go, you can't go wrong with Terry Gilliam. He made Brazil, 12 Monkeys, Baron Munchhausen, Time Bandits--the man is legit, makes great, original, imaginative films that inspire and excite and above all entertain. So when I hear of Tideland--the movie he made the Brothers Grimm (which sucked mostly) to make--and that it's his big crowning opus, I dedicated myself to hunting it down and watching it. Finding it on a bargain bin in my local record store, I snatched it up, forgot about it for three months, and finally watched it two nights ago, expecting a wild ride through a twisted mindscape of a genius.
What I GOT was an overwrought, overblown, self-indulgent, discomforting and disgusting piece of shit.
The story follows Jeliza-Rose (who reminds us of her abysmal name every ten seconds), a spirited and upbeat child who just happens to have the most broken family life known to man. Raised by a washed-up rockstar (Jeff Bridges, being awesome) and an abusive, chain-smoking caricature of a mother, Jeliza spends her days helping daddy tie off for his daily heroin, cooking, cleaning, and having long, spirited conversations with the severed heads of her toy dolls, all of whom have names and personalities. When her mom dies from a drug overdose, she and her dad ride off into the sunset to avoid the cops.
Inspired by daddy's drug fantasies of the magical realm of Jutland (Holland, basically), they end up in the abandoned home of daddy's mother (I think), where horrible things continue to happen. Jeliza-Rose ends up abandoned and alone, and proceeds to go completely insane. The plot stops here--the rest of the movie plays out in a series of increasingly fucked up imagery that guarantees to depress and disorient you, and by the end, you have absolutely NO FUCKING CLUE what you just watched.
First, the good: Tideland is beautifully shot. Gilliam is a master behind the camera, no mistake, and the cinematography is astounding. The story, an adaptation of what is evidently a really good book, is also quite good...sort of. Jeff Bridges is also really great, acting like a champ.
Now the bad: EVERYTHING ELSE. The story is, at best, deeply tragic. At worst, it's incoherent and disgusting. The movie is prefaced by Terry Gilliam warning us that we may hate this movie, but it helped him discover his inner child, who is a little girl. He also invites us to laugh. If you laugh during this movie, you have NO SOUL--or at least, very little of one. The movie is said to be from "the eyes of the child", which is technically true. There's no morality tale hidden in here--the horrible acts of inhumanity that pervade every core facet of this movie are presented so matter of factly, so simply, that it almost makes them worse. To watch the series of unfortunate events that unfolds in the life of Jeliza-Rose is utterly painful.
Seriously, Terry Gilliam just made sure to pound into our brains every single terrible thing that happens in this girl's childhood. Worse yet, she's so far-gone with loneliness that she doesn't even realize how bad things have become. She becomes delusional, and it doesn't help that she encounters nothing but the worst dregs of humanities. From a taxidermist obsessed with stuffing human corpses, waging a "war on all bees" (seriously) to her retarded next door neighbor, whom this precocious 9-year old girl has a ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP with. I am not fucking kidding, there's a scene where they make out, and she even asks him to whip out his dick. Even if his mind is like a five-year old's, he's, like, easily in his mid-twenties. The entire movie is exploitative schlock, misery and woe compounded by a sense of arrogant pride, as if Terry Gilliam is DARING us to criticize it, DARING us to call him out on his refuge in audacity. Well, I'm calling him out.
Terry Gilliam, you can NOT make a movie where a young girl dresses up the rotting corpse of her parent in wigs and makeup, attempts to seduce a retard, urges him to cause a deadly train crash, and then have her hounded by her own twisted, broken psyche, manifested by talking dolls' heads, bullied by abusive parents, and terrorized by an insane woman dressed like a witch, with one eye and a fixation for stuffing human corpses and turning them into leathery statues. You cannot expect me to appreciate any artistic integrity in a film so blatantly self-serving, so indulgent in whatever private issues that you may be dealing with that it ignores the fact that movies--nay, all entertainment--is meant to be viewed by an AUDIENCE. Other people have to be able to watch this movie and not feel sickened, disturbed, and genuinely disgusted by what they see. If your goal was to make me question your sanity, make me question your humanity, then you have succeeded.
I've tried not to spoiler this, because despite how horrible this film is, if you are going to see it (and I urge you not to) then the surprises are the key. The movie is a roller coaster of atrocities, built one atop the other, crowning in an epic explosion of immorality and built upon a foundation of arrogance and conceit. Great cinematography cannot save a movie that serves as nothing more than fuel to your own ego, as some sort of misaimed desire to recapture some manner of childhood...I don't even know. Innocence? The movie makes no sense. It has no moral, no message, no direction. It's aimless, pointless, absurd and horrifying. This is not art. This is a form of emotional torture, and I would only subject this movie willingly, having seen it myself, to the very worst of humanity, because truly, they are the only ones who could ever even HOPE to enjoy this steaming pile of shit.
---
I consider myself a man of culture and taste. I enjoy a good film. I enjoy an ARTSY film. Surreal objectivist journeys through the human subconscious as a metaphor for a broken heart? I eat that shit UP. And as surreal auteur filmmakers go, you can't go wrong with Terry Gilliam. He made Brazil, 12 Monkeys, Baron Munchhausen, Time Bandits--the man is legit, makes great, original, imaginative films that inspire and excite and above all entertain. So when I hear of Tideland--the movie he made the Brothers Grimm (which sucked mostly) to make--and that it's his big crowning opus, I dedicated myself to hunting it down and watching it. Finding it on a bargain bin in my local record store, I snatched it up, forgot about it for three months, and finally watched it two nights ago, expecting a wild ride through a twisted mindscape of a genius.
What I GOT was an overwrought, overblown, self-indulgent, discomforting and disgusting piece of shit.
The story follows Jeliza-Rose (who reminds us of her abysmal name every ten seconds), a spirited and upbeat child who just happens to have the most broken family life known to man. Raised by a washed-up rockstar (Jeff Bridges, being awesome) and an abusive, chain-smoking caricature of a mother, Jeliza spends her days helping daddy tie off for his daily heroin, cooking, cleaning, and having long, spirited conversations with the severed heads of her toy dolls, all of whom have names and personalities. When her mom dies from a drug overdose, she and her dad ride off into the sunset to avoid the cops.
Inspired by daddy's drug fantasies of the magical realm of Jutland (Holland, basically), they end up in the abandoned home of daddy's mother (I think), where horrible things continue to happen. Jeliza-Rose ends up abandoned and alone, and proceeds to go completely insane. The plot stops here--the rest of the movie plays out in a series of increasingly fucked up imagery that guarantees to depress and disorient you, and by the end, you have absolutely NO FUCKING CLUE what you just watched.
First, the good: Tideland is beautifully shot. Gilliam is a master behind the camera, no mistake, and the cinematography is astounding. The story, an adaptation of what is evidently a really good book, is also quite good...sort of. Jeff Bridges is also really great, acting like a champ.
Now the bad: EVERYTHING ELSE. The story is, at best, deeply tragic. At worst, it's incoherent and disgusting. The movie is prefaced by Terry Gilliam warning us that we may hate this movie, but it helped him discover his inner child, who is a little girl. He also invites us to laugh. If you laugh during this movie, you have NO SOUL--or at least, very little of one. The movie is said to be from "the eyes of the child", which is technically true. There's no morality tale hidden in here--the horrible acts of inhumanity that pervade every core facet of this movie are presented so matter of factly, so simply, that it almost makes them worse. To watch the series of unfortunate events that unfolds in the life of Jeliza-Rose is utterly painful.
Seriously, Terry Gilliam just made sure to pound into our brains every single terrible thing that happens in this girl's childhood. Worse yet, she's so far-gone with loneliness that she doesn't even realize how bad things have become. She becomes delusional, and it doesn't help that she encounters nothing but the worst dregs of humanities. From a taxidermist obsessed with stuffing human corpses, waging a "war on all bees" (seriously) to her retarded next door neighbor, whom this precocious 9-year old girl has a ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP with. I am not fucking kidding, there's a scene where they make out, and she even asks him to whip out his dick. Even if his mind is like a five-year old's, he's, like, easily in his mid-twenties. The entire movie is exploitative schlock, misery and woe compounded by a sense of arrogant pride, as if Terry Gilliam is DARING us to criticize it, DARING us to call him out on his refuge in audacity. Well, I'm calling him out.
Terry Gilliam, you can NOT make a movie where a young girl dresses up the rotting corpse of her parent in wigs and makeup, attempts to seduce a retard, urges him to cause a deadly train crash, and then have her hounded by her own twisted, broken psyche, manifested by talking dolls' heads, bullied by abusive parents, and terrorized by an insane woman dressed like a witch, with one eye and a fixation for stuffing human corpses and turning them into leathery statues. You cannot expect me to appreciate any artistic integrity in a film so blatantly self-serving, so indulgent in whatever private issues that you may be dealing with that it ignores the fact that movies--nay, all entertainment--is meant to be viewed by an AUDIENCE. Other people have to be able to watch this movie and not feel sickened, disturbed, and genuinely disgusted by what they see. If your goal was to make me question your sanity, make me question your humanity, then you have succeeded.
I've tried not to spoiler this, because despite how horrible this film is, if you are going to see it (and I urge you not to) then the surprises are the key. The movie is a roller coaster of atrocities, built one atop the other, crowning in an epic explosion of immorality and built upon a foundation of arrogance and conceit. Great cinematography cannot save a movie that serves as nothing more than fuel to your own ego, as some sort of misaimed desire to recapture some manner of childhood...I don't even know. Innocence? The movie makes no sense. It has no moral, no message, no direction. It's aimless, pointless, absurd and horrifying. This is not art. This is a form of emotional torture, and I would only subject this movie willingly, having seen it myself, to the very worst of humanity, because truly, they are the only ones who could ever even HOPE to enjoy this steaming pile of shit.
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