film: Terry Gilliam's - Tideland

WOW!!! What a great film. Such a dark morbid story told with such an innocent touch. Jeff Bridges best role since The Dude, kinda lol. I think is one of the best flicks Gilliam's done to date. Go rent it!

why the fuck wasn't this released in the cinema in aus?

I think this movie got extremely limited release worldwide. I never heard about it playing around where I live, I'm sure it did play but it wasn't well advertised or anything. Really sad as I think this is a masterpiece from Gilliam, I really wish I could've seen this in the theaters.

Just saw this on the weekend, had never heard of it before and LOVED it. Really amazing portrayal of innocence and the imagination of a child against horrific/dark surroundings, and beautifully filmed. Probably going to buy (or maybe download) this so I can watch it again proper.

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this film was too morbid and pervers for my liking. 2/5

Bizarre but well done...but that pretty much describes most of Gilliam's flicks.

EXCELLENT FILM! The writing was fantastic and visually not much matches it. very nice nugget to have found.

glad i saw this in an empty theater, because it had me blubbering like baby. 5/5

L2R said:

this film was too morbid and pervers for my liking. 2/5

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you gotta respect the treatment, regardless of the subject matter. cmon mr mod watch triumph of the will and this key aspect of film critique will resonate.

I don't know... i respect everyone's opinions and usually love terry gilliam...but i just could not sit thru this movie. i was bored shitless. what a waste of time.

colors said:

you gotta respect the treatment, regardless of the subject matter. cmon mr mod watch triumph of the will and this key aspect of film critique will resonate.

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i know what you mean. i don't take anything away from it's production. i love gilliams work.

but the one time i saw this, the subject matter rubbed me the wrong way. i just didn't enjoy the experience one bit.

This was not Gilliam's original story idea; he adapted it from a novel. Unfortunately, it's not really a novel that lends itself to cinematic adaptation very well, if at all, and I'm not sure if it should have been made. The subject matter is disturbing and macabre, the pace is slow and it's pretty boring a lot of the time. While I am fairly ambivalent on the film, I applaud Gilliam for taking the risk. He knew a lot of people weren't going to like a film that features mummification, some creepy moments bordering on pedophilia and a 10 year old girl preparing heroin shots for her dad. But he wants those images to stimulate uncomfortable feelings in the viewer, feelings that most filmmakers and producers want to keep away from their audience for the very reason that they do make us feel weird and abnormal, and I like that. Could the execution have been better? Yes. Was the subject matter just too difficult to pull off in the first place? Probably. But without risk you get sterility.

The film shares a wide breadth of counterparts in literature and film. The Southern Gothic mystique, supernatural phenomena and overall tone recall Faulkner and specifically A Rose for Emily, while the creepy taxidermy obviously parallels Norman Bates and Psycho. The desolate expanse of prairie life and everything it stands for is right out of Cather's My Antonia and the themes of escapism and youthful innocence can be found in Pan's Labyrinth. Unfortunately for Gilliam, every book and movie I just mentioned handles these themes in superior fashion.

I was not at all impressed with Jeff Bridges, who has a lot of screen time but doesn't have to do much. He's sort of reprising his The Dude schtick, which I wasn't crazy about the first time around, and he mails it in. Jennifer Tilly as the world's worst bloated heroin addicted mother is purely awful. The three main roles are superbly acted however, with 10 year old Jodelle Ferland turning in a really sweet and tender performance (although I find it hard to believe that a 10 year old would cuddle her dead father's mummified corpse and cook his heroin for him with that kind of blissful devotion). The unknown Brendan Fletcher does the retarded person thing almost as good, if not better, than Leonardo DiCaprio and Billy Bob Thornton while Janet McTeer as his macabre, taxidermy loving half blind sister is phenomenal. Apparently she is a British actress who does a lot of theatre, and she easily shows up everyone else in this film, not unlike Michael Gambon or any of these British stage actors who sometimes do us the great service of lowering themselves to the level of Hollywood tripe.

It is hard to believe that the director who made Brazil, Baron Munchausen and Twelve Monkeys is making films like Tideland and The Brothers Grimm now. Gilliam has never been a bankable director who makes easy films, and that is OK. But there is definitely a whimsy, a charm and brutal satire that infused his earlier films and is lacking now. Tideland offers some intriguing visuals and it stimulates us to think or feel things we might rather not, but it doesn't do so in a very constructive way. It succeeds in creeping us out, but from someone as talented as Gilliam, we expect more.