stay away #2

stay away from tideland, the latest film from terry gilliam.

dammit terry, you directed 12 monkeys and the fear and loathing adaptation. you directed baron munchasen. you make visually stunning, strange, stubbornly independent movies. i am supposed to like tideland.

i had read that this movie was controversial and that critics seemed to either love it or hate it. every time the controversial nature of the film was referenced somewhere, it came with mention of the drug use in the movie: the main character is a young girl who helps her father with the administration of his heroin dose. the shooting-up isn't really that big a component of the film, but from what i had read, you would surmise that this was the controversial bit of tideland. no problem, right?

a terry gilliam film shrouded in controversy, by its sheer weirdness and by drug-use scenes. sounds right up my alley, yes?

dammit terry. im supposed to like tideland.

i love confounding, weird-ass movies, the type where you need to watch it several times to really pick up on whats going on. i love 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind', 'donnie darko', 'waking life', that type of thing. these movies have taught me patience, and eventually each one rewarded that patience.

tideland starts out with some trademark sprawling-visual gilliam fare. soon though, we are in isolation with our main character, and the story just stalls.

my girlfriend and i made maybe 4 different attempts to watch the rest of the movie. god it is boring. i tried to be patient, and find something in the movie to latch onto, to keep my interest peaked. i came up empty.

the last time porsche and i tried to get through the film, we got pretty close by my reckoning. i was committed, very committed, to finish this damn thing. i felt like maybe the last 5 minutes or whatever would *PLEASE DEAR GOD* tie the wretched thing together.

so we're in this movie watching a little girl hang out with a lobotomized hill-person, playing make believe about submarines and sharks while they stumble around the desert. the hill person's hill-person mother has mummified the main character's father, and they are all kind of a make-shift family at this point. i feel like ive taken a lot of psychic lumps from mr gilliam to stay with the movie up to this point.

then the hill-person and the little girl start making out. then she basically asks him to show her his penis.

then tideland comes out of my dvd player and back to the rental store.

dammit terry, i am supposed to like this movie.