"Children are not delicate. When they are dropped, more often than not, they bounce."
I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that I look faintly more ludicrous with the moustache than without it. What say y'all?

Odd evening yesterday. Headed out on my usual Oxford pickup and perusal of the week's comics. While there, I got a call from a Robyn on her way outta the doctor's office, so we settled on a place to meet up for dinner. We settled on "Zocalo's" (sp?), a somewhat trendy Mexican restaurant/open bar type area with mandatory valet parking. I got some assortment of enchiladas slathered in a red sauce.

Now, when I say red sauce, I don't mean your standard salsa or chili sauce, I mean a homogenous, thick, deep, deep blood red sauce, about the color of red play-dough. In taste it seemed to be made up of equal parts chili paste, water, chalk, and food coloring. Much later I determined that I think it was mole sauce, and the chalk I was tasting was the bittersweet of the cacao powder. I'm a little surprised that I haven't come across this particular sauce before, but I guess I've a simple palate and was always happy to stick with the red and green sauces.

Seriously... why would anyone put powdered bakers' chocolate in chili paste? Blech.

In order to walk off the Margarita assisting me in dealing with the remains of that stupid tension headache from Sunday night, we browsed around the area for a couple hours. However, the place wasn't real browse-and-walk friendly, being little more than a Starbuck's, four bars, and a couple restaurants. The only place that was really browser-attractive was the only bookstore, the local gay and lesbian bookstore (Outwright). Spent most of my time there thumbing through a coffee-table book of Andy Warhol's prints. (One of these days I'm gonna have to track down a book of his complete work so I can finally decide if I think he was full of shit or not. If his art is legit, it's high-minded enough I can't decipher any but the shallowest surface interpretation.) Amusingly, I'm pretty sure the place had a much smaller selection of Yaoi and Shonen-Ai than you could find at a typical Borders or Waldenbooks. (Also oddly absent were the more well known assortment of graphic novels with GLBT perspectives... like "Strangers in Paradise.") Had I been thinking, I would've looked for KDTunstall's album (remarkably catchy tunes), but I can never remember albums I want when I'm actually in a store that sells them.

Eventually headed over to Videodrome, discovering on the way that a) the valet parking at Zocalo's has a minimum tip of 5$ (well... guess where I won't be eating again.) and b) no visit to the area is complete without a five minute rant from a crazy homeless person berating your car as you wait to turn into traffic.

Huh.

Welcome to the authentic Atlanta experience.

Videodrome is the best movie rental place I know of. One of my biggest regrets is not taking advantage of it more when I lived only a mile or two away from it. While they glancingly keep up-to-date with the mainstream video releases, their real attraction is the breadth of their material. Obscure animation (Soviet propaganda cartoons), hilarious re-releases (Gymkata!), foreign imports (Holy Mountain), foreign re-releases (Don't Torture a Duckling), trailer-trash horror (Pervert!), mixed in with political commentary, counter-culture art flicks (El Topo), documentaries of the truly insane, the whole nine yards. And that's just on their "new releases" wall. The shop itself is damn tiny, and though their ingenious stocking solution lets them make the most of it (a single DVD box holds call slips for every copy of that movie), the place can't possibly be as universal as the obscurity of their titles would seem to imply. I don't know how they vet which movies stay and which go, but the overall impression is that only the absolute classics, cult flicks, and the most obscure pieces stay, while the entire middle-ground is left to Blockbuster. Makes it the best place ever to just browse and trip over truly legendary films.

So we dig around in there for a bit (discovering, in the process, a copy of "THEM!" for $2 in the discard VHS bin), and come out with our selection for the night.


Our (read: my) selection for the evening, Terry Gilliam's "Tideland." Unfortunately, this will be a highly unfair review. My obsession with completeness of the viewing experience means y'all normally never have to worry if I was actually paying attention to the flick. In this case, however, I confess we talked over large portions of the dialogue, and we both spent a good deal of time berating the film as it was playing, as well as answering phones and the like. Basic sections of the story may be misunderstood here. Normally I'd never tolerate this. However, in this case I let it slide for two very good reasons.

1) The entire film hinges on the acting talents of someone we both found to be amazingly annoying. I might've let that slide and paid attention, but we were predisposed to dislike the girl because of her horrible acting job in the last film we saw her in, the visually beautiful waste of potential that was "Silent Hill." Yeah, the annoying little girl we spent the whole movie chasing after there gets center stage for 95% of this film. And this time she's sporting a hideous faux-twang.

2) Because ********************************************
(Sorry, not my story to tell.)

To understand how painful this review is for me, you have to realize that Terry Gilliam was responsible for Brazil, the greatest film ever made. I love Terry Gilliam's work with a vengeance and will defend against any unjust criticism of it viciously. Please note I said "unjust" criticism. As much as I love his work, I'll acknowledge the sizeable flaws in some of the finished films. For example, "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is a wonderful transgressive movie for children. Its elementary surrealism and narrative destruction are perfect for dumping a young mind in at the deep end... assaulting a child with the building blocks of real art by making them fight for simple comprehension. Simply put, it, along with Watership Down, is basic viewing material for properly fucking up a child's mind (to say nothing of the inclusion of a totally nude, barely legal (18) Uma Thurman as Aphrodite). However, it also suffers from some truly weird directorial decisions, childish tangents, and atrociously bad line delivery in parts. Viewed again as an adult, the film usually disappoints one's fond memories. (Time Bandits, on the other hand, remains largely endearing.)

So I admit that my favorite director is capable of mistakes. An admission unfortunately reinforced by "Tideland."

"Tideland" is the story of one seriously fucked up little girl. The fuck-uppedness originates with her parents, but a true schizophrenic personality born of the parental fuck-uppery blossoms into its own beast once her family's gone. In fact, the girl, Jeliza-Rose, is so thoroughly fucked-up and fucked-with that Terry Gilliam...

TERRY GILLIAM

...begins the film with a disclaimer. That's just unprecedented.

I really wish I knew if that disclaimer had been in place for the theatrical release, or if it was included at the insistence of the studio after the abysmal reception (rotten tomatoes gives it a 28%), explaining away the more disturbing situations and giving it more marketability via an "you just don't get it because you're not an artist" pretentious air.

Gilliam's disclaimer seems to be an extended admission that the film is a piece of personal exorcism for him, not in an "audience be damned" manner, but in a plea for understanding from an audience likely to turn away after things get too weird. The most important part is Gilliam's assertion that "children are not delicate. When they are dropped, more often than not, they bounce." That feels like something Gilliam would say, and likely reflects his real thoughts on the film, but has the unfortunate flavor of someone forced to dissipate the real impact of his movie by saying "don't worry, the kitten lives" so half the audience won't walk out.

Though we're first shown the 11-year-old Jeliza-Rose, fingers be-dolled, crawling into an overturned school bus to watch as firefiles are stirred up by the passing train, the story really begins with her family in their train-wreck of an apartment. Her dad (Jeff Bridges), Noah, is a minor rock star, but it's been many years since he's done more than drift in heroine-induced "vacations" or burst into her room to fill her in on the obsession of the moment (at this point it's the Jutland or "Tideland" of Denmark, where he fantasizes visiting during his heroine-induced vacations). Her mother is a diabetic sore of a human being, bed-bound and existing solely off of drugs, cigarettes, and chocolate bars, alternately slapping and coddling Jeliza, frequently in the same breath. It's left to Jeliza, naturally, to cook daddy's heroine, buy momma's cigarettes, and generally be the only functional human being in the house.

Ten minutes in, momma dies of a heart attack. Dad, deep in a drug-induced paranoia fugue, gets his daughter to help "bury" his wife in the bedsheets with all the things she loved (Jeliza sets-to with all eagerness, happy to get some of momma's chocolate), but he has to be dissuaded from a "proper Viking burial"; burning the wrapped body and probably the apartment. Fearing repercussions of the body's eventual discovery, Noah sweeps up his daughter and a suitcase full of clothes, and the two take the greyhound out to "grandma's." (I don't think it was ever clear if it was his grandfather or Jeliza's.) The house is a huge 3-story structure in the midst of a sea of wheat, somewhere in the heartland. The rolling plains conceal any signs of neighbors, and anything else that might be out there. Grandma, however, is long gone, leaving the place is a dusty wreck, obscene graffiti covering the walls, and infested with squirrels.

Off the damn Greyhound and home a full hour, dad has Jeliza-Rose prepare another vacation for him...

...and he overdoses.

We're twenty minutes into the movie.

Talking about what comes next is difficult, because it's hard to find the proper narrative perspective. Jeliza doesn't realize that her dad is dead, not even in the most basic an-11-year-old-would-understand way (still oblivious when he starts stinking and is infested with flies), because her schizophrenia, lurking in the background until now, explodes into full bloom. Over the next day or two, living happily off of a jar of peanut butter, Jeliza explores the house, playing dress-up and forever talking to her half-dozen doll-heads, supplying them with individualized voices. The gradual progression of her insanity is reflected in the way she slowly stops "providing" the voices for the dolls, and they begin speaking on their own and talking back to her. When frightened, she curls up on her father's lap to sleep. She hears the squirrels talking to her in a fast-paced garble, and later accuses her father of eating too much when his body begins to bloat.

Now, I love me a fucked up movie, and this is pretty fucked up. And I love Gilliam's work. But the girl is just hard to take. She can't act. Or she acts too much. I'm always unclear on those matters. Needless to say, she isn't acting exactly the right amount. She goes off on intentionally over-dramatized monologues, ad-libbing soap opera lines as she dresses up or debates with her doll heads (perched on her index fingers), speaking like a southern belle. In other words, for much of the movie, the acting is intentionally bad. (And I thought she was irritating when she was trying to act well.) I think I could've swallowed this flick more easily on mute with the subtitles turned on.

Even setting that aside, the film is kind of imaginatively bare. The interesting objects are a) the squirrel, and b) her dad, with a half point going to the doll heads. I'm used to a much denser field of play from Gilliam, but we spend about a half an hour playing with these couple toys before adding anything else.

When we do expand, it's through an encounter with Jeliza's neighbor. Janet McTeer plays Dee, a highly eccentric woman so deathly afraid of bees (allergic) that she wears a black bee-keeper's netted hat, gloves, and enclosed glasses all the time. Dee, though verbally abusing Jeliza (who perceives Dee as a ghost, and thus flatly tells her "you're dead"), still fills Jeliza-Rose in on her history. Apparently, during her youth as a "flower child" Dee set fire to her mother's beehives, and the bees subsequently swarmed the mother, stinging her to death. Since then, Dee is convinced the bees wish to exact further revenge upon her.

Jeliza is so overjoyed that Dee would talk to her that the next day she dresses to the nines (creepily making herself look like one of her dolls) and tromps over to visit Dee's house. Each visit (there are several) is something of a false start. One time she spies the way Dee "pays" for her weekly groceries, an event that Jeliza and her dolls sneak into the house to observe, meaning Jeliza-Rose gets fucked-up in the strictly Freudian sense as well. Another time she meets Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), Dee's brother. Dickens is a child-like mentally retarded man, claiming to have been partially lobotomized (hence the enormous scar across his skull). Dickens is too tender-hearted to kill the rabbits he traps for their dinner, so Dee cruelly manipulates him by withholding food. Dickens, however, constantly sneaks off to play in his "submarine" (a tent filled with random junk) and pretend at being a "shark hunter" hunting the "super shark." Less completely delusional than Jeliza, but too confused and retarded to register that Jeliza isn't exactly "playing," they become fast friends, putting pennies and shotgun shells on the railroad tracks. Dickens even shows her his secret "atom bomb," something that will wipe out everything on earth... take everything all away and finally kill the super-shark. It's a half-dozen sticks of dynamite he's swiped from a local strip-mining operation.

Eventually, however, Dee visits Jeliza's home. Jeliza-Rose, surprised by Dee, hallucinates a redux of Alice, falling down an enormously long rabbit-hole as doll heads and hypodermic needles float by. Dee, we presume, brought the unconscious girl home and there found Noah, rotting away in a rocking chair on the living room. Being the neighborly type, Dee did the only thing that a crazy neighbor could do when they find a rotting corpse in your house.

She taxidermy'd it.

Wow... if that family ran a motel, I can think of a good name for it. (There's even an explicit reference to the movie.)

Jeliza wanders downstairs just as Dee is slitting Noah up the belly and scooping out the rotting innards. When Jeliza eventually recovers and she's processed all of this, she happily joins Dee and Dickens in a grand spring cleaning, dusting, scrubbing, repainting all the walls brilliant, sterile white, and preparing a huge dinner. She even assists Dee with her father's preservation, contributing (per Dee's instructions) something very dear to her for her father to be well again. Naturally, Jeliza chooses two of her favorite doll heads, and, ignoring their pleas, tosses them into her father's hollow belly, where Dee sews them in.

Dee, naturally, wouldn't have done all this for just anyone. It seems that Dee and Noah had a thing way back before Jeliza, and Dee is absolutely enraptured that Noah has come back to her now. (There's a lot of necrophilia implied here, in the depths of Dee's own schizophrenia.) Dee is preserving Noah for when Jesus returns and restores him to life. (If he's buried then he's "gone totally forever.") Fortunately, Dee's good at this, having extensive experience with taxidermy work. Even some experience with humans, having preserved her own bee-stung mother years ago, and keeping her in the bedroom shrine. Not to be left out, Dickens also has strong feelings about Jeliza's family, having been sexually abused as a child by Jeliza's grandmother.

Not fucked up enough yet?

Having prepared a sumptuous feast of pastries, lemonade, rabbit, and vegetables, the whole "family" sits down in the newly whitewashed dining room around the pristine repast with "father" Noah positioned at the head of the table in what can only be a direct reference to the "family dinner" scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Whoa.

After the near ceremonial dinner, Dee and Dickens go home. Then things get even more fucked up. After hallucinating a scene where her mother's corpse is re-animated inside her father's hollow wire-and-mesh ribcage by using one of the doll heads and a "new brain given to her by Jesus," Jeliza comes to a decision. The eleven-year old begins trying to seduce the twenty-five year-old Dickens during his visits. What precisely Jeliza thinks she's doing wasn't really clear, as we were pretty deep into the "'the HELL?" mode of ridicule by this point, but the culmination is a disturbing and clumsy (but fortunately fully clothed) bedroom scene between Dickens and Jeliza next to the preserved corpse of Dickens' Mom. (Mother's day special!) Dee walks in on them, and in the confusion and violence Jeliza kicks dear ol' mom's face in, and runs.

Let's see... Dee's pretty much taken over the "mother figure" position by putting Jeliza's house in order and lusting after dead Noah, which makes Dickens Jeliza's brother, which makes their relations incest... did I miss anything?

The film ends in a train wreck.

No no... I mean a literal train wreck. Dickens finally slays his "super shark," using those sticks of dynamite on the train tracks. At least, we assume that's the case, as we never see Dickens after the terrific explosion. Jeliza-Rose, dressed up in found clothes, wanders through the night to the crushed assembly of passenger cars. There she idles among the injured and dying, catching a glimpse of Dee, in a panic, hunting for her brother. The film ends as the train officials and one woman in particular think Jeliza's been orphaned by the wreck, and we're left to assume she's taken from that place, as her eyes dissolve in a swarm of fireflies (exit graphic).

It's hard to admit my own ambivalence towards this film. As I've mentioned above, I'm a big fan of Gilliam's work, but this flick is atypical for him on many levels. First, the sets and environment are somewhat imaginatively barren, the wheat fields serving as a sea that blanks out any features other than the two island-like houses. In spite of the deliriously whacked characters in the homes, much less attention is given to those environments in comparison to the crazily elaborate worlds he's created elsewhere (Brazil, Munchausen, Time Bandits). The annoyance factor of the little girl cannot be underestimated, either. Fully 60% of the film is spent watching her and her alone, so her grating acting and accent must be endured to even get through the flick.

Worst of all, however, is how closely the film apes a story I'd always wanted to tell, and seeing how badly Gilliam crashed and burned with it just makes me despair of managing anything better. It wasn't the same story, of course, but rather the gathering of themes and concepts that bear a startling resemblance.

'cept it's not exactly those concepts either.

See, on the most surface level "Tideland" is about Jeliza's schizophrenia, but also the inherent schizophrenia of youth and "pretend" as a young mind tries to come to grips with the complex and equally insane ideas of adulthood. In the film Jeliza's suddenly forced to deal with very adult issues, such as death, love, and sex (insofar as she understands it). Her education is conducted via completely insane adults (first her drugged-out parents, then the necrophiliac, paranoid, and abusive Dee), while she gravitates towards the adult who is still a child, and the only truly kind person in the film. Dickens, however, is something of a false idol, as his child-like nature and inability to become an adult is a crippling handicap, not an advantage.

Though SFX are drastically under-used in comparison to Gilliam's other works, their brief appearance here is always in the form of Jeliza-Rose's attempts to re-mold and comprehend the insane world she's found herself in. If we add Gilliam's disclaimer to this mix, then the film is apparently about the astonishing resiliency of children's minds as they are forced into the insane adult world... how, one day, everything just stops making sense. They have to comprehend people and the world on a completely different level, one where the stakes are very high, and even success, the acquiescence to the insanity, seems confusing and unappealing.

It's a film about the awakening of a child from a wonderful dream into a terrifying, insane reality, and how the child has to consume and cope with this new world.

(Undoubtedly, there's other layers to this film, but unraveling that would require more intimate knowledge of the film, and a much closer look than our increasingly derisive take on it the first time through.)

It's several of these themes that I always wanted to tell a story about. The lack of a fantastical "childlike innocence was right all along!" revelation. The absence of anything resembling traditional plot direction and goals... where you honestly can never tell where the story is going or how it will end. The violation of the family unit as symbolic of the breaking of all foundations of stability and reality. The creation of a new perception totally alien to anything that's been conceived before, and the building of a unique mythology from the ground up. True internal perspective of a slow descent into madness.

And on an even more basic level, there's something about the way the story concept is built that feels familiar. The barren-ness of the world that lets us examine these characters against a blank canvas, like we would a quirky gewgaw dug out of the back of a drawer, observation slowly revealing their fucked-up nature; assembling monstrous, yet nuanced, unique characters. It's like witnessing the first time a character archetype is formed. Even true archetype originating stories, like Dracula, cannot be read today as they originally were, because layman knowledge of vampires and Transylvania equips us with preconceived impressions of how the story will proceed, and what manner of monster we face. Even stories that controvert those clichéd standards are still acting in direct relation to them, and thus are entering into a dialogue with prior or subsequent works. But this... this is pure, tabula rasa invention.

And in "Tideland" it fails. It doesn't even fail spectacularly, it just gets boring and irritating enough to make you want to be doing something else, meaning you're driven away by the fucked-uppery instead of being pulled in, making the eventual denouement either shocking and reprehensible or incoherent and random. In short, the director set himself a massive storytelling challenge, and couldn't meet it.

As much as it pains me to admit, this film I really can't recommend. Gilliam completists will need to see this, but everyone else will be driven away by the girl's annoying acting, and the more boring initial segments will drown interest in all but the most dedicated viewers before we even get into the really fucked up parts where the point of the film is revealed. It's an ambitious failure.