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Author Topic: Toronto Film Festival premiere
sienel Posted: 26-Jul-05 17:57
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It's just been announced that Tideland will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

"The world premiere of Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND (Canada/UK) has been added to Masters. This adaptation of Mitch Cullin's classic cult novel brings the audience into the fantasy world of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the young narrator, who drifts from the harsh reality of her childhood to escape into the fantasies of her own active imagination. The cast includes Janet McTeer, Brendan Fletcher, Jeff Bridges, and Jennifer Tilly."


Also of interest...

"Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's mockumentary BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (UK), a world premiere, has been added to Visions. The film tells the story of conjoined twins (played by Luke and Harry Treadaway), plucked from obscurity in the 1970s by a music promoter who grooms them into a seminal link between "classic" rock and punk."

http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/mediaCentre_releaseItem.asp?id=130

[Edited by sienel on 26-Jul-05 17:57]
 
Tim Posted: 27-Jul-05 05:06
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Is anyone on the messageboard going to attend? Phil? Would be great to hear a report back.
 
ccjonesiv Posted: 27-Jul-05 05:50
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Will this be open to the public, or is it an isolated event?

I'm not familiar with film festival entries, whether it's invite only, or you have to pay a few hundred to get in.

-cc
 
sienel Posted: 27-Jul-05 15:56
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Assuming that things are like last year, there will most likely be two screenings (possibly three - schedule doesn't come out until late August), both of which will be open to the general public.

First dibs on tickets go to people who have purchased passes/coupon books in advance (these are currently on sale at the TIFF site (www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/ - the site has been a bit wonky lately, so you may not be able to get on at the moment).

Single tickets will go on sale starting Sept 7th. - CA$18.23 according to the site.

I'll be heading to the festival, so hopefully will be able to get in to see the movie.
 
phildreams Posted: 27-Jul-05 23:25
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I've heard the Tideland premiere is on Sept 9th. I could do with a trip to Toronto, an old pal of mine lives over there and he'd put me up. Great place for eating out. I will have to start a campaign to get an expenses-paid trip over to the festival.
Phil
 
crunchysquirrel Posted: 28-Jul-05 07:50
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I'm going to the festival for the first time this year and cheered when I heard Tideland was coming, but the premiere on the 9th has me a little worried, since I don't arrive until the 10th. Maybe someone who's attended in previous years could tell me: they usually stagger the two showings, right? The second one should be the 11th or 12th, right?

I don't want to sound pleading, but seeing Tideland, with Gilliam in attendance--well, I don't have to explain how amazing that would be to anyone around here.

Chris
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 28-Jul-05 21:58
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How I wish I could attend this. Too far away and too poor. Drats! Phil, please do give us a full report if you make it there. Or anyone else for that matter.
 
sienel Posted: 31-Jul-05 01:08
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"The second one should be the 11th or 12th, right?"


No guarantees. The second screening wouldn't be on the 9th, but it could be on the 10th.
 
sienel Posted: 30-Aug-05 17:13
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The dates for Tideland:
Fri 9th, 6pm, Elgin/Visa Screening Room
Wed 14th, 1:15pm, Paramount

The dates for Piano Tuner of Earthquakes:
Fri 9th, 9:30pm, Paramount
Sun 11th, 5:30pm, Jackman Hall/AGO
Thurs 15th, 10am, Cumberland

The dates for Brothers of the Head:
Sat 10th, 10pm, Paramount
Mon 12th, 2pm, Paramount
Fri 16th, 9:15pm, Varsity

 
vance Posted: 31-Aug-05 20:19
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To follow up on the links from above to the Toronto Film Fest Web site, I took a look at the page they have for Tideland and was very impressed by the description they gave of the story:
http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/films_description.asp?id=281

Very well written and it has made me even more excited about seeing this film than I already was. It also made me wonder how comparable it might be in theme to Linda Barry's novel 'Cruddy' - has anyone else read that?

Curious thing though - in the brief bio of Gilliam at the bottom of the page they list every one of his films except for Brothers Grimm. That's a bit odd and I wonder if, for whatever reason, the ommision was intentional.

Anyhow, if anyone here is attending the premier then best wishes for a great trip and please don't be shy about posting comments soon after to satisfy our curiosity!
 
Alford Posted: 10-Sep-05 05:54
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OK, the premiere screening was tonight at 6:00, nearly six hours ago. Anyone see it?!

 
brendon Posted: 10-Sep-05 19:47
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Here's the first review I came across:

Tideland (2005) Terry Gilliam 2 out of 5
- A huge disappointment from Gilliam, a grating and un-involving misfire about a young girl's fantasy life which results from the death of her parents. The hammy and over-the-top performances didn't help much, and despite a rather interestingly morbid turn of events late in the film, I was too bored to care at that point. (BM)
Director Gilliam, producer Jeremy Thomas, novelist Mitch Cullin and cast Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly, Brendan Fletcher, Jodelle Ferland and others were in attendance.

From: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/tiff.htm
 
JonBowerbank Posted: 11-Sep-05 09:18
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Don't think I could trust a review from "dvdbeaver.com"

Looking forward to more reviews
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 11-Sep-05 09:39
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Here's yet a second review from DVDBeaver reported in their Toronto International Film Festival Log, and this one seems to counter the first one:

"Tideland (Terry Gilliam) – This is a much smaller film than Gilliam is accustomed to making, and I think it worked wonders for him. A Canadian production, this twisted little tale tells the heartbreaking story of a young girl (10 yr. old Jodelle Ferland, in brilliant performance) who is forced to take care of her drug addicted parents, even going so far as to help them shoot-up. She escapes this nightmarish home life by retreating into her imagination, and the film becomes a Gilliamesque “Alice in Wonderland” of sorts. Filled with a cast of eccentric characters, and some stunning camerawork, this is a welcome return to the imaginative filmmaking of the Terry Gilliam of old. 4 stars out of 5 (AL)"

[Edited by Shawn Lee on 11-Sep-05 09:46]
 
Kirkinson Posted: 11-Sep-05 10:04
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>>Don't think I could trust a review from "dvdbeaver.com"<<

I'd just like to voice my support of this web site. Despite their name, they are far and away the most venerable DVD review site on the internet, and they are devoutly committed to cinematic art. Their speciality is comparing releases from different countries to make sure those interested in foreign films can find the best version possible for their money.

Take a look at their Brazil review for illustration:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare/brazil.htm
Or Jules & Jim for an example of their near-obsessive dedication:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews14/julesetjim.htm
Or practically any review at random:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/masterlist.htm

Now that I have a region-free player, I consider them an invaluable resource when I'm shopping for DVDs from other countries. Remember, you can't always judge an organization by their name. Let's not forget Gilliam's own "Poo Poo Productions"!
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 11-Sep-05 12:42
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This is from Canada's Cinematical site:

"Toronto Dispatch: The festival director, Piers Handling, introduces Gilliam to introduce the film, followed by the producer, screenwriter, author, cinematographer and then the cast. On hand were Brendan Fletcher who turns in a great performance, Jennifer Tilly, Jeff Bridges, and 10-year-old Canadian Jodelle Ferland, whom Terry has to lift off the floor so she can speak into the mic to say “Hi”. Aww, how cute…well, actually it was pretty cute, she seemed very excited.
Gilliam starts off with basically a warning that this film is more “out there” than anything he’s done before, and as he’s introducing the writers he suggests if we don’t like the film we can blame them and finishes saying he hopes we enjoy the screening, which he quickly retracts and edits that he hopes we will get through it. Needless to say, I think he was a little concerned how the film would be received. And there is some just cause for this concern; while I found the film extremely easy to follow, there are definitely some uneasy scenes. But the result is what I believe to be a wonderful film as told through the eyes of a little girl with such an overactive imagination she can get through situations of death, mental handicap, drug abuse and poverty without batting an eye. This young charismatic actress is amazing and carries the whole film. Watch out Dakota Fanning, you’re about to get eaten whole! And then there’s the cinematography… the camera placement? Brilliant, I say."

If you go to the link and scroll down there's a picture of Gilliam and the other Tidelanders on stage together:
http://www.cinematical.com/2005/09/11/toronto-dispatch-takeshis-tidel
and-shopgirl/

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 11-Sep-05 13:57
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Dark Horizon's chimes in on their Toronto Film Festival Report:

"Tideland: After his disappointing Brothers Grimm, idiosyncratic visionary Terry Gilliam takes on a twisted and macabre Alice in Wonderland of sorts, with his Tideland, which he shot while taking a break from directing Grimm. In this cinematic odyssey, a young girl named Jeliza-Rose is transported to her grandparents' farm following her mother's drug overdose. Once there, she embarks on a fantastic voyage into a world of bog men and disembodied Barbie heads, following the added drug overdose of her father. It would be fair to say, that Tideland is unlikely to do well in America's Midwest. It is a fractured, bizarre and totally strange film that audiences will either embrace or detest. There is unlikely to be much of a middle ground, but then it seems that's the way Gilliam likes it. A complete original, even his detractors have to meet that in his own way, he's a genius. It's easy to define Gilliam's latest film as Alice in Wonderland on crack, and it partly is, but it is also a ravishingly beautiful work, featuring a dazzling performance by 10-year old Jodelle Ferland, who gives the kind of mature performance that few veteran actors could hope to deliver. She is quite the find. One can forgive the film's disjointed quality, because it remains an ambitious and visually arresting piece, and a film that indeed defines Gilliam as a truly original voice."

Link: http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/050911e.php

[Edited by Shawn Lee on 11-Sep-05 13:58]
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 03:56
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Another review of TIDELAND from BlogT.O. at the Toronto Internatial Film Festival (WARNING: MIGHT BE SOME SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO DIDN'T READ THE BOOK):

"The greatest trick ever pulled in childrens' literature was by Lewis Carroll, who somehow managed to write (in Alice) a story that is fundamentally disturbing and obeys none of the traditional rules of storytelling, and yet is fully embraced by society as one of the great tracts of writing for the very young ever put to page. Was Alice ever really intended for children, given its inherent moral darkness and pre-Freudian subtexts? Who knows? Alice is such a genre-defining work that it, of course, slipped completely outside genre and became its own. Tideland is a film like that. I have never seen anything like it, and I doubt I ever will again. It is profoundly disturbing, upsetting, frightening, and wonderful. It is beyond itself: Tideland transcends.

Like Alice (and Tideland makes glances in her direction too numerous to count), this film essentially obeys none of the traditional rules of storytelling. There is no real "narrative" here, nor is there any ostensible sense of reality in the world we are visiting. We can catch glimpses towards the real world here and there; they are like distant anchors that, as an audience, we flail towards, in a desperate attempt to ground ourselves during Tideland's weird journey. If you are very lucky, at some point during the film you stop waiting for it to make some kind of conventional sense, and truly let yourself go inside. Then it all just washes over you, and you understand: you're in it, you're living it, it's real. You're in the flow of the water, and it is pulling you along. Or to use the touchstone yet again, the rabbit hole goes deep. And I'll say it one more time, because it is an important point: there has never been anything like this.

Tideland is horrible and wonderful and beautiful and upsetting and just so very unsettling. It tells of a young girl with the impossibly beautiful name of Jeliza-Rose, who is played by an impossibly beautiful young actress named Jodelle Ferland, with such complete ownership that, frankly, I never want to see Ferland appear in another movie for as long as she lives. She will be Jeliza-Rose for me for the rest of time. This is a performance by a child of ten that is beyond all acting, all performance craft. If everything else in Tideland is a stylized fantasy, Jeliza-Rose is unsettlingly real.

Jeliza-Rose's mother (Jennifer Tilly) dies in a paroxysm of alcoholic desperation at the beginning of the picture; ten minutes later, her father (Jeff Bridges) dies too, but only after having transplanted Jeliza-Rose to a farmhouse in the middle of a vast, deserted prairie. Now alone with a father she doesn't know has died, Jeliza-Rose proceeds to interpret the universe she has been dropped in. That is all that this picture is: two hours of a little girl interpreting the world she has been given, as only a little girl can. We never step out of Jeliza-Rose's worldview; we are never given cogent explanations for any of the things we see. After a point, director Terry Gilliam even stops explaining which things are really happening and which are out-and-out fantasies. Everything blends, because reality is no longer important. If it's real to the girl, it's real to us.

Like the best of childrens' literature, the ride is not pretty or even entertaining; it is in fact profoundly disturbing. The initial innocence of Jeliza-Rose's attempts to play house (albeit with the rotting, farting corpse of her father) eventually give way to greater and greater terrors. There's a local one-eyed crone, Dell, who roams the hills creating trouble; there's a neighbouring man with the intelligence of a 6-year-old, Dickens, who wants to destroy the train that occasionally passes through the prairie, believing it to be a shark. There's a fleet of dolls' heads that Jeliza-Rose plays with who slowly, unnervingly become real characters; Gilliam begins favouring them with close-ups and quietly stops showing Jeliza-Rose's lips moving while making them speak to her. Suddenly, the little girl's inner chorus is speaking for itself, and we are afraid. She's growing up, or going mad, or both.

The vaguest notions of sexuality are eventually introduced, and the film becomes even darker and angrier; sex is a witch's trick, as Jeliza-Rose discovers when she spies Dell fornicating grotesquely with the delivery boy to get a break on the fees. Jeliza-Rose and Dickens enter into a kind of romance that only children - or people with the mental capacity of children - can have, each of them vaguely aware of the greater significance of the sexuality they are playing around with, but unwilling to fully associate it with the world of adults. The overtones are ferociously complex, as the skies themselves darken and adulthood thunders along the horizon in the form of that shark-like train.

Finally, after two full hours of this stream-of-consciousness fable of darkness, Jeliza-Rose's world must destroy itself and order must be restored - an apocalypse of titanic fury that is so well-managed that it literally left me shaking as I was leaving the theatre. Terry Gilliam is rapidly becoming a rarity among filmmakers: a man with too many masterpieces. He's had at least three before, and he throws another onto the pile with Tideland. His command of visual craft is absolutely unparalleled in this outing; he has invented, and rendered, an entire fantasy universe that has never existed in this form before. He has made something that both filled me up with joy and ripped me apart with profound fear, because somehow, Tideland feels like a depiction of every dream and nightmare I have ever had, or might yet have. This is a film unlike any other I have ever seen, and I will never forget its blissful, terrifying spell. Tideland is real."

Link: http://www.blogto.com/toronto_film_festival_2005/2005/09/tideland_ter
ry_gilliam_rules_tiff/

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 04:12
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From GreenCine Daily's Toronto Dispatch 2, by NPR contributor David D'Arcy:

"Every year I come to the Toronto International Film Festival in the hope that I'll be surprised by a film made in Canada. I already have been this time. Terry Gilliam's Tideland takes on the worn notion of an epic within a child's head, and turns it into something logistically grand and ambitious, and seems to have been made without much concern for its commercial possibilities. I wish him and his investors well. The film does not yet have a distributor.

The film is one of many adaptations of novels at Toronto this year, this one from the novel of the same name by Mitch Cullin. The book is a child's picaresque interior monologue that might seem un-filmable. (Many may still feel that way after seeing its world premiere in Toronto last night.)

I'm not so sure, but Tideland is nothing if not challenging. It's the story of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the wise daughter of two drugged-out rockers who are now retired into full-time stupor in a house cluttered with every kind of object. That plenitude of ephemera is the fertile soil for this child's near-infinite imagination, which is really the subject of the book and the film. Her father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), is a retired bawdy bad-ass star who has his daughter shoot him up for a "vacation." Her nasty mother (Jennifer Tilly) now worries about varicose veins and has fallen into an addiction that combines drugs with candy bar binges. Jeliza-Rose is their full-time nurse, although the only drug in her medicine chest seems to be heroin. There's a chorus that observes it all - a group of dolls whose heads were removed from their bodies long ago. They might be angels, or they might be Gilliam's homage to the tradition of all the Chuckie scare-flicks. Tideland is full - and I mean full - of what look like homages. They're endless - just think of the title, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

When the mother dies of an OD, father and daughter set out on a bus for his family home on the prairie - an odyssey, with emphasis on odd. We're not told exactly where, but the film was shot in Saskatchewan. (Jodell Ferland is Canadian - remember that anything Canadian is big here.)

I won't give the story away - trying to figure it out is one of Tideland's many challenges - but once Noah and Jeliza-Rose reach their crumbling house on the prairie, Noah nods into eternity from an injection administered lovingly by his daughter, and she's on her own, with her dolls, a half-wit named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher, another Canadian) in swim gear (the fool on the heath?) and his sister, Dell, who's dressed like a witch.

Death and the anticipation of death are all over this film, as is the enigma of innocence in a soiled world of surrender to temptation - or whether there is such a thing as innocence. Also everywhere are dolls, grimy lace, rocks, stuffed animals, bodily fluids and just plain dirt that made me think of Alice and Wonderland outfitted from the prop room of Delicatessen. The parallels are endless, from Psycho in the old house to anything by Lewis Carroll, to the most commercial of haunted house horror.

Gilliam doesn't hold back - the final scene could make this movie hard to market - again, I won't give it away. But if you ever thought you were the victim of deep inner drives that you could not understand, this film will confirm your feelings, as Jeliza-Rose wades through the debris that Gilliam seems to be telling us is consciousness, already littered beyond repair for a child of ten. The fact that this film is two hours long doesn't make it any more lucid. Just bear in mind that the film is shot on the lyrical grassy prairie, so your eyes do get lots of relief from the tawdry interiors. If you can't enjoy that, blame Canada.

That said, Bridges and Tilly are quirky fun, and Jodelle Ferland is a delight - confident, composed, impish and sly. The extraordinary kid is now all of ten years old. It's the ultimate cliché to say that we'll be seeing a lot more of her, but we will."

Link: http://daily.greencine.com/archives/001191.html

[Edited by Shawn Lee on 12-Sep-05 04:13]
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 04:30
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From The A.V. Club blog, by Noel Murray:

"Toronto Part II: The Big Flinch
What do you do when a filmmaker you like makes a movie you think might be brilliant, but you absolutely despise it? Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is, at the least, about a dozen times more imaginative and deeply felt than The Brothers Grimm, which suffered from pervasive plainness. But Tideland is so damned unpleasant, and not necessarily in a “take this trip through the dark so you can appreciate the light” kind of way. It’s the story of a pre-teen girl who takes care of her heroin-addicted parents and--through a series of tragedies--winds up living alone in an abandoned house in the middle of a field, where her only company is her collection of severed doll heads and her childlike, brain-damaged adult neighbor. In any other hands, this story and script might’ve been completely unbearable--one of those indie gothics where human behavior has been rendered completely unrecognizable. It’s unrecognizable in Tideland too, but at least Gilliam doesn’t try to make the freaks adorable, or stubbornly noble. This is a full-on gallery of grotesques, engaged in behavior that ranges from merely odd to completely disgusting. The movie examines how a child’s inner world gets corrupted by her squalid outer world, and Gilliam doesn’t spare the squalor. Aside from the hauntingly beautiful final scene, and a moment in the middle where the wheat field becomes an ocean, nearly every flight of fantasy in Tideland is turbulent, jangled and frankly horrifying. No damn fun."

Link: http://avclub.com/content/node/40500
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 07:04
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From The Hollywood Reporter:

"Among the films that did not score home runs with Toronto audiences, buyers and journalists were Abel Ferrara's religious diatribe "Mary," starring Matthew Modine and Juliette Binoche; "Brothers of the Head," starring twins Luke and Harry Treadaway in a mock U.K. punk rock docu from the directors of "Lost in La Mancha"; Sidney Kimmel Entertainment's magic realism fable "Neverwas" (another Eckhart starrer); and New Zealand's "Little Fish," starring Cate Blanchett as a recovering heroin addict. Terry Gilliam's "Tideland" provoked some of the strongest negative reactions. Told from the surreal point of view of the daughter of two junkies, played by Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly, it inspired some 30 walkouts halfway through a press and industry screening."

Link: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_
id=1001096372

 
Bruttenholm Posted: 12-Sep-05 08:17
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A very first and very positive review on aintitcoolnews.com :
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=21231
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 09:32
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Excerpt from The Boston Globe:







SPOILER WARNING!!!








"And then there was Terry Gilliam's ''Tideland," a movie about which its own director told the world premiere audience, '' 'Enjoy' is maybe not the right word, but I hope you survive the film." If it was transgression you were looking for, this one had it by the boatload: Jeff Bridges as a junkie rock star dad who overdoses early on, rots on-screen, then is skinned and tanned; exploding Amtrak trains; talking doll heads; hints of pedophilia; and a young girl who escapes her hellish existence by treating it as the stuff of fairy tale. The movie's a classic case of a gifted filmmaker's obsessions finally sailing over the edge and taking him along, but as the prairie Candide at the movie's center, 10-year-old Jodelle Ferland has a talent to make Fanning call her agent in alarm."


Link: http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2005/09/12/at_toronto_film_f
est_the_buzz_is_building/?page=3

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 17:28
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From Panix.com, whatever that is:


MAYBE SOME SPOILER CONTENT...








"Tideland (Terry Gilliam, UK/Canada): 51
Not the disaster most people will claim, but not very good, either, I'm afraid. So long as he sticks to the little girl and her decapitated Barbies and the putrefying corpse of her father (no kidding), Gilliam conjures a genuinely disturbing portrait of childhood solipsism; unfortunately, the supporting characters unleash his penchant for unrestrained grotesquerie, repeatedly breaking the spell. Still, I'd sooner revisit this dank, morbid semi-fiasco than endure a second round of Grimm's hectic pyrotechnics -- better Gilliam on steroids than Gilliam on autopilot. Absolutely gorgeous ending, and where the hell did he find that kid?"

Link: http://www.panix.com/~dangelo/tiff05.html
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 12-Sep-05 18:08
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From ScreenDaily.com (Allan Hunter in Toronto):

"Dir: Terry Gilliam. UK-Can. 2005. 121mins.

Terry Gilliam has spent his entire career celebrating the power of the imagination to transcend the awful realities of life and death. He has described Mitch Cullin’s Tideland as “Alice In Wonderland meets Psycho” and it sounds like ideal material for him.

Unfortunately, this macabre, longwinded fantasy is closer in tone to the uninvolving grotesquerie of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas than the charm of The Fisher King. It’s hard to see a general audience having the patience for a film whose appeal will be strictly limited to a hardcore of Gilliam fans.

The film begins by quoting Lewis Carroll and maintains the Alice In Wonderland connections throughout as characters disappear down a rabbit hole and individuals appear who could be seen as distortions of the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter.

Jeliza-Rose (Ferland) is the little girl with a powerful imagination. She has built a whole fantasy world around her conversations with four severed dolls’ heads and the journeys she takes in her mind. This is a vital survival mechanism as both her parents are junkies and she regularly prepares and administers their fixes.

When her mother (Tilly) dies, her rock star father Noah (Bridges) decides to take her on a trip to a dilapidated old house in the vast emptiness of sprawling golden cornfields.

Here, she meets the black-garbed Dell (McTeer) who has been blinded in one eye by a bee and her brother Dickens (Fletcher), a mentally damaged young man who dresses in a wet suit and a pair of Speedos and claims to be in search of a monster shark. They provide further fuel for her increasingly lurid fantasies as her life becomes more bizarre than any fiction she might be able to concoct.

The character of Jeliza-Rose appears in every scene of Tideland and has to carry large stretches of the film on her own. It would be an exceptional burden to place on an experienced adult performer and really requires an outstanding child actor to make the film work.

Jodelle Ferland is wide-eyed and willing but doesn’t find the emotional shadings necessary to bring the character alive. Terrible things happen to Jeliza-Rose and she copes the best way she can but we don’t make the connection with her that would sustain or interest and compassion through what comes to seem an inordinately long film.

Jennifer Tilly is almost as overblown here as she is in the Child’s Play series and Jeff Bridges has what must be the most thankless role of his career. In the early stages of the film, he has the bedraggled look of a tired and emotional Nick Nolte and in the rest of the film he is merely a corpse in a chair, decaying, attracting flies and eventually being embalmed. Tucked up in bed or propped up at the dinner table, he is still considered a member of the family, just like Norman’s mother in Psycho.

Tideland does look very beautiful, with Nicola Pecorini capturing some striking images of cornfields and countryside and the camera constantly prowling and tilting to emphasis the way reality has become skewered. The craftsmanship is small compensation in a film that is too often merely weird and uninvolving."

Link: http://www.screendaily.com/story.asp?storyid=23315&r=true
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 13-Sep-05 13:54
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Excerpt from Film Telegraph's overview of the festival so far:

"Tideland is one of two Terry Gilliam films due out this year. The first, The Brothers Grimm, met with a hammering on its US release. But this is a much smaller and stranger kettle of fish - a grotesque rural fantasy about the imaginary world of a young girl (the remarkable Jodelle Ferland) with two drug addicts for parents.

To say that it won't be many people's cup of tea is putting it mildly - fun with desiccated corpses and some perilous paedophiliac frissons mean it wouldn't be many people's preferred draught of cyanide, frankly. But Gilliam's scuzzy, off-the-wall vision has its blackly comic moments."

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/09/13/bftor
13.xml&menuId=564&sSheet=/arts/2005/09/13/ixfilmmain.html

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 13-Sep-05 14:05
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Anyone getting the feeling that Tideland is going to get critically damned for the exact opposite reasons that Grimm got hammered?
 
brendon Posted: 13-Sep-05 15:50
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Of course.
 
Kirkinson Posted: 13-Sep-05 22:20
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Tideland is generating the sort of response I'd expect from a new Peter Greenaway film. I just hope it has an easier time finding a distributor than The Baby of Mâcon.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 14-Sep-05 16:07
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I know this is a bit off topic, but all of this mixed reaction to Tideland has gotten me interested in what others have said about Gilliam's earlier films. It seems that initial reactions are often unfavorable. For example, I had no idea that that turd with legs named Roger Ebert has pretty much disliked almost everything Gilliam has done. He's bound to hate Tideland, but here's some excerpts of his thoughts on other films by TG:

On Brothers Grimm--"Terry Gilliam's 'The Brothers Grimm' is a work of limitless invention, but it is invention without pattern, chasing itself around the screen without finding a plot. Watching it is a little exhausting. If the images in the movie had been put to the service of a story we could care about, he might have had something. But the movie seems like a style in search of a purpose."

On Fear & Loathing--"The result is a horrible mess of a movie, without shape, trajectory or purpose--a one joke movie, if it had one joke."

On The Fisher King--"'The Fisher King' is so charming it's hard to say when we notice it has no clothes. Individual sequences are bittersweet and moving, some of William's inventions are funny, there is no denying the originality and force of the Ruehl performance - and yet there comes a time when we cannot sustain one more manic outburst, one more flight of fancy, one more arbitrary twist of plot, one more revelation that the movie tricked us into caring about subjects it eventually throws away."

On The Adventures of Baron M.--"I wish only that Gilliam, who co-wrote the screenplay as well as directed, had been able to edit his own inspiration more severely as he went along. The movie is slow to get off the ground (the prologue in the theater goes on forever before we discover what it's about), and sometimes the movie fails on the basic level of making itself clear. We're not always sure who is who, how they are related, or why we should care. One of the things you have to do, when you fill a movie with extravagant fantasies, is to explain the story in clear and direct terms, so it doesn't fly apart with intoxication at its own exuberance."

On Brazil--"The movie is awash in elaborate special effects, sensational sets, apocalyptic scenes of destruction and a general lack of discipline. It's as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed - this time, heedless of sense."

On Time Bandits--"It's amazingly well-produced. The historic locations are jammed with character and detail. This is the only live-action movie I've seen that literally looks like pages out of Heavy Metal magazine, with kings and swordsmen and wide-eyed little boys and fearsome beasts. But the movie's repetitive, monotonous in the midst of all this activity. Basically, it's just a kid and six dwarfs racing breathlessly through one set piece after another, shouting at one another. I walked out of the screening in an unsettled state of mind."
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 14-Sep-05 16:14
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From CTV News:

"Known for his unique and fantastical approach to storytelling, director Terry Gilliam's latest feature, the low-budget Tideland, stays true to his style. But the director warns 'mature' audiences may not be able to see past its surface.

Adapted from the novel by Mitch Cullin, Gilliam has described his film as Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho. Visually, that is indeed an apt comparison, conjuring as the film does its unassuming house of horror nestled in the swaying sheaves of the Saskatchewan prairies.

The director credits the Canadian environment with providing a naturally perfect backdrop for Tideland, but Gilliam says the film's visual cues were -- unusually for him -- all drawn from a single source.

At a press conference in Toronto, Gilliam told reporters that when he read the book, the paintings of Andrew Wyeth sprang to mind. He only learned later that Cullin had also had Wyeth in mind when he first wrote the novel.

Looking at Wyeth's muted depictions of prairie desolation clearly explains why, unlike Gilliam's other films, Tideland is not crammed with his trademark chaotic visual signatures. Of course, the sets are dressed meticulously, but rather than fantastical contraptions, the scenes are filled with everyday bric-brac.

The film's take on normal -- drug-addicted parents raising an unusually attentive and mature pre-teen daughter, complete with all the personal tragedies and disasters you can imagine -- is a far cry from the average. But the expansive desolation of the prairie setting makes many of the crazy goings-on seem almost normal.

At its most literal, the film is a tale of drug abuse, child neglect and the ravages of loneliness. But Gilliam says to dwell on such themes is to miss the point.

"It's scary for adults and not for children," the sexagenarian director told reporters, explaining that lost innocence is the crucial difference.

"As an adult, with all the baggage you carry and the attitudes you have towards the world with all your fears, you're going to be in for a rough ride. But if you're like Jodelle -- young, innocent, good looking -- it's a very enjoyable ride."

Hugging the young star of his movie, Vancouverite Jodelle Ferland, Gilliam says he allowed her imagination to chart his course.

"At 64, I discovered the child within, and it was a nine-year-old girl," Gilliam said, laughing. "That was a bit of a shock."

Known as a creator of movies audiences either love or hate -- from his early work with Monty Python, through Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, and the current wide release The Brothers Grimm – Gilliam warns his latest could also split audiences.

"We didn't want to romanticize childhood, because there's so much of that about at the moment -- that childhood is this wonderful golden age where it's all going to be surrounded in fluffy cotton and soft colours -- that's an adult's idea of what it is. That's not the reality."

Instead, Ferland's character Jeliza-Rose inhabits a reality chock full of adult-sized problems. To cope, she runs free in her imagination, inventing friends and scenarios that some may dismiss as childish play. But again, Gilliam cautions that would be an oversimplification.

"She's reinventing all of the things around her to get her through, which is clearly a very disturbing situation," he said. "Everyone who's older has had more time to be scarred, to become disillusioned, lost. And she's the one that is still untouched."

Whatever the audience's interpretation of Tideland, there is no question Ferland carries the film with a performance well beyond her years.

In person, however, many of the assembled scribes are clearly disappointed when she turns out to be a regular, shy little girl.

When asked how whether playing the troubled Jeliza-Rose haunted her in real life, Ferland answers, matter-of-factly, that she never once found it scary. As for her preparation to play the girl and the numerous imaginary characters she both invents and voices convincingly throughout the movie, Ferland is equally succinct.

"We usually have rehearsals ... that really helps to prepare for it."

"We don't have to intellectualize it," Gilliam pipes in."

Link: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/mini/CTVNews/1126618720743_1220
27920/?s_name=tiff2005&no_ads=box

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 15-Sep-05 07:07
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From Listen Missy:

"Wednesday, Part I, aka VERY MILD SPOILERS

Vague Spoilers forTideland at the end of this: There's been a not insignificant and somewhat confounding amount of backlash--including walkouts--towards Terry Gilliam's Tideland, reasons for which I'm finding difficult to understand. I saw it with Michael Sicinski and we both found ourselves laughing during many otherwise disturbing moments. Let's be honest here: the thing plods along at times (nothing that a little tighter editing wouldn't help) and aside from a few patently ridiculous plot points, this is an almost wonderful movie of a child who, when left to her own devices and imagination, never quite approaches becoming a victim. And that's kind of a beautiful thing. Young Jodelle Ferland, who is in every inch of this film, is particularly affecting."

Link: http://listenmissy.com/blog/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 15-Sep-05 07:13
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A second perspective from Ain't It Cool News which--like Dvd Beaver & Twitch--gives a countering review to previous positive reviews:

"COPERNICUS here with the first of my reviews from the Toronto FIlm Festival. I've been trying to pack everything into the few days I have here before flying to Austin to catch the end of QT6. I've been seeing so many movies that I've hardly had a chance to write, but when I saw Harry getting his hopes up about TIDELAND, I decidedit was time to take everyone's expectations down a notch.

TIDELAND broke my heart. Terry Gilliam is one of my favorite directors – he has a unique vision, he doesn't play by the rules, and at his best he takes you to places you could not possibly imagine on your own. Though his struggles with finding the appropriate financing to realize his extravagant dreams are legendary, I fear TIDELAND could make it that much harder. It pains me to say this, because I don't like to fault risk takers, but the reality is that this is his third spectacular failure in a row.

At the heart of the movie is Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the child of an abusive mom (played way over the top by Jennifer Tilly) and heroin-addicted dad Noah (a decidedly dudelike Jeff Bridges). Thankfully, Jennifer Tilly's character is killed off early, and father and child take off to the an old decrepit house in the Prairies. Once she is there, Jeliza-Rose finds that she can't depend on her father and must fend for herself against the bee-obsessed, corpse-shellacking, witchy neighbor Dell (Janet McTeer) and her dangerously retarded brother (Brendan Fletcher). Jeliza retreats into her own fantasy word where her four doll heads talk to her and she sees fairies in the abandoned hull of a bus by the train tracks.

The traumatized child with an imaginary life and a fort by the train tracks was tackled to much greater effect last year by Danny Boyle with MILLIONS. If you took all of the mirth and warmth out of that movie and set it in the ridiculous world of the second-worst movie ever made, NOTHING BUT TROUBLE, you would start to get some idea of what TIDELAND is like. That Gilliam magic fails to take off because the soul-crushing bleakness of the girl's situation hopelessly extinguishes any sense of whimsy.

Sure, I could recognize this as a Terry Gilliam movie from the interesting camera angles, the beautiful images, and the perverse characters, but the saddest thing is that I didn't care about any of that because I was so uninvested in the proceedings. There is no real driving narrative for us to latch onto. The second half of the movie seems like just high jinks with corpses and setting up disturbing situations for no more reason than shock value.

The one bright spot in the movie for me was the performance of Jodelle Ferland as the little girl. She is truly incredible, sometimes having to have whole conversations with herself through her doll heads. Some credit must also go to Terry Gilliam for coaxing such a performance out of such an inexperienced actor.

I have given a lot of thought to trying to figure out the target audience for TIDELAND. It is a movie about a little girl, yet it is too disturbing for children. But the movie is hardly for adults, either given its obsession with fart jokes and gross-out humor. And teenagers themselves would be bored to tears. It is almost like someone bet Terry Gilliam to redefine the word "unmarketable."

Even Gilliam himself admitted that this is a hard movie to love. Before the screening he said that the huge Elgin Theater was too big for this "small little movie." He also said "try to keep an open mind," and that most people don't like it right away, but some come around after a few days of thinking about it. Then as he finished his remarks he said "Enjoy the show…. Well, maybe enjoy is not the right word."

TIDELAND is not the worst movie ever made, but it is easily the worst Terry Gilliam movie. Before Saturday's screening I had such trust in him as a director that I would see anything he made unconditionally. I blamed THE BROTHERS GRIMM on the studio. But now after being burned yet again, I think I'm going to read the reviews first before I see his next movie. It is hard to fault Mr. Gilliam completely, though. I'd rather have him gamble large and occasionally fail than have him become conservative and formulaic.

-COPERNICUS"

Link: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=21238
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 15-Sep-05 07:21
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To download an MP3 Toronto International Film Festival podcast, including a review of Tideland, go to the following link and scroll down to the very last topic on the page:
http://blogto.com/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 15-Sep-05 16:22
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From JohnnyVong.com:

"Tideland (Directed by Terry Gilliam) - 7 out of 10
All the Gilliam signature shots (extreme wide shots that tend to push in constantly, and those manic canted angles) and motifs (dreamer theme) are all there in full force. And with all the Lewis Carroll references intact (bunny holes and all), Tideland is an interesting effort, but I probably won't want to watch it again. Nonetheless, this is similar to how I felt initially after watching Brazil, which still holds up as my favourite Gilliam film to date. Note: it was really cool to see the legendary maverick in person. Gilliam never looked more happy, I suppose having successfully completed two movies in one year put the "Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-PTANG" back where it belongs."

Link: http://www.johnnyvong.com/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 15-Sep-05 17:29
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From Film Cauldron:

“Poor Terry Gilliam. The visionary director just can’t catch a break. Blessed with one of the most fertile imaginations in modern cinema, equally renowned as an animator, filmmaker, and iconoclast, he has made a handful of highly original, single-minded films, most of which are now considered classics (although it tends to take a few years before critical revisionism regards his work as such; I bet few recall The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen was first considered a costly bomb on par with Heaven‘s Gate). But of late he has had to suffer a critical beating for his mainstream-designed The Brothers Grimm, not to mention the well-documented collapse of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (why does the word schadenfreude come to mind?), and more often than not he is regarded as somewhat of a brilliant madman with integrity to burn, willing to battle Hollywood at any cost to keep his visions intact.

Now comes his adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s Tideland, a category defying film that is at turns poetic, disgusting, absurd, and darkly funny (think the languid pacing of Spirit of the Beehive, the fever dream of Alice in Wonderland, the wry insanity Psycho, and a large dose of Terence Malik gone insane). In many ways, this is the purest Gilliam film since Brazil (a film that also borrowed liberally from other sources while maintaining its own originality), and harkens back to the days when auteurs were not only allowed to follow their wildest muse but were expected to do so. And that, too, presents what will no doubt be Tideland’s greatest failing, as well as its highest achievement. Cinema has become so cynical in the last twenty years - so narrow in scope and so entertainment driven - that anything which requires viewers to experience a motion picture on its own terms is usually greeted with scorn. These would be very tough times, indeed, for the likes of a young Fellini, Kubrick, and Lynch. That’s not to say Tideland is a perfectly misunderstood creation, although it should be pointed out that those who are screaming foul about this film being pointless, self indulgent, and too weird are likely the very same people who ridiculed Grimm for being unoriginal, mainstream, and plain. Yes, there were walkouts at its screenings, gasps of shock, even angry grumbling. There were also laughs, applause, and continued debates concerning what the film was really about (how often does that occur these days after a screening?).

In the end, Tideland will likely please a select group who prefer to experience cinema rather than opposing it with their own expectations (there were those who were still talking about it two days following its premiere, even when they hated it). But for those who are anxiously wanting Time Bandits 2 or desire some degree of Pythonesque humor, Tideland will disturb, bore, and profoundly bother to the point of contempt. Nevertheless, it is a very unique and, at times, incredible film, infused with at least two amazing performances, beautiful photography, and one of the most enigmatic endings I’ve seen in ages. Hate it or love it, few will be able to deny the lingering, ineffable vibrations left by this film, or that it stands as further proof that its director has stayed true to himself. Of course, prepare for the yin/yang laments to come in spades: Grimm would have been a better film had Gilliam be left to his own devices; Tideland would have been a better film had Gilliam not been left to his own devices. Poor Terry Gilliam; apparently he can do no right even when he does.”

Link: http://www.filmcauldron.com/Tideland
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 15-Sep-05 17:43
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Another positive review from Ain't It Cool News:

"Tideland (2005, directed by Terry Gilliam)

Great films have exactly one thing in common -- they have the capacity to surprise the audince, whether in terms of story or theme or visuals or whatever. Somewhere in every great film is a jack-in-the-box that makes people shriek or giggle when it bursts open.

Make no mistake, this is a great film. But you're going to hear an awful lot of shrieking over it.

Tideland follows young Jeliza Rose through a few ugly days in her ugly life. Her mother's on methadone and her father, well, isn't, and relies on his little girl to cook up his smack and prepare his needles. When Mama dies, daddy and daughter flee to the house he grew up in, abandoned since his mother died. With only one other house, populated by its own train wreck of a family, within miles Jeliza Rose is essentially left to fend for herself in a place where civilization is just a big, clumsy word.

One of the things that makes Tideland so surprising is that it's really a Gilliam film turned inside out. The normal Gilliam aesthetic is to create a universe in which a pool of wonder hides an undercurrent of darkness. Tideland inverts that formula, presenting a universe as black as cancer with a thin little trickle of fantasy to relieve the despair. Jeliza Rose's world is hellish; Things happen around her and to her that Should Not Be. What's worse, she doesn't even realize it. The way things are for her is the way they're always been. Unlike the child heroes of Time Bandits or Baron Munchausen, Jeliza Rose has no frame of reference from which to put what's going on in perspective, and no home to which she can return once the madness subsides. Tideland makes explicit the message that's always gone unstated -- a Gilliam universe is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

More than that though, what makes Tideland great is the complete honesty with which it shows that universe through Jeliza Rose's eyes. The things she sees, the way she reacts to them, are presented totally without judgement, despite the fact that from the audience's perspective they are unquestionably WRONG. Little girls, especially darling little girls played with such incredible, dazzling intelligence and skill (note to Hollywood: Jodelle Ferland just made Dakota Fanning obsolete) that you can't help but want to scoop them up and give them a big hug and protect them from the darkness, should not be subjected to the things Jeliza Rosa is subjected to. Darling little girls should also not do the things Jeliza Rosa does, in her efforts to adapt to her surroundings. But they do, and she does, and there's nothing we can do but watch, and pray that she somehow survives it all.

The fact that the film is transgressive is not what gives it such impact though. It's that lack of condemnation that's going to create the chorus of shrieks. By playing it straight, by not making any moral judgements and simply letting Ferland's performance carry the story, Gilliam has crafted a film that strips away all defenses. The empathy I felt for Jeliza Rose blasted away any distance I had from what she was going through, and I suspect most people will feel the same. And a lot of them are going to be very uncomfortable with that feeling. Add to that the number of people who are going to feel betrayed because they expect Gilliam films to be psychedelic, feel-good bits of whimsy... well, let's just say this one's going to generate some pretty strong reactions.

There's no doubt in my mind that, eventually, Tideland is going to be seen as one of the high points of Gilliam's career. It may take a while to get there, though."

Link: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=21256
 
phildreams Posted: 15-Sep-05 23:55
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Thanks Shawn for posting these reviews.
Phil
 
Vintage Posted: 16-Sep-05 15:33
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http://www.sick-boy.com/toronto2005-3.htm#tideland
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 16-Sep-05 18:02
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It's my pleasure, Phil. It gives me something to do during downtime at work.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 16-Sep-05 18:04
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From Reuters:

"Tideland

By Michael Rechtshaffen

TORONTO (Hollywood Reporter) - While awaiting the delayed release of "The Brothers Grimm," Terry Gilliam went ahead and directed another film. And if the former was met with critical indifference, wait until they get a load of the latter.

A Canada-U.K. co-production that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, "Tideland" is a misconceived washout of a darkly Gothic story of madness, addiction and child abuse made all the more unpleasant by Gilliam's trademark intense visual style.

Given the troubling subject matter combined with Gilliam's garishly ill-fitting approach, finding domestic distribution will prove to be a tricky proposition, although it still might find a few fans in certain overseas markets.

Adapted by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni ("Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas") from the novel by Mitch Cullin, "Tideland" is related through the eyes of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a precocious child whose household chores include preparing the needles for her junkie parents' (Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly) fixes.

When her mama, a.k.a., Queen Gunhilda overdoses, her dad, Noah whisks her off to the rural farmhouse of his youth, which has since fallen prey to vandalism.

Jeliza-Rose still manages to make the best of things, which is a good idea seeing that daddy has also OD'd and has been steadily decomposing in the living room chair for days.

She proves to have a very vivid imagination (or could it be good old-fashioned madness?), and creates elaborate adventures involving her four severed doll heads, better known as Baby Blonde, Mustique, Glitter Gal and Sateen Lips.

That is, until she meets the witchy Dell (Janet McTeer), a self-styled taxidermist who once knew Noah and knows how to, uh, preserve that memory, and her mentally-damaged young brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher).

Things culminate with a serious train wreck and it's hard to think of a more apt description for the entire production.

While Gilliam, who frequently invokes Lewis Carroll here, is obviously trying to say something about the survival instincts possessed by a child's boundless imagination, this "Malice in Wonderland" comes across as off-putting rather than wondrous.

Although the wide-open spaces of rural Saskatchewan provide an ideal canvas for Gilliam's still potent visuals, some stories are simply better left to the imaginations of their readers. Cullin's "Tideland" is unmistakably one of them."

Link: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=reviewsNews&story
ID=2005-09-16T011343Z_01_FLE604412_RTRIDST_0_REVIEW-FILM-TIDELAND-DC.X
ML&archived=False

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 16-Sep-05 18:08
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Excerpt from Buffalo News, by arts editor Jeff Simon:

"Not so Terry Gilliam who now has the distinction of having made the worst single film I've ever seen at a Toronto Film Festival (and I've been going since Year Two): "Tideland." Gilliam calls it "Alice in Wonderland Meets Psycho," which, I'm afraid, merely sanitizes and even deodorizes the unwatchable thing that it is."

Link: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050914/1057072.asp
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 16-Sep-05 18:11
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From JoBlo.com:

"The biggest disappointment for me, so far, has got to be Terry Gilliam's TIDELAND, an absolute acid-trip mindf*ck of a movie that's told almost entirely from the perspective of one unlucky little girl. First, her mom (a nearly unrecognizable Jennifer Tilly) drops dead of an overdose. Then she's forced to accompany her papa (Jeff Bridges) to an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere -- and then daddy promptly drugs himself to death, too. The little lady has nobody to talk to (except for a quartet of disembodied dolly heads) until a rather colorfully retarded goofball stops in ... and the guy has one witchy maternal figure hiding in the background. Basically, TIDELAND is like a Tears for Fears video (without the music) that runs for two nearly interminable hours. And considering that I call Terry Gilliam my #1 favorite movie director (yes, still), you might want to think twice before calling this flick 'Gilliam's post-GRIMM return to form.' Because it's absolutely not."

Link: http://www.joblo.com/index.php?id=8586
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 16-Sep-05 18:19
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Festival overview, excerpted from Terminal City:

"And the good movies—the movies that impose themselves on the screen, movies that project—these are all tough tough sells: Capote is about a dead gay writer (brilliantly played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, sure); Brokeback Mountain is a gay western; Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto is about an Irish transvestite mixed up with terrorists; The Proposition is another western—hetero this time, but doggedly Australian; Michael Winterbottom’s Cock and Bull is inspired by a book nobody’s read; and Terry Gilliam’s fantastically dark Tideland seems determined to alienate everybody. Abel Ferrara’s Mary? Too conflicted. Michael Haneke’s Caché? Inconclusively French. Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy For Lady Vengeance? Violently Korean. (This is the one I’d recommend to Brian De Palma, given the chance)."

Link: http://www.terminalcity.ca/content/view/1126/139/
 
brendon Posted: 16-Sep-05 20:00
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All this HATRED! Well done Terry... you made people FEEL.
 
brianshapiro Posted: 16-Sep-05 22:18
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I actually think Gilliam's best film is the one which has been most universally critically liked, and which he was given freedom over but didn't write the screenplay for: 12 Monkeys. I like Gilliam's other films also, and I think I will like Tideland very much. I think though Gilliam's imagination and beliefs about film-making are a little scattered and needs to have an anchor for him to make something which is exceptionally good.

Theres an interesting point though I think which should be made; a lot of films adapted from novels become considered brilliant classics in filmmaking and enter the canon, but the novels they're based on usually fail to be accepted as great works of literature by academics and don't join the canon. Is this a problem with academics, or are there different issues in what makes a literary classic and what makes for a classic film?
 
JonBowerbank Posted: 16-Sep-05 22:38
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um, yeah, of course

They're both totally different mediums with completely different audiences. The stories might be the same, but the marketing, the pacing of the story and the fact that everything has been imagined and put on celluloid for you is what make the difference...again, of course
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 17-Sep-05 15:29
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A balanced review from CHUD:

"Tideland
[UK/Canada; Terry Gilliam]

I'll admit that I don't really know what to think. Part of me really admires Tideland, for it's sense of purpose and refusal to be swayed, but most of me never wants to see it again. Watching Gilliam's movies can feel like being devoured. Sometimes that's good, but when the material is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Tideland, the experience can be draining. Gilliam is known as an audacious, unrestrained filmmaker, but he's never gone so far as he does here. The man seems to have given up on the very notion of limits.

Tideland is the story of Jeliza-Rose, the child of junkie parents. She's recruited to cook shots for her father every night, but is repulsed by her slovenly, shrill mother. When the old lady ODs on methadone, pop and Rose hit the road, landing at the old family homestead out on the prairie. There Rose is drawn further and further into a fantasy life populated by talking doll heads and fearful dreams.

She also meets Dickens, a child-man who fancies himself as deep sea captain hunting the Monster Shark; in reality a train which runs on tracks near their homes. Years of abuse and neglect are implicit in the lives of both Dickens and Rose, and Gilliam finds the most unusual and memorable means with which to bring disturbing events to light. Those with young children may find Tideland incredibly difficult, as it puts Rose into situations typically far beyond taboo in American cinema.

And yet this isn't Gilliam's most fantastical film, though it is certainly his most grotesque. Much of his language is very literal and real. While Rose's doll heads are her friends, only once or twice are they actually animated into life. And as a friend pointed out, when we see the monster shark, it simply appears as a train.

(Gilliam does retain the basic visual style seen in Fear and Loathing. Drunken, leering camera angles are his basic syntax. No dutch angle is too dutch.)

Further anchoring the film is a solid performance by Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose. An occasionally weak southern accent aside, she gamely handles everything Gilliam throws at her, which is quite a lot. So much so, that at times it's hard to see the point, and Ferland's easy presence in front of the camera kept me in my seat.

But the film does have ambitions, and all the grotesquerie isn't simply for it's own sake. Gilliam is looking at the inheritance of abuse in a vivid and interesting way, though I'm still not sure it's worth the effort of watching.

I haven't been keeping up on what's been sold to distributors, but a part of me will be shocked if Tideland makes it to theatres. This movie is way out there, and if The Brothers Grimm was meant to be Gilliam's mainstream cash-in, this is the total opposite."

Link: http://chud.com/news/4291
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 17-Sep-05 17:19
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Found this on some really obscure little site. Mitch Cullin's comments on Toronto:

"Well, darn, I'm writing this in a hazy mentally-lagged state, having returned from the insanity of the festival. Man, I love Toronto, but the trip was a blur--non-stop days, too much food & beer, and maybe a total of 12 hours sleep in the course of a week. I got back to L.A. and immediately took a 14-hour nap.

The evening Tideland screening at the Elgin was something else, highlighed by the sight of Peter & I arriving right before everyone else to walk the red-carpet while the confused, unsure papparazzi couldn't figure out who the hell we were as we stepped from the limo--cameras poised, each one waiting for another one to start snapping, and then said cameras slowly lowering as we moved on into the Elgin theater. Pretty damn funny, actually. I just regret not arriving with a camera and then, as we walked the red-carpet, pausing to take pictures of the bewildered journalists with their slumping cameras.

Anyway, it was a pretty weird trip in every sense. There were a few walk outs during the Elgin screening, and at one point near the film's most dramatic moment the lights of the theater came full on for two minutes, washing out the screen--causing an annoyed stir among the audience. Very weird, it actually seemed like a deliberate act of sabotage, and when the screening was over several of us, including Terry, tried to find out who was responsible but no one could tell us. Odd. Even so, the audience gave the film a grand round of applause, even though the unease and discomfort in the air was tangible. My favorite take came from Brent Bottin, one of the crew for the Tideland documentary, who sat beside an eldery couple--throughout the film the eldery woman laughed and seemed to be enjoying the ride, whereas her husband lowered his head at one point and muttered, "Enough, enough--"

Needless to say, I suppose I was hoping everyone would just love it as a fine piece of subversive filmmaking--although I realize now that Terry's whole goal was to make as divisive a film as possible, and during lunch that day before the screening he said as much. By the way, about that lunch, a young man named Keith joined us for the meal at our patio table, and he seemed like a pleasing fellow, figured he was related to someone there, sat across from me and we chatted about books and the documentary Dark Days. Very nice guy. Only later, once he had excused himself, was it pointed out to me that his name was Heath and not Keith. And his last name was Ledger. You know, I really need to get out more. After lunch, Terry, Nicola, Tony Grisoni, Jeremy Thomas, and I introduced an afternoon screening for the crew at the University of Toronto. As the main showing was a few hours away, we didn't stick around to watch it, although Tony & I did a brief waltz on stage to prove that both the novelist and the screenwriter were in accord, apparently a rarity.

As for the film itself, I'm very, very proud of it. I actually think it's a beautiful and original creation, and wasn't intended to entertain but rather challenge.

Now let's see if it can snag U.S. distribution. Ten years ago it wouldn't have had a problem. These days in Bush-America, however, makes it seem less likely to happen here. For all the Republican banter about the left-wing agenda of Hollywood, the film industry is pretty conservative and corporate. Anyway, should be interesting to see how it all plays out. Yikes! Still, I do think it's okay to hate it, but I don't think it's okay to dismiss it as being meaningless or uninvolving--or as nothing more than an exercise in weirdness--because that's simply not the case.

Oh, and yep, I made the final cut. Just for a moment on the bus you can catch a glimpse of me and Peter.
And the mailbox at the farmhouse has "M. Cullin" written on it. Or, as Terry has said, "If I'm going down with this ship, you are too, Mitch."

So that's that. As much as I'd like to attend, I'm skipping San Sebastian, actually. Going to Japan instead, my first real vacation in three years. We'll be staying on an island with monkeys, and no TV, internet, or telephones. Sounds like heaven to me.

All right, I gotta go to the store and buy socks. I'm outta socks. I need socks."

Link: http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/tideprem.htm
 
Vince Posted: 17-Sep-05 18:43
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why did you bother posting the whole article..

Phil made a thread as well:-
http://www.philstubbs.com/dreamsboard/cgi-bin/teemz/teemz.cgi?board=_
master&action=opentopic&topic=85&forum=Tideland_News

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 17-Sep-05 22:31
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"why did you bother posting the whole article.."

I don't know. Why'd you bother to waste space on this page asking me that? For that matter, why'd I bother responding to your dingleberry hunting? Guess neither of us have anything better to do with our time. Ho hum.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 05:26
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From FilmStew.com:

"GILLIAM GALLOPS FORWARD by Pam Grady

Terry Gilliam is in Toronto with another picture bound to polarize movie audiences.

Adapted from Mitch Cullins’ novel Tideland, the film tells the tale of little Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), who moves with her junkie rock musician father Noah (Jeff Bridges) back to his long-abandoned and crumbling family home. The house fairly defines rural isolation and the closest neighbors are epileptic, slow-witted Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) and his fearsome taxidermist sister Dell (Janet McTeer). The young girl reacts to the desperation of her circumstances by constructing an elaborate fantasy life with potentially dangerous consequences.

Gilliam describes Tideland it as an Alice in Wonderland story, but one where "she’s falling and falling and falling, but never quite gets squashed." In its pastoral beauty, it resembles a more extreme version of Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It also brings to mind Michael and Mark Polish’s Northfork, their drama about a town about to be flooded for a water project and the men who go door-to-door trying to get the last stragglers to leave by offering them angel wings.

Gilliam has never heard of the latter movie, but is intrigued and instantly makes the connection with current events. "They should be showing that in New Orleans now," he exclaims. "Angel wings! George actually is in close contact with angels, isn’t he?"

Gilliam acknowledges that Tideland is not an easy film to process; certainly, I feel at a distinct disadvantage in having to talk to him about it in Toronto immediately after seeing it, with no time to digest what I’ve just seen. He sympathizes: "I’ve been trying to make sure that I don’t talk to people ’til they’ve had a day or so to digest it."

And as of this writing, I am still not done digesting. It is a beautiful, strange, and disturbing film, with Gilliam drawing a vivid picture of Jeliza-Rose’s surreal inner life. Bridges, who spends much of the movie sprawled silently in a chair, is kind of amazing. Gilliam tells me that he had a dummy double prepared for Bridges, but the always-game actor wanted to play the scenes himself.

"He has tremendous breath control," Gilliam says. He laughs when I joke that Bridges probably inherited that gift from his father Lloyd, who played a deep-sea diver on the’50s TV series Sea Hunt.

While we’re talking, Gilliam gets a call with box-office results in Spain where his other new film The Brothers Grimm is number one. In the States, so many critics have savaged it (wrongly, I might add) and the director considers how they are going to react to the more complex Tideland.

"It’s going to be really hard on the critics, the ones who didn’t like Grimm. How are they going to deal with this film? Because they said Grimm was a flawed Gilliam film," the director chuckles, adding, "Arigato! Good luck!"

Love it or loathe it, it is films like Tideland> that make Toronto such a worthwhile annual celebration of cinema. The crowd pleasers, such as Mrs. Henderson Presents, are wonderful, too, but festivals are in a better position than the average multiplex to offer movies with real meat on their bones. With Tideland, there is certainly a lot of chew on."

Link: http://www.filmstew.com/Blog/blog_commento.asp?blog_id=382&month=9&ye
ar=2005&giorno=&archivio=

 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 05:43
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From LA Weekly's Foundas On Film Toronto blog:

"If I begin with rumor and innuendo, it is because they are part of the ritual of festivalgoing, and because it is almost always the name-brand auteur films that are subject to such intense scrutiny. In short, in a festival landscape as vast as Toronto's, some disastrous low-budget indie by a first-time director may be able to fall quietly in the forest. But if Cameron Crowe and Terry Gilliam stumble, the vultures begin to circle. In truth, I haven't seen either of those films — though, admittedly, I'm intrigued. When movies inspire this level of hatred, they're usually worth checking out. People don't get so upset over just any ordinary misfire. Besides which, according to the daily poll of international critics conducted by the British trade magazine Screen, Tideland is actually quite popular with reviewers in Denmark and the Netherlands. Mr. Gilliam, grab thy passport."

Link: http://laweekly.blogs.com/foundas_on_film/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 05:59
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From Four Bad Men-A Manjournal:

"After classes on Friday, I spur-of-the-momentedly found myself in a rush line for tickets to the Tideland premiere, Terry Gilliam's new movie. Saw Gilliam--who's shorter, and jitterier than expected--along with Jennifer Tilly and Jeff Bridges (Lebowski!), and yeah, the movie. It's good, kids, and definitely more interesting than Brothers Grimm.

No pictures, though; the tacky allure of gawking at actors hadn't yet taken it's strangle-grip. That came after the movie."

Link: http://www.4badmen.blogspot.com/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 14:39
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From Rightwing Film Geek (I wonder what he'll think of Tideland):

"Tideland (Terry Gilliam, Britain, 3) -- My sensibility simply doesn't match Gilliam's and this film was a singularly unpleasant experience -- like watching colon surgery, with Gilliam helpfully providing fish-eye lenses, canted angles and acting turned up to 11 to make seem it even louder than it needs to be. Just ... ick."

Link: http://cinecon.blogspot.com/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 14:53
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From FilmNerd3 (Fan reviews from the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival):

"Terry Gilliam is a marvellous director. The acting, writing and cinematography in Tideland are all well above standard. So the movie is technically excellent and satisfying to watch. But that tells you nothing of what it is about, which is crucial.

You know how the Victorians took all the raping and murder and incest and general horror out of fairy tales? They missed this one.

Tideland is a fairy tale. Cute little girl off on an adventure to a magical place, meeting fantastic people, and travelling with her boon companions. And everything is horribly twisted and wretched.

There are no adults in the movie. At least not mentally or emotionally. They all have a child's motivations, a child's dreams, a child's understanding of the world, and a child's limited concept of morality. Their love is only the love of a child for a favourite toy, shallow and fleeting.

Do they hold onto childhood's capacity to escape into fantasy because their lives are bleak and empty? Or has their isolation stunted them in childhood?

I don't know. Bees are bad, fireflies are good, and these people are as incestuous as a nest of farm cats."

Link: http://www.fardelsbear.com/fn3/archives/cat_tideland.html
 
Vince Posted: 18-Sep-05 15:04
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"I don't know. Why'd you bother to waste space on this page asking me that? For that matter, why'd I bother responding to your dingleberry hunting? Guess neither of us have anything better to do with our time. Ho hum."

because it seemed pointless, especially as Phil already publicised his new article in his own thread? No need to get so aggitated like a child or something.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 15:10
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From Jonah's '05 Toronto Int'l Film Festival Journal:

"Caught the 'world premiere' of Terry Gilliam's Tideland last night at the Elgin. For some reason this film was co-funded by Telefilm Canada, a fact that has upset more than a few CDN film industry types I spoke with . IMHO it's money well spent to be able to work with a director of Gilliam's caliber. That being said I really did not care for the film. It's the story of a young girl whose parents die in the first 20 minutes of the film and how she deals with the loss. Her mom played by Jennifer Tilly is a loudmouth fiend who wouldn't share her chocolate with her starving daughter. The father is played by Jeff Bridges is a heroin addict and sometimes rock star. An early scene has the young girl assisting Bridges character in shooting up. Once he expires in the film his rotting corpse is shown in various stages of decomposition. The daughter is somewhat unaware that pop has popped. She figures he's in another drug induced stupor. The bulk of the film is the relationship between the girl and a mentally challenged boy at least 10 years her senior. They're both escaping their sad realities with a fictional realm that they share. Reminded me a little of Heavenly Creatures in their escape to a world of magical realism. The movie just felt like too much. It was too long and very frustrating. Creative but pointless. Could have effectively been made into an interesting short film IMHO. Gilliam and the cast were in attendance. I swear that Jennifer Tilly is stalking me..."

Link: http://tiff05.blogspot.com/
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 15:14
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"because it seemed pointless, especially as Phil already publicised his new article in his own thread? No need to get so aggitated like a child or something."

Oh, Vince, oh buddy, oh pal: 1) I hadn't seen Phil's thread yet when I posted the article, and 2) I was joking around with you.

Honestly, don't you have something better to contribute to Dreams than this kind of petty stuff? Come on, man, I know you got it in you. I believe in you.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 15:21
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From Bad Movie Zone:

"The first up was, as it happened, my single most anticipated movie of the Filmfest, Terry Gilliam's latest movie Tideland. Gilliam himself, gleeful little goblin that he is, was there and spoke out front about what a horrifyingly good experience he had shooting in Saskatchewan ("I kept expecting the crew to suddenly turn on me") which sounds totally out of line from his usual experience. Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly also came out, though as it happened their parts in the movie weren't what I was expecting. Gilliam mentioned that the film was different from his usual kind of thing and to keep an open mind. "Anyway, I hope you...well, 'enjoy' isn't the right word...I hope you survive the film," were his parting words.

In spite of what you may have heard, Tideland is not a straightforward fantasy movie, though it's certainly not a conventionally realistic movie either. I see it as part of an unofficial trilogy with Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy and Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. All three of these movies are quite similar in style and tone, and feature many fantastical sequences that take place entirely within their young protagonists' heads. And all three movies are about the way kids use fantasy to shield themselves from unpleasant circumstances, but also how that withdrawal into fantasy can take a distinctly nasty and even dangerous turn.

Tideland starts with a quote from Alice in Wonderland (a book that is overtly referenced throughout), but any notion that we're watching a kid's movie is immediately tossed out with the opening scenes, which show Jeliza Rose (played engagingly by Jodelle Ferland) at home with her parents Noah and Gunhilda (Bridges and Tilly). These two make the parents from Roald Dahl's "Mathilda" look like Ward and June Cleaver. Tilly plays Jeliza's mom as something out of a John Waters movie, and Jeliza's dad is a skanky and flatulent rock musician obsessed with half-baked dreams of taking the family to Jutland, where he believes the bogs that preserved corpses for thousands of years will have a revivifying effect on them. Oh, and they're heroin addicts. An early scene shows Jeliza matter-of-factly cooking the junk and preparing the syringe for daddy's "vacation" as if it were part of her household chores.

Gunhilda croaks in the night after about three scenes, and Noah, panicking, packs his daughter off to the only other place he can think of, his mother's house up in Saskatchewan. Unfortunately, the house is in disrepair and abandoned, and very shortly, for a variety of reasons, Jeliza is left to essentially fend for herself.

Fortunately, whatever the circumstances, a rickety old house in a field of vast, sweeping grasses turns out to be a terrific place to play, and Jeliza spends most of her time in an imaginary world where the waving grasses are weeds on the bed of a vast ocean (hence the title), the squirrels are trying to talk to her, and her severed doll's heads (Mystique, Satin Lips, Good Girl and another one whose name I can't remember) provide all the company she needs.

The imagery here is jaw-dropping. The setting is very reminiscent of the Andrew Wyeth painting "Christina's World", and in fact I wouldn't be surprised if that painting had provided an inspiration for Mitch Cullin's original novel. The vast fields of prairie grasses, stunted trees, train tracks and crumbling farmhouses is a beautiful enough backdrop as it is, but Jeliza's imagination makes it even more of a stunner. Pirates, bog monsters, swarms of fireflies and flying dolls' heads all make an appearance to add typically Gilliam-esque baroque clutter. It works really well here, though, as we explore the heads of the various characters.

Actually, Jeliza is alone for a pretty big chunk of the running time, having conversations with herself (in the guise of her various imaginary friends); her only real company are Dell, a crazy woman in a nearby, equally remote farmhouse, who stumbles around in a veil and black clothing at the peak of noon and who Jeliza variously believes to be a ghost, a witch, a vampire and a pirate, and her brother Dickens, who's apparently been left autistic or retarded after surgery to cure his epilepsy. While she keeps her distance from Dell, Dickens becomes a close friend and they play together. I liked Brendan Fletcher's performance as Dickens--it avoids the "noble simpleton" cliche that Marlowe hates so much. Dickens is essentially a "friendly monster" in Jeliza's mind, but he keeps a certain violent streak, and the story ends up going in ways that are certainly not cutesy by any stretch of the imagination.

Gilliam and his partners use the basic structure of whimsical kid's fantasy stories going back to Alice in Wonderland, with the young girl entering a world of imagination, but the movie he makes is deliberately warped and nasty, almost gleefully so. Sure, it's sort of moving to see Jeliza off in her imaginary world, never realizing that she's been abandoned or that her circumstances are much bleaker than she realizes. But Gilliam resists bathos, and eventually we're given reason to believe Jeliza is no innocent. The craziness around her starts to affect her fantasy life--which slowly takes over the film--and we're left wondering just how much imagination is healthy.

After greatly disliking "The Brothers Grimm" a few weeks ago, I was quite nervous for this, but I'm happy to report that "Tideland" is a very good film, maybe even a great one, and a definite return to form for Gilliam. In spite of everything, the guy still has it--much like Jeliza, he's not going to let circumstances get in the way of exploring his imagination, no matter how dark and nasty that imagination gets."

Link: http://badmoviezone.com/cgi-bin/ib3/ikonboard.cgi?;act=ST;f=5;t=7586
 
Tim Posted: 18-Sep-05 16:10
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"No need to get so aggitated like a child or something."

Some people need to lighten up. It's just a message board.
 
Tim Posted: 18-Sep-05 16:11
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And, Shawn, I want to second the THANK YOU for doing the dirty work and gathering all this information together in one place. It's become a good resource for early opinions on the film. Mucho gracias!

[Edited by Tim on 18-Sep-05 16:12]
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 19:06
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Thanks, Tim. It's been fun.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Sep-05 19:07
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From Blue's Movie Reviews via Rotten Tomatoes:

"Tonight I went to the world premiere of Tideland at the Toronto International Film Festival. Terry Gilliam introduced the film and the cast (Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly and others) was present for the screening. It's also worth noting that I tried to go meet Gilliam, but was stopped by the "people". Also, on an unrelated note, I saw Danny Elfman at the screening as well.

I will begin this review by saying that Gilliam himself said that this is the kind of film you need to sit on for a week before you know whether or not you enjoyed it. I agree. I'm not entirely sure if it was brilliant and disturbing or just disturbing. So far I will give it a 7, but my opinion may change later on in the week.

The story focuses around Jeliza-Rose, and thankfully Jodelle is a phenomonal actress. It's amazing how a little girl could convey so much. She has a tremendous future ahead of her. Brendan Fletcher also stood out as Dickens, and very convincingly portrayed a mentally disabled person. Frankly, every performance in the film was excellent.

The main issue that I had was with how disturbing it was. Now, I love a good Terry Gilliam mind-fuck, and maybe this will grow on me later, but the initial reaction to certain events, for me, was "Holy Fuck Ewww". The jury is still out, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who could be reading this.

I do have a problem with how it ended. It somehow didn't fit the rest of the film, and I can't quite put my finger on why.

So frankly, this review has been weird, because I haven't been able to make up my mind yet.

The Opinion: Yet to be determined.
MOOD: *Shrug*
CURRENT RATINGS:
FRESH: 7/10 7/10 Movie: Tideland (2006)"

Link: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=158237&
entryid=239333&view=public

 
cyboexpo2002 Posted: 19-Sep-05 13:56
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"Now, I love a good Terry Gilliam mind-fuck"

Atta boy Charlie, she's grow on you yet...

Now sit down and watch it again!

"Holy Fuck Ewww" Hell yes
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 19-Sep-05 18:23
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I guess the festival reviews are now dwindling down. Although here's another one from Ain't It Cool News that I just stumbled across:

"Okay, so having not seen "The Brothers Grimm", but being an avid Terry Gilliam fan nonetheless, is "Tideland" a return to form for Gilliam? I can't say. What I can say, and what Gilliam himself emphasized in his humble intro to the movie, is that it's unlike anything he's done before. Among other things, Gilliam described the movie as being small and spare and he asked the audience to keep an open mind.

So, the movie starts off rollicking enough, introducing our young female protagonist, Jeliza-Rose (played by newcomer Jodelle Ferland), amidst a golden wheat field, in an overturned bus, before flashing back to Jeff Bridges singing and rocking-out, looking something like Lemmy from Moterhead, in a small club. We soon discover that Bridges and Jennifer Tilly are the drug addict, dead-beat rocker parents of young Jeliza-Rose. In a run-down apartment, Jeliza-Rose innocently cooks up daddy's heroin fixes, shooing-him-up, as well. She takes some verbal abuse from Tilly, who's appearance in the film is quite brief and, after tragedy strikes, Jeliza-Rose and Daddy flee via bus to Bridges' dead mother's place on a dilapidated farm in the middle of nowhere.

Now, I must admit, I'm loathe to sit here and run down the rest of the events that occur in the movie, suffice to say that Jeliza-Rose is soon left to fend for herself, along with her prized Barbie-Doll heads, against some of the precious few, and very odd, locals, as well as a pesky squirrel. In addition, Jelize-Rose, must keep from starving and going insane, but these harsher aspects are handled quite subtly--well, for the most part anyway.

People expecting this movie to be like a darker "Alice in Wonderland" might be disappointed. In fact, people expecting any one kind of film from "Tideland" are bound to be left scratching their heads, as it is a strange animal.

Past Gilliam greats, such as "Brazil", "The Fisher King", "12 Monkeys" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", all seem rather busy, manic, and bursting at the seams compared to "Tideland", which spends a large amount of time with Jeliza-Rose, all alone in her farmland surroundings, talking to her Barbie heads. The film abounds with the trademark Gilliam fish-eye perspectives, unstable canted angles, and intricate, strange set-pieces, however, this time, Gilliam seems to favor long takes, allowing scenes to really play out, and atmosphere over the usual theatrics. Compared to the aforementioned films, "Tideland" definitely takes a less-is-more approach, which is certainly not your parents' Terry Gilliam.

That said, all the actors in the film are quite good, although some characters leave us well before their welcome has worn out, and I suppose that's the point. As Jeliza-Rose, the movie rests on young Ferland's shoulders, and she does an admirable job at that. But the simple fact is, "Tideland" seems unfocused. It kind of strays here and there, before catching itself again. Long, quiet stretches go by, before a new character or situation pops-up. The film contains some great elements, among them: embalmed loved ones, a fiery train wreck and Jeff Bridges' flatulence--but, overall, "Tideland" left me feeling kind of indifferent. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it, and I probably could do with another viewing to make up my damn mind. Heck, I guess people are just going to have to see it for themselves."

Link: http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=21233
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 19-Sep-05 18:56
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As it looks like the TIFF coverage has pretty much petered out, I thought I'd offer a wee re-cap of these initial reactions to TIDELAND. Overall, it looks as if the bloggers and general film buffs who attended the festival leaned in on the favorable side of things, whereas the "professional" critics went toward the unfavorable.

With mostly loved it or hated it reviews offered, the very small number of middle ground reviews seems to back up the claims of others that TIDELAND is a divisive film and a button pusher for many. Most interesting to me, however, is the serious lack of critical analysis from film critics, and instead all we get is what seems to be either a visceral dislike or an uncertain appreciation of the movie without any real understanding as to why either responses were the case.

Disliked It:
DVD Beaver (1 of 2 reviews), Twitch (1 of 2 reviews), Hollywood Reporter, Boston Globe, Screen Daily, Ain't It Cool News (1 of 4 reviews), Ain't It Cool News (1 of 4 reviews), Reuters, Buffalo News, JoBlo.Com, Jonah's '05 TIFF Journal, Rightwing Film Geek

Liked It:
Cinematical, Blue's Movie Reviews, Ain't It Cool News (1 of 4 reviews), Film Cauldron, CTV News, GreenCine Daily, The A.V. Club Blog, Panix.Com, Film Telegraph, Listen Missy, JohnnyVong.com, Planet Sick-Boy, Terminal City, CHUD, Film Stew, Four Bad Men, FilmNerd3

Loved It:
Bad Movie Zone, DVD Beaver (1 of 2 reviews), Twitch (1 of 2 reviews), Ain't It Cool News (1 of 4 reviews), Dark Horizon, Blog T.O.
 
JonBowerbank Posted: 19-Sep-05 20:16
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In response to the AIC article that Shawn posted, I have to admit that I let out a sigh of relief when I read "Gilliam seems to favor long takes, allowing scenes to really play out, and atmosphere over the usual theatrics".

Even though I enjoyed Brothers Grimm, I will admit that it is a very scattered picture and I was hoping TG had made a film where he could just calm down keep it simple.

I'm ready to see this film...now who's the damn distributor?
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 20-Sep-05 19:55
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Okay, here's a straggler review from TIFF that had escaped me, but luckily enough it was forwarded to me today.

From Michael Sicinski TIFF '05 report:

"Tideland (Terry Gilliam, U.K. / Canada) [6]

[SPOILERS] When you consider Gilliam's complaints about the Weinstein brothers' pervasive interference on the set of The Brothers Grimm (e.g., threatening to close down the production if Gilliam fitted Matt Damon with an ugly fake nose), Tideland practically begs to be read as a perversely anti-Hollywood gesture, a systematic flipping-off of the system Gilliam so resents. One of its stars is dead by the end of the first reel, and the other one spends the majority of the running time playing a slumped corpse. And Gilliam found another use for his prosthetics; Janet McTeer is practically unrecognizable. Still, in the midst of these smartass maneuvers, Gilliam has fashioned the most sustained examination of female subjectivity in his career. The film locks onto the mature but fantastical worldview of Jeliza Rose Jodelle Ferland, in a stylized but preternaturally controlled performance) as she produces the adults she requires to raise her in her head. Gilliam's protagonists have always been stranded in magical thinking, but never before has he given them such a thoroughly feminine framework for the exercise of the imagination. Jeliza Rose's interactions with her severed doll heads, her beautification of her "vacationing" dad, and eventually her awakening desire, all serve to create a context in which the sinister or disturbing aspects of an unsupervised childhood become stolen moments of asserted selfhood. Even when the film veers into forbidden sexuality (in a way, Jeliza Rose ends up having her own thwarted version of The Blue Lagoon, although Gilliam invests it with the appropriate psychological depth), Jeliza Rose maintains control. It is not remotely a victimization scenario. Sadly, Gilliam can't restrain himself and injects the film with some needlessly literal leftovers from the Grimm playbook, including an outright wicked-witch and an amplification of the Freudian fear / desire of parental carnality. It goes too far. But the fact that some folks at TIFF were walking out or declaring it the worst film in years . . . well, I'm at a loss. One final note: after so many overbearingly closed-off Gilliam films with their dark oppressive industrial-past-as-dystopian-future mise-en-scene, what a joy to see what the man can do with light and landscape. The exteriors are stunning, and Gilliam manages to invest this found world with the same sense of wonder of those he builds from scratch. It's a bit like a mash-up of Wild at Heart and The Straight Story, if you could even imagine."

Link: http://www.geocities.com/michaelsicinski/TIFF2005.htm
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 20-Sep-05 22:52
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Right, and then there's this one. I can't tell if this is a good review or a bad one. Anyone care to offer up an opinion?

From The Village Voice:

"The most spectacular example of kamikaze auteurism, however, was Terry Gilliam's almost unwatchable, not altogether unadmirable, and certainly unreleasable TIDELAND. Making exactly the movie he wanted, Gilliam presents an American Gothic Alice in Wonderland in which little Alice is the logorrheic offspring of two flaming junkies (Jennifer Tilly's Courtney Love–like slattern and Jeff Bridges's flatulent Captain Pissgums) and Wonderland is a pair of derelict Midwestern farmhouses seemingly furnished by Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein. The creatures include a collection of doll heads and Brendan Fletcher's drooling Forrest Gump parody. Increasingly grotesque in its intimations of pedophilia, the movie ends with a comic train wreck, literally. It will become legend."

Link: http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0538,hoberman2,68001,20.html
 
brianshapiro Posted: 21-Sep-05 03:26
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"Tideland starts with a quote from Alice in Wonderland (a book that is overtly referenced throughout), but any notion that we're watching a kid's movie is immediately tossed out with the opening scenes, which show Jeliza Rose (played engagingly by Jodelle Ferland) at home with her parents Noah and Gunhilda (Bridges and Tilly)."

Alice in Wonderland wasn't really meant as a kid's book either.

Anyway the sense I get is that this is a film that focuses on atomosphere and doesn't have a real linearity to it. I wonder what critics of Tideland have thought of Gus Van Sant's recent movies, Gerry/Elephant/Last Days. I wonder too what Terry Gilliam thinks of those movies.

and actually, there was a movie called Alice I saw recently which was half-live action, half-stop motion; which had (somewhat) disturbing images also. It wasn't really linear, and thinking of it, neither was Lewis Carrol's book

[Edited by brianshapiro on 21-Sep-05 03:31]
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 21-Sep-05 04:24
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"Alice in Wonderland wasn't really meant as a kid's book either."

Good point, Brian. Another thing is that aside from Fisher King, Brothers Grimm & Jabberwocky, it's not like Gilliam has made films that truly function is a straight-ahead, narrative manner. I also remember people thinking that parts of Brazil plodded along or bogged down in the middle. More than ever though, I'm excited to see Tideland.
 
Kirkinson Posted: 21-Sep-05 06:55
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"Alice in Wonderland wasn't really meant as a kid's book either."

I have to disagree with this. Dodgson first came up with it on the spot when he was out rowing with the three Liddel sisters and they pressed him for a story. At that time, Lorina was 13, Alice was 10, and Edith was 8. And while it's true the published version contains many things that only adults would have understood, I would argue it also contains a great many more things only children would have understood.

But true, also, that its story does not follow any traditionally linear narrative, and there's also no lesson or any real purpose to it (not the first book, anyway - Through the Looking-Glass is more complex). That's what made Alice's Adventures so revolutionary, as most of the literature children had available to them at that time was aimed at teaching them some sort of pious moral. (Interesting that the three Victorian children's authors who have survived the best to this day - Carroll, Edward Lear, and George Macdonald - were probably the most subversive.)

That Svankmajer version of Alice is quite something, though, isn't it? It's probably my favorite film adaptation, maybe neck-and-neck with the 1966 BBC version from Jonathan Miller.

[Edited by Kirkinson on 21-Sep-05 06:57]
 
vance Posted: 21-Sep-05 15:18
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Yeah, that Svankmajer version of Alice is pretty bizarre. I love his work as a film maker usually, but I have to admit that I was a little bored by the pacing on that even though a lot of the scenes were wonderful. I'm a bigger fan of Svankmajer's recent Little Otik. In fact I'm a little surprised Gilliam hasn't mentioned him or his work yet in interviews about Tideland because, from what I've read, there seems to be some thematic similarities between Tideland and some of Svankmajer's films.

Though I may find out that, after having actually seen Tideland, that there's no similarity at all, but I'll be surprised if that happens. Whatever the case, I'm terribly excited to see it after reading all these reviews - great work on collecting them, Shawn.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 21-Sep-05 16:27
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My pleasure, Vance. As for Svankmajer's Alice, I really love that film, although I must say that Jonathan Miller's adaptation remains my favorite. Apples and oranges though. Also, has anyone seen the movie Spirit of the Beehive, a Spanish film by Victor Enrice (sp-?)? One of the reviewers mentioned it, and I must admit that when I heard Gilliam was doing Tideland I thought it might be a companion piece to Svankmajer and Enrice.
 
brendon Posted: 21-Sep-05 16:30
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Alice's stories ARE for children - just not ONLY for children. They were laced with many topical social references and arguments that most kids would have ignored (especially through the Looking Glass). And that's not to mention the complex, hidden logical and mathematical problems.

Both Miller and Svankmajer did a bang on job with their Alice adaptations.

The connections between Alice and Tideland are immediately apparent from Mitch Cullin's source novel, I imagine Gilliam has compounded and strengthened them somewhat.

There's a rumour - a lovely rumour - that Pixar are planning an Alice movie. I do hope so.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 21-Sep-05 16:34
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Okay, this sort of review is the kind that really pisses me off. Damning a film by word-of-mouth when you haven't actually seen it for yourself is just bad, bad journalism. Also, it tends to support this feeling I have of some people being pre-disposed to the idea of Terry Gilliam failing.

Excerpt from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

"As for Tideland, I had a conflict during the first screening, and then I was loudly warned away by fellow critics from subsequent screenings. Word around town was that this Alice in Wonderland-influenced fantasy is an even bigger disaster than Gilliam's recent The Brothers Grimm. The only question that remains for the once-promising Gilliam: Will anyone ever give him money to make another movie?"

Link: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/entertainment/12701936.htm
 
JonBowerbank Posted: 21-Sep-05 17:22
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Yes, I think I've mentioned Svankmajer's "Alice" on here before, but it's been released on DVD just recently. Definitely worth a rental

I agree with the similarities between him and TG. The similarity is mainly in the imagery, namely taxedermy. Svankmajer loves using bones, taxedermied animals and all sorts of grotesque formerly animated things for his animations.
 
brianshapiro Posted: 22-Sep-05 01:19
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brendan,

I really don't like Pixar movies, I think in some respect they're even more mediocre than Disney cartoons. But I also haven't found really anything I like yet in computer animation. I've found stop-motion animation to have a lot more charm and a lot more possibilities to it. I've always thought that a stop-motion adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by the same people who put together The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach would be a good idea, even if art-wise it had no other originality. The old Disney cartoon was very good in style in some respects, and even if just that were adapted to stop-motion...

I think Svankmajer's version though was very good though and probably more meaningful than something like that would turn out, because instead of focusing on the verbal nonsense in the book, it recaptures the story by using nonsensical, surreal imagery, and thats a better use of the medium of film. --I've never seen the version of Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller.

Kirkinson,

I'm not sure Edward Lear or George MacDonald are so well known today; I guess what you mean that they survive the best that they still read well as good stories. The idea that Victorian children were made to only read pious moral tales is also something you hear when Mark Twain's stories are brought up...

Its probably true that there was a lot of this, but there was a lot of interest in using high fantasy in the Victorian era. For instance, the Little Nemo in Slumberland comics which are beautiful and remain one of the most artful comics made. I'm not sure whether they were intended towards adults or children. Then you have Barrie's Peter Pan and Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Also, there was a lot of interest in re-publishing and illustrating folk tales, from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.

There are also later created a lot of childrens books that remain known today, like Treasure Island, The Secret Garden, The Jungle Book, Little Women, etc.
 
truman Posted: 23-Sep-05 16:53
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From "cream of the crop" critic James Berardinelli 2005 TIFF Update #5: "Hell Day"


SPOILER WARNING!!!




"Next up on my schedule: Terry Gilliam's latest film. Unlike the critially-reviled The Brothers Grimm, this one received no studio interference. Gilliam had total creative control. So there was every reason we could expect a "return to form." What we get, sadly, is easily the worst production Gilliam has ever been involved in, either behind the camera or in front of it. Tideland is, by turns, a complete bore and a creepy experience. And I don't mean "creepy" in a positive sense.

Things start out with some promise. Engaging young actress Jodelle Ferland plays Jeliza-Rose, the daughter of two drug addicted parents (Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly). Jeliza-Rose lives in a world that is half-real and half-fantasy. Her headless dolls have conversations with her, she imagines bog-men roaming around the house, and she dreams of living her life in Jutland. After Mom OD's, she and Dad head out to a big house on the prairie, the run-down domicile that was once the property of Jeliza-Rose's grandmother. Soon, Dad takes one "extended vacation" too many, and ends up inviting flies to join him as he stinks up a rocking chair. Meanwhile, Jeliza-Rose imagines a neighbor (Janet McTeer) to be a witch and the neighbor's retarded brother, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), to be her husband. There are talking squirrels, Alice in Wonderland references, and taxidermy. And some unsavory considerations about the relationship between a little girl and man who may or may not have "a thing."

Tideland sounds better on paper than it is to watch. This is a two-hour snoozefest. The imaginative parts are curtailed by the low budget. There's no point to the experience, and it's a chore to get through. One of the problems is the presence of the adults. It's easy to imagine how a better movie could have been made centered around Jeliza-Rose on her own, exploring magical fantasy-worlds of her imagination. Yet this seemingly obvious Wizard of Oz approach is not one that Gilliam explores. And some of the experiences Jeliza-Rose goes through while in the company of her deranged neighbors are difficult to watch. For example, she gets to watch the witch perform fellatio - good education for a young girl.

It's hard to say for whom this movie was made. I can't think of a demographic to which it will appeal. Another critic suggested that Gilliam probably made it only for himself, which is likely the case. But, if this is a picture that the filmmaker really wanted to produce, it raises questions about the creative direction of his career. It's hard to believe that the man who made The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Brazil (not to mention his Monty Python stuff) has gone off the deep end, but if he doesn't have anything better than Tideland to offer, there could be a problem. This is a rare movie about which everyone seems to share an opinion: it stinks."

Link: http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/tiff2005/tiff2005_5.html
 
Donald McKinney Posted: 23-Sep-05 22:38
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The critics who write the bad reviews have well and truly, in my opinion, shot themselves in the foot. The way they descibe most scenes in the film make me (and most of us) want to see the film all the more!! Having read the book, I know EXACTLY what to expect!! Although, I will admit I am amazed Gilliam has made a 2 hour film out of the book, it will be interesting to see.

It certainly won't be a snoozefest, as I wanna see what Gilliam has done, the film looks waaaay too beautiful and weird to be a snoozefest. The critics who have reviewed it, and given it a bad review, obviously ain't read the book yet, if they had, their review would be different. I urge everyone here to read the book first before seeing the film.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 25-Sep-05 11:28
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All right, two very different takes on Tideland from the very same article in Slant Magazine (Toronto coverage). The first is from Jason Clark who has always been a very a dubious reviewer:

" The worst entries, though (and probably the two worst ever in this festival), were actually made by previous collaborators. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe chronicled the disastrous filming and undoing of Terry Gilliam's dream project Don Quixote in the engaging documentary Lost in La Mancha in 2003. Now all parties proceed to make moviegoing hell with their latest work. I found out after I saw Brothers of the Head that it was an adaptation of a cult novel by Brian Aldiss, and that made me despise it even more as it has no sense of the texture that Aldiss's book must've had. Siamese twins become rock stars…and do drugs…and then die. Seriously folks, that's the story. Pointless to the point of teeth-gritting, this smug mockumentary is like Hedwig and the Angry Inch crossed with This Is Spinal Tap if the music was shitty in both, the actors all stunk, and neither had any rhyme or reason for existence. What Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe sought out to achieve here is unfathomable; it's one of those movies where it feels like the same three scenes play out for 90 minutes. And Terry Gilliam truly wants us all to feel his wrath with the audience-less Tideland, a grisly fairy tale gone rancid. Now, here is a movie that makes everyone wish they were a shifty film producer, just so they could tell Gilliam personally that they would never invest a red cent in it. Grotesque to the breaking point and beyond and back again, and dreadful in ways movies may not have invented yet, the movie is really just a patented "fuck you" to people who won't let Gilliam make his mammothly expensive cinematic tomes. In the future, please leave us out of your whining, Mr. Gilliam."

The second review is from Jesse Paddock:

"An even more destructive nuclear family crumbles away in Terry Gilliam's latest film. Fresh from his middling, Brothers Weinstein production of The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam was in town to drum up support for Tideland. Unfortunately, due to some negative word of mouth and a healthy number of screening walk-outs—the film is about a young girl who retreats into a fantasy world after the deaths of her junkie parents—it looks like he'll have his work cut out for him. And while it's a fascinating piece of work, moving skillfully between icky creep-out moments and darling childhood whimsy, there's no denying it may be too dark to be a kids' movie and too lovingly fantastic for the midnight madness crowd."

Link: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/tiff30.asp

[Edited by Shawn Lee on 25-Sep-05 11:29]
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 25-Sep-05 11:47
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Jason Clark (see above entry) also spills his bile in the latest issue of Premiere Magazine, although it's hard to take this guy too seriously. He even mentions that the farmhouse in Tideland is in Europe (didn't know they had Southern American accents in Europe).

Keep in mind, too, that he's previously disliked films like Sexy Beast ("There is nothing tangible to hold onto, just a lot of sound and fury and bloodied-up gangsters"), Big Bad Love ("The worst kind of independent; the one where actors play dress down hicks and ponderously mope around trying to strike lightning as captured by their 1970s predecessors"), Morvern Collar (""Opaque, tiresome"), Amelie ("Amelie’s only major crime is how dull it can often be even while being so deliberately elaborate"), American Beauty ("When all is said and done, doesn't really offer anything new"), Y Tu Mama Tambien ("Oft-described as the antidote to American Pie-type sex comedies, it actually has a bundle in common with them, as the film diffuses every opportunity for a breakthrough"), & Chuck & Buck. In other words, he's proof positive that any idiot can review films and be taken seriously.

His tripe for Premiere is as follows:
"Terry Gilliam seems to being walkin’ the plank. His bid for small film status comes in the form of the already reviled Tideland, a verrry broad, audience-abusing storybook nightmare tale of a young girl (Jodelle Ferland) who inhabits a large, dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere in Europe and spends her days in a dream world that is not remotely magical or enviable. And yes, it’s as awful as you’ve heard. There will be a pocket of fans for this (stoner movie enthusiasts I’m guessing), but it defies every reason Gilliam made a name for himself in the first place. The movie is forced right out of the gate, and every aspect is arch and shrill. And it appears to be more of a f--- you to everyone who wouldn’t let his cinematic dreams come true with his last few pictures; it has the unpleasant feel of a director steadfastly making the strangest movie possible, just to satisfy himself. But in turn, Tideland will satisfy almost nobody. It also marks a footnote in my Toronto Film Fest history for me, it is the first movie I’ve been here for (and there have been about 100) that received not a whiff of applause at the conclusion. Not a single pair of hands."

Guess he was at the press screening, or maybe he didn't even see it. Hard to tell with this guy.

Link: http://www.premiere.com/article.asp?section_id=6&article_id=2300
 
Donald McKinney Posted: 25-Sep-05 13:37
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"Grotesque to the breaking point and beyond and back again, and dreadful in ways movies may not have invented yet, the movie is really just a patented "fuck you" to people who won't let Gilliam make his mammothly expensive cinematic tomes."

This is one impression that the film does give. Reading the book, you'll know that it would NEVER be the stuff of mainstream cinema. I think Terry was lucky to get it financed independently, let alone get it made. It does seem like a two-fingered salute to Hollywood though. I'd love to see if this finds a distributor in America!!
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 26-Sep-05 18:52
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From Hollywood Awards News (Toronto coverage):

"Terry Gilliam jokes that the critics who dismissed The Brothers Grimm as a ‘flawed Gilliam film’ are really going to be up against it when Tideland comes out later this year. Certainly, this drama that the director describes as an Alice in Wonderland story in which she falls down that rabbit hole and keeps on falling is certain to polarize audiences and critics alike.

One of the characters is a corpse who spends most of the film moldering in a chair; others are doll heads that are a girl's closest friends. Another is a mentally challenged young man with no sense of borders and an unhealthy misapprehension that trains are monsters. At the center of it all is little Jeliza-Rose, a lonely child with a vivid imagination and no sense of the danger that surrounds her. This is a profoundly disturbing film, but one well worth seeing it, because it is just not often that one finds a filmmaker of Gilliam's stature willing to take this much of a risk."

Link: http://news.hollywoodawards.com/Article.asp?ContentID=12386&Color=Gra
y

 
babysis60ca Posted: 29-Sep-05 00:58
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I have been trying to keep up with all the comments, however, too many make me dizzy!!! lol I worked on this film when Terry, Jeremy and ll were here in Regina. I thought they were doing a fantactic job. To see what they were doing on set with the old houses they were using was fantastic. I am trying to find out when this will be released to Canada. I am not well versed in all the things that need to be done with a movie once it is completed. I have been in the industry doing menial things (renting motorhome to stars, directors etc. Doing security things like that) so am not sure what goes on after they leave here. Terry and Jeremy were absolutely fantastic people. Loved visiting with Jeremy and son. Little Jodelle was a beautiful young lady with some tough acting to do. Hope to hear soon when it will be shown in theaters or what will happen to it.
 
Vince Posted: 29-Sep-05 21:20
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J. Tilley interview 20 MB

http://ffmovies.ign.com/filmforce/video/article/621/621768/Tideland_T
illy_060205_qthigh.mov

 
Vince Posted: 29-Sep-05 21:45
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Review by Leslie Felperin

"Made back-to-back with Terry Gilliam's somewhat commercial but roundly panned "The Brothers Grimm," indie-produced "Tideland" sees the fanciful helmer overindulging his dark side with a slice of Gothic nastiness.."

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117928157?categoryid=31&cs=1#loop
Now I feel more fulfilled in contributing my pastings.
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Oct-05 11:35
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Here's three belated reviews of Tideland from those who saw it at Toronto (sorry if these have already been posted above, but I don't they have). Might be a few SPOILERS not previous mentioned, so watch out.
____________

From The MovieForum blog:

" TIFF 2005: "TIDELAND" (Review)

Terry Gilliam's second film in under a month (following August's release of the long-delayed "The Brothers Grimm") could easily be dismissed by some wags as "Alice In Wonderland" on the prairie, with detours into "Eraserhead" and, believe it or not, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The tenacious auteur of the weird has survived worse blows than those this bizarre, but oddly personal, fantasia will likely invite when--and being a Gilliam effort, "if"-- it secures a release. Cineaste lore has it that this was one of the only Toronto film festival screenings in the 30 year history of the event that failed to elicit a single round of applause following its premiere screening, and Toronto audiences are known to bestow dutiful accolades for just about anything, even "Loving Couples" and "Duets". I saw it at a press screening, where no one claps for a damn thing, so...

10 year old Jeliza-Rose (Ferland) is an only child who lives with her father Noah (Bridges), a middle-aged, still-aspiring musician, and layabout mother Queen Gunhilda (Tilly) in Los Angeles. When she's not helping her parents with their heroin habit and enduring her father's stoned-out monologues on Danish Jutland, she's engaging in conversations with her only friends: a collection of doll heads. When Gunhilda overdoses and dies, Noah insists that she be given a fiery Viking funeral--until his daughter talks him out of it--before he flees with his Jeliza-Rose on a bus trip to his mother's home on the Texas prairies.

They arrive to find a long-abandoned dump covered in dirt and graffiti. Noah immediately embarks on one of his "vacations" by shooting up again--this time a permanent one. Oblivious or uncaring that her father is dead, Jeliza-Rose pretties up his festering corpse in makeup and one of her grandmother's wigs and makes some new friends in the form of fireflies and a talking squirrel.

Out in the fields the girl meets the wraith-like Dell (McTeer), an obsessive woman from her father's past who lives with her manic, mentally challenged brother Dickens (Fletcher). Dell embalms Noah's corpse and repaints the house to create some semblence of a nuclear family, a perverse consensual fantasy that drives Jeliza-Rose even deeper into her own...

I have not read Mitch Cullin's novel "Tideland", but it's easy to see why Gilliam snatched it up (his rave is on the cover of the North American trade edition): its simple premise was perfect for him to infuse with his favorite ingredients . Here, again, he crafts a tragic and repellent reality entwined with a baroque fantasy world, oddball secondary characters, environments as psychic landscapes, and meticulous, far-from-random production design (in a Gilliam film, style is substance).

Jodelle Ferland--perhaps best known as the ghostly child in Stephen King's "Kingdom Hospital" miniseries-- is an amazing find and an actress of remarkable presence and conviction--and thank god for that, since here she's pretty much the whole damn show. With scenes of her helping her parents shoot up, and sexually experimenting with a too-friendly mentally handicapped "friend", this has to be the most disturbing kid's turn since David Bennett's debut as "Oskar" in "The Tin Drum". Bridges' brief role allows him some pathos before requiring to live (?) out the bulk of the story as "The Dude" gone Ma Bates. On the other hand, Jennifer Tilly's Courtney Love riff might be the most frightening thing Gilliam's ever committed to celluloid--those "baby" masks in "Brazil" included. McTeer and Fletcher are appropriately strange and appear to have been allowed to invent their top-of-the-lungs Jungian caricatures pretty much on-the-fly as they please.

Despite many surreal and often macabre set pieces, "Tideland" is a very small movie, concerned exclusively with Jeliza-Rose' subjective--and decidedly "skewed"--take on adult relationships before reaching a melancholy and moving ending that'll be a surefire turn off to those with an intolerance for ambiguity (who, presumably, wouldn't be caught dead at this film anyway).

Perhaps it's that Gilliam clearly loves these characters and the golden sandbox in which he's been allowed to play, or maybe it's that he got carried away being able to finally make a film from script-to-screen in under 12 months (the production was announced just last year during the Toronto film fest), but the worse thing about "Tideland" is that it's just too damn long. Even David Lynch had the good sense to trim 3o minutes out of "Eraserhead" following its first screening. Though challenging and often infuriating, "Tideland" is an inviting rabbit hole in which to disappear, but even Jeliza-Rose knew when it was time to snap out of fantasyland.

Robert J. Lewis
Movieforum

posted by Robert L at 11:41 PM"

Link: http://movieforumblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/tiff-2005-tideland-review.
html


_____________

From Splices of Life blog:

"Tideland. [Terry Gilliam. UK/CAN.] B.
Started off in SPUN territory and that was worrisome. But Gilliam's too much of a stylist to lose out to the slippery slope of a drug-mania storyline, and Bridges is too soulful an actor as well. Soon morphs into a truly bizarre hybrid of Curly Sue and The Butcher Boy. Ick-factor is super-high on this one, my toes were curling a lot and I felt pretty weird when it occurred to me that I was watching a delusional young girl try to convince a retarded boy to let her see his penis. Props to Gilliam for making it so affecting, despite how it sounds. I had to leave a couple minutes early so I could get a seat at the Ryerson, since they were keeping the balcony closed off--I wasn't walking out walking out. Sorry, folks in my row."

Link: http://splices.blogspot.com/

[Edited by Shawn Lee on 18-Oct-05 11:36]
 
Shawn Lee Posted: 18-Oct-05 11:37
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#3 from Movie Martyr:

"Tideland (Terry Gilliam) 69 – I’ve got no clue how Tideland picked up such deadly buzz at the festival (and there were scads of walkouts at my screening…), but to me it’s an infinitely superior film to Gilliam’s recent fiasco The Brothers Grimm. Far more personal than that over-caffeinated bombast, this modern-day fairy tale is a great and distinctive work. Gilliam’s gift for invention is as present as ever here, and what I saw was, counter to what I had been led to expect, much more low-key than Gilliam’s work usually is (it’s certainly no Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in its directorial aggression factor).

One of the most impressive things here is the way the film’s fantasy sequences feel a part of a continuum. Even the most elaborate of effects sequences here (such as a scene in which a house becomes submerged in water) fail to overpower the rest of the film’s mood, and as a result don’t feel like standalone set pieces. Because of this, the film captures the flow of its pre-teen heroine’s imagination in a way that few films manage, flowing into an alternate consciousness that reality keeps sneaking into.

The film is loaded with the sort of obvious symbolism that gives meanings to our fairy tales and the uniqueness of its distinctly American, folkloric imagery conjures a distinctly Midwestern madness. Recalling Northfork at times, but operating on a higher level, the movie is unafraid to probe uncomfortable territory, plunging headlong into fantasies involving sex and death. This is all the more surprising given the story’s roots in a child’s mind, but Gilliam’s willingness to go there gives the movie its considerable emotional depth (the ending is nothing less than beautiful). Editorially, it unfurls at its own distinct rate, though I sort of suspect that what seemed to be pacing issues on my first look will feel a lot more natural when I see the movie again.

posted by Jeremy Heilman at 8:14 AM"

Link: http://moviemartyr.blogspot.com/2005/09/tideland-terry-gilliam.html
 

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