Skip to main content

Movie Review - "Tideland"


“Have you ever seen anything like this on celluloid?” I kept asking myself this question throughout the runtime of the movie. Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is an elegy to the art; it is something of the director’s mortal brilliance. The movie is the product of his brilliance gagging at him to the point of breakdown, and it appears that Gilliam has stripped all of the virtues of his previous movies and presented what was minimal. The art of minimal is what you get in Tideland.

The movie is about a child who is fascinated with Alice from the wonderland, and so, paints her reality with wonderland brushes. She loses her father, meets a rather eccentric woman and her deranged brother. The woman with one blind eye disembowels the father’s body, stitches it up later to preserve the skeleton. Now this is an odd movie.

There are shades of “fear and loathing” in this movie. Although the movie is frighteningly absurd, it is enchanting at times, for the viewer is expectant. You will stay expectant, if you have had the exposure of Gilliam before. Otherwise the movie is virtually unwatchable, for it offers nothing to the viewer, and almost teases your obedience for sitting through the two hours long movie.

The deranged is the sea captain, the dolls are imposing, the eccentric lady is frantic, and the tall grass is alluded to the tides in a hypnotic world that can only be described as a forgotten village. Is there magic in the move? Is it visually appealing? Is it for children? Is it for the intelligent audience? It is none of these and is hard to follow if you, the viewer has never had the occasion of witnessing the charming elegance of Gillam’s work.
Yes, the movie is tiring and endlessly boring. Perhaps, I won’t revisit it at all. Perhaps I will try and conceive it in my mind rather than read about it somewhere else. Something is of miss in the movie. It is too bland for Gillam’s talent. Or perhaps, I missed the moments completely, for I was out of tune or was not so much of an intricate observer that I thought I was.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

White Man's Diary

I have utter contempt for a man who is not passionate about the work he does; I am at loss for words to decipher the enigma of this world and its subtle nuances. Its really intriguing at the same time quite disturbing to know that there are people who consider the world a mundane place. It’s inconceivable to think that people are ingenuously assuming the shred of indifference. Permit me to feel flattered for being bestowed upon me the onus of enlightening the kind of people that were ostracized for centuries by the society of the enlightened, the kind that were never kind to themselves, the kind that wished to liberate themselves from all the desires that besieged them perpetually. History tells us that the people who managed to think beyond the obvious were invariably rewarded for having put up the act of thinking. People who lived on this planet earth 2000 years prior to now, had enough food for thought. An incredible amount of friction existed at every step they took in the evolutio...
1 comment
Read more

Keyboard

In this land of square edges, people wear black square helmets with lines in contrasting colour drawn right at the top. With tapering stiff cloaks fattening at the bottom, we rest on this flat piece of charcoal Black Island. We stand tall, our bodies solid and inflexible, but the knees are lithe and give away. However, we are genetically designed to spring back up, stand tall and take the incessant knocking on our helmeted heads. Our life time varies; we hear news of islands, our contemporaries, wearing out with the frontline soldiers’ knees worn out of perpetual thrashing to their feet only to spring back and be knocked again. With a population of close to a hundred people, our island boasts a frontline soldier squad of 26. This squad is relentlessly battered; under a roar of stuttering knocks on the head, they are the ones who find their knees buckle before the rest of the population’s. More often than not, it is the ones who are guarding the left front, ones with ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘e’, or...
1 comment
Read more

Pressure Cooker

Daubing the top of wicks, one by one, with drops of kerosene, J proceeded to rest her newly bought Hawkins pressure cooker on the stove. “Now, you wait for the whistle” said the wealthy neighbouring lady who assisted J that morning with the cooker. With an assumed indifference, J waited for the whistle to lift its bottom over the lid and dance in merry. The kerosene stove, she was told won’t do justice to the cooker; she needed a proper gas stove with sleek finish and hollowed eyes that spewed blue flames with the turn of a switch. The kerosene stove with its twelve tongues brocaded over the epithelial layer of its throat, strung into a circle, served her family since the time of marriage. Her son squatted beside her, giggled and found it amusing as J rubbed his cheeks with her hands warmed before the many tongued stove. In the forlorn house under the wooden roof that leaked, between the pale brown walls that flaked, over the grey rugged tiles that cracked, mother and son lent their t...
Post a Comment
Read more