audacity10 After spending too long trying to decide which movie to watch last night, I chose a duff called Tideland. Here we have a movie that surrounds and involves a young girl in a world of hard drugs, abusive parents, sex, death, violence and strong language - all things we should be protecting children of her age from. The director, Gilliam, clearly thought he could get away with this so long as it's acted out with playful Disney-esque music dancing away in the background and with the odd hint at humour. Humour which barely raised the corner of my mouth into a smile. No, this is deliberate and nihilistic and I can only imagine perverts or communists enjoying watching this degrading junk. You can of course try and search for an inner message if you want - but I doubt you'll make it to the end of the movie, considering how painfully boring it is. It drags on for 2 hours, I only regret that I dedicated a whole 1 hr 20 mins to this turd.

The Couchpotatoes I am not surprised that people love or hate this movie. It's a weird movie, that's the least we can say. I'm a big fan of Terry Gilliam's directing and I thought this movie was really good. You have to watch it through a troubled kid's eye that uses her imagination in coping with the world around her. Having drug addicts as parents made her see reality completely different, it made her grow up faster in some points, but it made her also have imaginary friends because she had no real ones due to the constant taking care of her addicted parents. Jeff Bridges must have had the easiest role of his life playing Noah, her heroin addicted father. The absolute star in Tideland is eleven year old Jodelle Ferland. It's amazing how she can be so convincing in her role at her age. I had great fun watching and listening to her with her imaginary friends in her fantasy world. Her friend Dickens played by Brendan Fletcher was also a delight to watch. Even though the movie is all fantasy with the weirdest characters possible the movie brought several smiles on my face. And I'm normally not a big fan of weird movies, on the contrary, but this one is definitely one of my favorite in the genre. Excellent work from Terry Gilliam.

Voyou Nobodysbusiness Tideland starts by plunging me back into Fear & Loathing, so unbearable a film that I couldn't finish it. However, I manage to coat my nerves with whatever I can find in my body and I try to get into this one, because, you know, Terry Gilliam...I can't take TG's junkies seriously. They numb my feelings, and specially my empathy. Their hysteria only makes me want to punch them. As I hoped and expected, these characters are soon taken out of the story, and we now concentrate on a little girl.Not to my benefit. It's not the little actress' fault if she hurts my ears; she does a fine job for a person of her age. It's just that some of us are wusses with sensitive ears that can't take endless high-pitch monologues between little girls and their dolls.Then there's the first reference to Alice in Wonderland. I abruptly realise... I'm watching the millionth take on the most unimaginative book in the history of booking. My singing umbrella agrees with me when we play fufuball with the purple panda and the Cloud of Tomorrow. Anyway, I can watch this. I've done it before. Competent hands can work with it. The signs are there. The squirrel isn't carrying a clock.I'm yawning now. The sound is annoying. The plot is annoying also, since the little girl has lost her common sense and her sense of smell. Okay, let's be fair: she had never displayed the latter before; my bad for assuming she had one.When I see other characters coming into play, I have a moment of hope. Briefly. They end up being as hysterically annoying as the junkies. This movie is a farce. The constant frenzy annihilates the possibility of any emotion. It creates a wall, through which I still can discern all the strong emotions that Gilliam is trying to infuse. He has failed to touch me.Most likely, you don't share my heart rate. Or my auricular sensitivities. Maybe your nerves won't be scratched like mine when you watch Tideland. Then go for it: the cinematography is great, the story original and very mature. You'll probably be bored though; I only described the flaws that mattered most to me.Early on, Tideland brought me back a whiff of The Lovely Bones. They end up being worlds apart. I love this P.Jackson's piece, whereas I consider Tideland the second hiccup in T. Gilliam's wonderful filmography. I don't expect it to be the last. He can reach the highest levels as a director because he takes risks, so he is also bound to fail sometimes.

Johnny Davis Just got done with this movie and I must say it drags on somewhat, similar to the way Fear and Loathing did for me. The dialogue is done in a way that it defies you to listen to it and absorb anything. I tried to watch Fear and Loathing 3 times and could never finish it. I finished Tideland, but it wasn't that great. I will say Jodelle Ferland and Brendan Fletcher are SUPERB in their roles as Jeliza Rose and Dickens, but it feels like 2 great performances in a boring, supposed-to-shock-me, Natural Born Killers-esque affair that has already been done. Then again, the film challenges me in that I am appalled that I am not appalled by the things I see here, so it has some social merit, of sorts.Overall, my feeling is that Terry Gilliam's best work is long behind him, like 12 Monkeys and Brazil, Time Bandits, Python, etc. I think sometimes filmmakers get older and lose their edge, falling victim to sentimentality, and it changes their art (usually for the worse, imho.) It is beginning to seem this is the case with Gilliam. I didn't like Imaginarium, either, btw. I saw That before I saw this.