Sunday, October 29, 2006

Movie Review: Tideland

If this weren't a Terry Gilliam movie I wouldn't have gone to see it. Before the movie there's a short clip of Terry explaining how to watch the movie. He'd given the talk to a few audiences in film festivals and sneak previews and it became such an essential part of understanding the movie that they added it to the general distribution.
The message is that you have to watch the movie from the perspective of a little girl. All the stuff that we would see as twisted and just plain wrong are explained away if you can just understand that this is how the little girl thinks things are.

The story follows a little girl whose parents are both druggies. She prepares the needles and helps her dad shoot up, or as he calls it "go on vacation". Her mom seems to hsve her own mental problems as she hugs her daughter too tight, telling her over and over how much she loves her, and then smacking her around when the girl tries to take one of Mom's candy bars.
Mom chokes, on a cigarette I think, and dies. The girl stops Dad from setting fire to the building to cover things up, and they both flee to the old farmhouse where Dad grew up.
Here she meets a man with serious mental handycaps so he acts her age and his sister who dresses in an all black bee protection suit. When her father dies the girl just thinks he's on a long vacation until the woman in the bee suit, who has been pining for the man for all these years, has him stuffed. Taxidermy I say.
I'm not even getting into the inappropriate boyfriend/girlfriend relationships that form.

I'm leaving out a lot, but the point is that the girl thinks it's all normal either because people say it is or because she doesn't understand how age differences affect the boyfriend and girlfriend relationships she sees in movies and storybooks.

I won't get this on DVD. I wouldn't really want to see it again. I'm glad I saw it, but anything that needs this much justification to appreciate isn't worth a second viewing.

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