Tideland

Many reviews have touted Terry Gilliam's Tideland as a return to form after the mess of last year's Weinstein-complicated The Brothers Grimm, and it is that. What the reviews fail to mention, however, is how challenging a film Tideland is. That may seem redundant, but it is worth a reminder that Gilliam's best work is not easily digested.

Tideland is the story of a young girl, without an ordinary plot or antagonist to commercialize things, and it takes place in the most Gilliam-esque world since 1998's Fear and Loating in Las Vegas. Case-in-point, there is not a level, static shot in the film for almost 30 minutes. Factor in an eight-year-old girl cooking heroine for her loser daddy (Jeff Bridges), being called a bitch by her bitch-of-a-mother, and playing kissing games with a lobotomized, adult epiliptic and you have a film that is probably too much for the majority of American filmgoers.

But that's kind of the point. Terry Gilliam is the sort of filmmaker who must make movies that push the envelope of the acceptable and even the tasteful. Here he juxtaposes the innocence of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) against a truly disturbing backdrop of drug use, death and sex, creating one of those few films that truly invoke the innocence of childhood. (Count last year's Pan's Labyrinth in that number as well.)

Some might question this choice, yet what better way to reveal than to challenge? Fear and Loathing turned our views of the drug culture and America on our heads by reveling in their humorous excesses and revealing in the end the horrifying and honest result.

What Gilliam has created here is a film that will have many crying foul citing "extreme and inappropriate content" due to the presence of a child, yet it is a story of hope. In finding his inner child, as he claims in the DVD introduction, Gilliam has championed the resilience of children, the inner strength that tends to fall by the wayside when we coddle them. This is not a film for children, but a film for adults who have forgotten their childhood and the innocence inherent therein. Gilliam is attempting to revive the childlike resilience that our adulthood has beaten into hiding. He has shown us hope for a future that adults seem so intent on fucking up, and in so doing has hopefully helped some of us recapture the innocence that makes that hope possible.


Note: I recommend renting but not purchasing the ThinkFilm DVD release of Tideland. The flick was filmed in 2.35:1 and cropped slightly for DVD by Gilliam, yet ThinkFilm has unconscionably cropped the image further to an "anamorphic full-frame" ratio of 1.77:1. A ridiculous move since the only likely viewers of a Terry Gilliam movie are hardcore cineastes, the kind of people who actually care about the presentation of their art.

Disconnect

Does it ever seem like very intelligent people have lost all grasp of everyday life? Maybe they never had one to identify with. Whatever the case, this week's out-of-touch award goes to yet another movies-cause-smoking study.

Browsing the IMDb for like the 9th time in the last two hours (I really don't want to be at work today) I came across this story: imdb.com/news/sb/2007-03-06/#film3. It seems another group of bespectacled grad students have determined that R-rated movies make kids smoke. Apparently, once again, movies are the cause of everything dangerous. I know I'm hyperbolizing, but it kills me that they never make the obvious connection: that the kinds of movies people watch tend to tell you more about the kind of person they are, then influence the way they behave.

Of course, I'm fully aware that exposure to R-rated movies can spur on rebelliousness, but the soil's gotta be there before the seed can grow. It's just funny to me that people who are so careful about using words like "theory" and "projection" haven't managed to determine that "young people who are likely to watch R-rated movies are more likely to smoke" is a more accurate statement. Smoking is a symptom (or trait) of rebelliousness, not the cause.

Now, anybody got a light?

Zodiac

First, a note: I will never promise anything on here ever again (like future drafts of the Decalogue). And, since I'm the only person who reads this, I will henceforth be far more honest with myself.

Zodiac. My God, what a movie. David Fincher is a master (like you didn't know that). From the opening frames, I was hooked. Two lovers sit in a T-Bird on lover's lane. She wants him. He wants to go party. Then a car drifts by, pausing behind them. He's freaked. She just wants to get some. He asks if it's her husband. Then the Mustang comes back. The driver gets out, the sounds of Three Dog Night swell, and he shoots the lovers.

How's that for an opening? From there we're introduced to the players: Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery, a drunk, pill-popping, sleaze-slinging reporter; Mark Ruffalo as the work-a-day detective; and Jake Gyllenhaal as the headliner, comic artist Robert Graysmith. These guys all turn in stellar work, as does the supporting cast including Bryan Cox and Anthony Anderson (two "o"s in Goose, boys).

Special credit here must also go to cinematographer Harris Savides and screenwriter James Vanderbilt. Savides' work is elegant, pushing the limits of digital photography and finally capturing that ghostly, barely-there nighttime feel Fincher has been after for so long. As for Vanderbilt, nothing in his resume suggests that he's capable of a work of this scope, yet here stands the result. I don't know how much of it had to do with Fincher, but the writer of Darkness Falls managed to turn out a script that yielded an exciting, suspenseful, and somehow complete film about the endless multi-decade search for an almost-forgotten killer.

Go see it. And dethrone that fucking Wild Hogs piece-of-shit from the top of the box office. Please.