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Reviews
Tideland (2005)
A masterful look into the mind of the adolescent girl
Tideland is an amazingly perceptive flight of fantasy seen from a child's point of view. Viewed from this perspective, we can forgive pretty much any of Gilliam's transgressions, for in this film he takes us far beyond our visual and psychological zones of comfort. But how deliciously we squirm in our seats watching this one. Viewing adults as extreme characters and caricatures, and grappling with the mysteries of death, sex, and the fear of being abandoned are indeed the dark but necessary truth of growing up. In this respect, Tideland is strikingly similar to Miyazaki's Spirited Away. In both films we see the world as a young girl's perceptual mix of cruel reality and spirited fantasy. Just as Chihiro's parents turn to pigs as the realization of her horror at their gluttony, so too the demise and/or mummification of Jeliza-Rose's parents is best taken not as a literal outcome but as visualizations of her curiosity about the consequences of death blended with the evil wishes that come with the perceived slights of childhood. It's not a flattering picture, but the bizarre character Dickens, from this point of view, represents boys, men, male love objects in the broadest sense. They're strange, unpredictable creatures, somewhat brain damaged, who are obsessed with (symbolic) devices like submarines. Should she play with him? Kiss him? Hate him? Marry him? The curiosity and the confusion over attraction mixed with revulsion that is the reality of an adolescent girl's perceptions is brilliantly manifested in Dickens' character. The imaginative world of the adolescent girl is perhaps one of the last great mysteries of the world, and one few filmmakers have tried to seriously illuminate. We are truly fortunate that two such wonderful filmmakers, Miyazaki and Gilliam, have both within a few years of each other given us such perceptive peeks under the kimonos.
Khoon bazi (2006)
Uncomfortable
I caught this film at the Toronto International Film Festival and was frankly somewhat disappointed. The film is well acted and crafted, but both the story and the cinematography, with its washed out, almost black-and-white, color palette, made me uncomfortable most of the way through the film. The story centers on the relationship between a heroin-addicted daughter and her mother. The part of the daughter is played movingly by director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's real life daughter. The mother character suffers and ultimately facilitates the daughter's addiction, while the daughter endlessly cycles between giving lip service to wanting to clean up, and then getting high "one last time." Good intentions, drugs, and self destruction have been treated more effectively in many other films over the past several decades, for instance Midnight Cowboy. Perhaps because of that, the story here doesn't seem fresh. My hat is off to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad though. It must have taken incredible perseverance to succeed as a woman filmmaker in Iran, and to produce a film dealing with what must be a suppressed subject there. Mainline (several Iranians in the audience insisted that the Persian title is much more effective) is definitely worth seeing if only for an insider's gaze at modern Iran, but expect to be uncomfortable.
Severance (2006)
George Romero's Successor
Severance surprised me at the Toronto International Film Festival, I had about written off this genre, but Chris Smith has breathed new life into the horror/comedy movies that popcorn and Halloween were invented for. If you like George Romero's movies, you'll love this one. I winced, along with everyone else, at some of the gory scenes and worried that he would take us a bit further than we're willing to go, but Smith wisely lightens the mood at appropriate times with bits of clever dark humor. Most importantly, when there's an opportunity to resort to the sort of clichés that ruin most other horror movies, Smith turns this around, defying expectations and poking fun at them. This is smart film-making where we least expect it, in a horror thriller worthy of a Saturday matinée.