Dry Ice Factory

I had high expectations for this Terry Gilliam movie, since everything I'd read about it made it sound like prime Gilliam material, but I came away slightly let down. The visual invention is wonderful as always (although perhaps too familiar), but I was never engaged by the characters or the story, never got in synch with its rhythm, and often felt baffled by the symbolism. The antic shtick seemed perhaps a little tired. I'll need to revisit it on DVD to see what I think a second time through. It was difficult for me to understand what the movie was trying to do, that's for sure.

Last night holyoutlaw mentioned that an LJ friend had commented that Gilliam had made another movie about himself. I said I didn't know what that meant, unless he was saying that Gilliam saw himself as Dr Parnassus. This morning on the walk to work I took that ball and ran with it.

( Spoilers and flailing 'analysis' below the cut )

As reported elsewhere, yesterday was moving day for holyoutlaw and juliebata, as an enormous crew of buff science fiction fans formed a bucket brigade stretching from Wallingford to Fremont. In the rain! We worked for four hours, with a break for a tasty deli lunch from PCC. As jackwilliambell said, the move covered all the bases: blood, sweat, and tears. (Fortunately, the blood was his, not mine.) Glenn Hackney and I had a devil of a time figuring out how to rotate Luke's desks on various axes to get through a series of interlocking tight spaces in the stairwell of the house, but O, the towering feeling when we succeeded! Here's a devout wish that the torn and frayed feelings of all parties in the former household can now begin to mend or that they can at least layer soothing pearl on the irritation.

Last night was Vanguard, which doubled as a birthday party for Jordin Kare, who has hit the five-oh. marykaykare was the hostess with the mostest in her lovely purple gown. Along with the birthday song and cake and the gab about TAFF, early SF, woodworking, and why the chicken crossed the road, the evening was also filled with sad thoughts about Michael Scanlon, whom I only knew through Vanguard and who died a couple of days ago after a bad fall. I didn't know him well, and in fact didn't know he had a wife and children. His death reminded me of Octavia Butler's, both involving a fall, two faces I will no longer see at our monthly gathering of old and newer friends.

On Friday I snuck out of work a little early to catch the first regular showing in Seattle of Terry Gilliam's newish movie, Tideland (actually made around the same time last year as his Brothers Grimm). It has been getting terrible reviews, but of the almost angry, argumentative sort that made me hopeful that this was a movie that struck a live nerve. It is a grotesque fairy tale of sorts about a very young girl who loses her junkie parents and meets some strange characters on the prairie (and in the little house thereon). It's hard to describe, because I can't think of what else to compare it to, although it has elements of a zillion familiar things, from Alice in Wonderland to Andrew Wyeth to Psycho and (I'm told) Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The theme is very similar to Brazil (fantasy as an escape from pain), except that the humor is if anything even blacker (while at the same time whimsical and broad) and the girl's situation is even more nightmarish, although perhaps only because she seems so innocent, vulnerable, and helpless. On a very basic level, it's a story about child abuse, and it's also about surviving the abuse. The girl is grotesque in her own fractured way, but it's how she survives. From that angle, the story reminds me of Samuel Delany's horrific porn novel, Hogg, which also shares certain elements of white trash grotesquerie.

I dunno, it's hard to describe. It creates its own idiosyncratic tone that refuses easy reduction. I walked out of the theater uncertain how I felt, uncertain that I'd ever want to see it again, but also laughing in astonishment as I thought of various outrageous scenes. There is stuff that makes you cringe and laugh at the same time. There is stuff that made me cover my mouth as if to stifle the laugh that wanted shamefully to come out. I think it may be an amazing movie. It was interesting after reading so many negative reviews to go to IMDb and find rave after rave in the comments. It strikes a nerve, whether you wanted that nerve struck or not. There is some powerful juju there. Definitely recommended to fans of Gilliam (at least if you liked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) but I don't know about the rest of yiz.

Ah, the Puget Sound in January. Rivers are flooding, mudslides are closing roads and railways, and the foundation of my house is springing leaks, although so far not in my bedroom. But give it a few more days. I've twice gone for long walks in the rain without an umbrella in the past week. Is that perhaps why this cold has stuck around? Dunno, but you get cabin fever after a while, and I've got an Australian raincoat and mostly waterproof boots.

But I've been home the past two days, feeling sick -- and heartsick too. Wintery days. So I've been watching Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for distraction. Saw it twice in the theater when it came out in 1998 and thought it was a brilliant return to form for Gilliam. Saw the beginning on DVD last year and thought that Depp's performance was actually maybe too gimmicky. Now I've watched it twice on DVD in the past two days (once with Gilliam's commentary) and I'm back to thinking it's a brilliant performance, as is del Toro's. An amazingly fierce, deranged performance by del Toro. And it's a pretty deranged movie, too -- as in derangement of the senses. It perhaps proposes that the American Dream is of absolute freedom, and that true freedom is weirder and uglier than most people want to face. On the other hand, there is a petulance to the disillusioned idealism underneath it all that seems pretty adolescent.

I noticed the colors more this time around. An amazingly sophisticated use of color to communicate conflicted states of mind and emotion. The whole production design is incredible, as usual in a Gilliam movie. The way that more and more weird shit accumulates in the various spaces the characters inhabit becomes almost encyclopedic, quoting complex strata of the material world, signs and symbols that run askew to the so-called plot. Definitely makes for a movie that can be viewed repeatedly just to pick out more of the details, if you can handle the assaultive nature of it all.

Meanwhile, it's the heart of darkness, except the savages are us.