Tideland. Again.

"Not to put too fine a point on it, but what Terry Gilliam's latest creation elicits from its first moments is that most unsubtle of reactions, for which not even the notoriously negative word-of-mouth quite prepares you, namely: 'WTF?'" Kristi Mitsuda opens the Reverse Shot round at indieWIRE. "Reducing the work of the director responsible for such heady contributions to cinema as Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to that single expression may seem glib, but there's no other way to encapsulate the utterly baffling experience of Tideland."

For Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, Tideland "marks the final, ugly implosion of a one-time maverick's career."

"[T]he borderline between fantasy and reality" is "familiar territory" for Gilliam, writes AO Scott in the New York Times, "but this time he has stumbled into a different no-man’s land, the one between the merely bad and the completely indefensible."

Slant's Nick Schager finds the "unrestrained inventiveness is both the blessing and the curse of Gilliam's wack-job of a film, whose anti-conventionality (and anti-commercialism) is a breath of eccentric air even as its narrative and stylistic lack of self-control ultimately results in something of a catastrophe."

Related online viewing: Terry Gilliam hits the streets, begging folks to see Tideland. Also, Tasha Robinson talks with Gilliam for the AV Club, and so, too, does Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls.

Earlier: Critical reaction in the British press.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2006 1:42 PM