Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our own Anton Sirius on his second day of Toronto. Below you'll find reviews of TIDELAND (positive), a sleeper hit of a flick called THE BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (a mockumentary) and the Orson Welles doco THE WELL. Enjoy!
Greetings, starkinder! No time for funny anecdotes right now -- I am many reviews behind, with many film to see, so I'm just going to pump them out as they get written.
I do feel better about the whole Bono thing with Copernicus though, as the Toronto Star apparently reported that the Bono he met was an imposter. Considering that Bono is really in town though (Neil Jordan vouched for him, which is good enough for me) the whole thing just makes my head hurt.
Tideland (2005, directed by Terry Gilliam)
Great films have exactly one thing in common -- they have the capacity to surprise the audince, whether in terms of story or theme or visuals or whatever. Somewhere in every great film is a jack-in-the-box that makes people shriek or giggle when it bursts open.
Make no mistake, this is a great film. But you're going to hear an awful lot of shrieking over it.
Tideland follows young Jeliza Rose through a few ugly days in her ugly life. Her mother's on methadone and her father, well, isn't, and relies on his little girl to cook up his smack and prepare his needles. When Mama dies, daddy and daughter flee to the house he grew up in, abandoned since his mother died. With only one other house, populated by its own train wreck of a family, within miles Jeliza Rose is essentially left to fend for herself in a place where civilization is just a big, clumsy word.
One of the things that makes Tideland so surprising is that it's really a Gilliam film turned inside out. The normal Gilliam aesthetic is to create a universe in which a pool of wonder hides an undercurrent of darkness. Tideland inverts that formula, presenting a universe as black as cancer with a thin little trickle of fantasy to relieve the despair. Jeliza Rose's world is hellish; Things happen around her and to her that Should Not Be. What's worse, she doesn't even realize it. The way things are for her is the way they're always been. Unlike the child heroes of Time Bandits or Baron Munchausen, Jeliza Rose has no frame of reference from which to put what's going on in perspective, and no home to which she can return once the madness subsides. Tideland makes explicit the message that's always gone unstated -- a Gilliam universe is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.
More than that though, what makes Tideland great is the complete honesty with which it shows that universe through Jeliza Rose's eyes. The things she sees, the way she reacts to them, are presented totally without judgement, despite the fact that from the audience's perspective they are unquestionably WRONG. Little girls, especially darling little girls played with such incredible, dazzling intelligence and skill (note to Hollywood: Jodelle Ferland just made Dakota Fanning obsolete) that you can't help but want to scoop them up and give them a big hug and protect them from the darkness, should not be subjected to the things Jeliza Rosa is subjected to. Darling little girls should also not do the things Jeliza Rosa does, in her efforts to adapt to her surroundings. But they do, and she does, and there's nothing we can do but watch, and pray that she somehow survives it all.
The fact that the film is transgressive is not what gives it such impact though. It's that lack of condemnation that's going to create the chorus of shrieks. By playing it straight, by not making any moral judgements and simply letting Ferland's performance carry the story, Gilliam has crafted a film that strips away all defenses. The empathy I felt for Jeliza Rose blasted away any distance I had from what she was going through, and I suspect most people will feel the same. And a lot of them are going to be very uncomfortable with that feeling. Add to that the number of people who are going to feel betrayed because they expect Gilliam films to be psychedelic, feel-good bits of whimsy... well, let's just say this one's going to generate some pretty strong reactions.
There's no doubt in my mind that, eventually, Tideland is going to be seen as one of the high points of Gilliam's career. It may take a while to get there, though.
Brothers of the Head (2005, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe)
20-odd years after its birth, the mockumentary is finally starting to grow up a bit. There's no shame in its late development; if any genre needed an extended adolescence it was the one kicked off by This Is Spinal Tap. But you could see the first hints of maturity in the Mitch & Mickey storyline in A Mighty Wind - the humanity in their relationship was a far cry from exploding drummers and a man with two left feet.
Brothers of the Head ups the ante considerably. Based on a novel by Brian Aldiss, the film uses 'archival footage' and 'present-day interviews' to tell the story of twin brothers, plucked from obscurity by an unscrupulous but sentimental promoter and show biz lifer, who formed the heart of a band called the Bang Bang that became an underground legend and, like the Monks (not the Drugs in My Pocket guys, the other Monks) and the MC5, a key link in the early evolution of punk.
Did I say twins brothers? Of course I meant siamese twin brothers, because the band is initally all about the gimmick. Joined at the stomach, Tom is able to use both his arms and is trained as the lead guitarist; Barry, forced by anatomy to live his life peering over his brother's left shoulder, is the lead vocalist.
Make no mistake, Brothers of the Head has some, uhh, gut-bustingly funny bits in it, particularly the footage from Ken Russell's unfinished biopic Two-Way Romeo. But the film also doesn't shy away from the glimpses of darkness inherent in any rock 'n' roll tale of burning out and not fading away. The boys' manager physically abuses one (yes, just one) of the brothers to try and keep him in line. Birds, booze, pills and powder are everywhere, and take their toll on Tom and Barry. And their deaths, coming as alone as they could be and out of the spotlight, are nearly as poignent as the passing of any real-life Johnny Thunders or Nick Drake.
The other thing the movie gets exactly right is the music. The tunes off the Bang Bang's one and only album are perfect, raw and roaring and just on the edge of catching the lightning bolt Johnny Rotten and the boys rode into history. Hearing songs like Doola and Dawla, My Friend (You Cunt) and Two-Way Romeo reminds you of the first time you heard the Stooges or the New York Dolls - they're so spot-on perfect that it's impossible to tell which one was co-written by the Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley without peeking at the credits. In fact they're so spot-on perfect that I was sorely tempted not to let on in this review that it's a work of fiction... if marketed correctly Brothers of the Head could easily generate a Blair Witch "Is it real?" sort of buzz.
Special mention has to be made of the kids in the leads. Luke and Harry Treadaway are fantastic, probably the best portrayal of fucked-up twins since Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons. Tom and Barry are complete individuals, yet creepily intertwined (and not just at the waist) in that way all the greatest movie twins seem to be.
Brothers of the Head is dynamite, a look back at a band (and Ken Russell film) that never was, but probably should have been.
The Well (2005, directed by Kristian Petri)
For the most part, trying to solve "the mystery of Orson Welles" is a mug's game, even moreso than it would be for more common folk. The riddles of a person's life are obscure for a reason. You might, in the end, figure out what Rosebud was, but figuring out what it means is pretty much futile. The best you can do is learn something about yourself in the attempt.
Fortunately, Kristian Petri knew all that before he made The Well. On the surface, the film is about Petri's quest to find out who "the real Welles" was by retracing his footsteps through Spain, one of the great loves of the great man's life, and interviewing those who knew him best there (an odd assortment of folk it is too, ranging from Oja Kodar to Jess Franco to some Scottish ex-rugby player who was Orson's drinking buddy and fellow bullfighter groupie). In reality the film is about Petri himself, as seen through the lens of Welles' legend and staggering creativity. The Well isn't so much an examination of what Don Quixote meant to Welles as it is an adaptation of the story, with Petri playing the Don and Welles playing every other role, especially those of the sheep and the windmills.
There's plenty here for the Orsonista too -- Franco's anecdotes are a riot, and some of the newly uncovered footage (Welles doing Shylock, or explaining the appeal of bullfighting as "a tragedy in three acts... with the bull as the hero"), as with all uncovered Welles footage, makes you long for an afterlife that features a DVD shelf containing all his unfinished and bastardized masterpieces, restored and pristine.
The doc isn't without its flaws. Petri aims for a languid pacing in keeping with the country itself, but ends up with a film that simply drags in spots. And while his adherence to a first-person perspective is admirable, there's only so many shots of the road ahead taken through a car windshield that we really need to see. Still, as a way to spend a couple of hours with one of cinema's titans, The Well sure beats listening to Bogdanovich relive the good old days yet again.
Revenge of Name That Tune!
Thought you might like to know... I'm her lorry driver man.
Last Week's Answer: Svefn-G-Englar by Sigur Ros
