The Mumpsimus

Will Lasky at The House Next Door suggests that The Fall is destined to be a cult classic, and that seems right to me. It's a movie that causes viewers to split quite strongly, some feeling the film is visionary and powerful, others finding it pretentious and boring. Inevitably, as we try to tell people what we thought of the movie and what the experience of watching it is like, we compare it to other films -- The Princess Bride comes up a lot, but I think that's a bit misleading, and likely to cause dissatisfaction in a viewer who watches The Fall expecting the other film's whimsy. A closer approximation would be Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , a movie that is as full of stories-within-stories as Princess Bride and The Fall , and also shares The Fall's darker view of human motivations, attention to imagery, and sometimes messy (some might even say flabby ) narrative structure. The other particularly valid comparison, I think, is to th...

I'm a die-hard Terry Gilliam fan, so would have seen Tideland at the first opportunity no matter what, but even if I weren't a Terry Gilliam fan, how could I not be intrigued by the reviews it got -- "You watch the film feeling abused and exploited" , "ugly visuals and even more unpleasant behavior" , "easily the worst production Gilliam has ever been involved in" , "has the effect of a prolonged shriek" , "virtually unwatchab le" , "borderline unwatchable" , "unwatchable" , "squirmingly unwatchable" , "one of the most stunning mistakes of the first decade of the 21st century" , "It might be said that [Gilliam's] imagination knows no boundaries; it might be good if he found some. " Even though I have a certain perverse pleasure whenever I can disagree with just about everybody, I still went into Tideland with pretty low expectations, because ... well, I'd seen The Brot...