8-11-06, 1:45 pm

Tideland (18)

Directed by Terry Gilliam

WARNING, this film is not suitable for those with a dodgy disposition, never mind those who equate childhood with the middle class adventures of Famous Five, Just William or Harry Potter.

Based upon Mitch Cullin's book of the same name, Terry Gilliam describes his film adaptation as 'Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho.'

While I agree about comparisons with Lewis Carroll's creation, the analogy with Hitchcock is misleading.

The irony is that Gilliam is closer to Grimm than his own film on the baroque brothers as he directs this tale of the travails of a 10-year-old girl caught up in a heroin horror and the hallucinations of childhood.

From its opening moment, with a young girl reciting Alice's adventures as she runs through a vast field, it increasingly becomes a parable about an apocalyptic US nightmare.

As such, it has moments of madness, gems of genius and, as always, periods of pretentiousness, portentousness and provocative politics.

Jodelle Ferland is amazing as Jeliza-Rose, who, when she's not preparing a fix for her junkie father (Jeff Bridges) and cuddling her chocoholic mother (Jennifer Tilly), she's having conversations with five decapitated doll's heads.

Bridges is also brilliant as a rock musician well past his sell-by date fixing to spend his time on 'vacation' before circumstance has him and the child take a bus to a house resembling a painting by Andrew Wyeth.

You know the one - even the Bush baby knows it - it's Christina's World, a seeming idyllic image of a young woman lying in a cornfield looking up at a typical white weather-boarded house on the horizon.

'Seeming,' being the operative word, since the woman in the foreground is not as she seems - she's a polio victim and she's crawling, the truth of her situation undermining the apparent sentimentality.

Tideland also challenges the idyll of the American Dream, forcefully and without compromise. Gillian touches on aspects of childhood that few would mention, not least because of fears of child abuse.

Given that Bridges spends most of the film dead to the world and, despite some decidedly distasteful moments, his persona becomes an icon of a mummified ideology.

Fortunately, the young girl can escape into her imagination, conjuring up images of a heaven no less real than those promised by a religion that hangs pictures on the wall of a man being crucified.

Apart from having imaginary conversations with her imaginary friends, she has a delusional friendship with batty, one-eyed taxidermist Dell (Janet McTeer) and her brain-damaged son Dickens (Brendan Fletcher).

While Dell seems intent on stuffing every living thing for when God's grace arrives, Dickens trawls through the prairie believing himself a frogman waiting for the day when he can destroy the great shark.

It's what he calls the local train, which rides through the landscape like a screeching monster. The only other intrusions to break the silence are the hellish blasts from the local quarry.

The film is easier while stuck in imaginative mode. The moments when reality rears its ugly head, things go awry, the implication being that reality is more horrendous than anything anyone could imagine.

This is particularly true in the scenes in which the girl-woman dresses up in a bride costume to court the man-child, their relationship being a macabre parody of most marriages, not least that of her mother and father.

Tideland is a place where seemingly lost souls are washed up in more ways than one as they try to survive the vicissitudes of time by creating comfortable illusions necessary to maintain the myth of the founding fathers.

All the characters are recognisable from a galaxy of Western movies and US folklore, from the archetypal outcast-cum-prodigal son to the legion of loonies waiting for a fix from God.

As ever, Gilliam stretches out the plot to epic proportions, the end arriving like a late train and almost as explosive, the young lass wandering in the ruins of the cornfield like the proverbial lost soul.

Throughout his career, Gilliam has made epic tales of troubled quixotic souls who, unable to cope with a world in transition, are driven to fight the phantoms in their mind.

Whereas Don Quixote existed at a time when the so-called age of chivalry was on the wane, Gilliam's characters are caught up in a world witnessing the demise of the age of reason.

They might call it a war on terror, but it feels like a war on the world.

But, as ever, as the new barbarism ravages the planet, there walks a new innocent, a child carrying the scars of the past, determined to survive, even to create an imperfect present.

Tideland is very problematic, but well worth the bother.

JEFF SAWTELL



------------------------------------------------------------------------ Innocent Voices (12A)

Directed by Luis Mandoki

INNOCENT VOICES arrives here with the best recommendation that it can have. The US cinema circuit sought to censor the film because it stands accused of suggesting that their government had collaborated in genocide.



Based upon a 'true story' by Oscar Torres, it features Carlos Padila as Chava, a 10-year-old boy who is dreading being 11, since that day will mark his induction into the El Salvadorean army.

Luis Mandoki's film is set in El Salvador during the bloody repression of the people by the army after they had the audacity to challenge the hegemony of the landlord class. The latter were aided and abetted by the US ruling junta.

Chava's days are spent at school, fearing the moment when the soldiers will arrive. He spends the nights with his family, mostly hiding under the bed as shrapnel explodes all around them.

He lives with his mother (Leonor Varela) and siblings, the father having disappeared north long ago and never returned, like many other men, except, of course for those who join the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The local population largely consists of women, children and men too old for service and Chava has to seek work to help support the family while struggling with the problems of puberty.

The guerillas are represented by his Uncle Beto (Jose Maria Yazpik), who visits and gives the lad a tiny radio, instructing him in how to tune in to listen to FMLN radio station Venceremos.

Naturally, he's told not to listen to it within earshot of the soldiers, advice which he's reluctant to follow until his boyish pranks lead to problems, not least involving the local priest and the destruction of the village.

Despite its Hollywood gloss, this is a poignant film about life behind the lines. The boy tries to pursue a school room romance while working calling out the stops on a local bus.

Naturally, his mother is beside herself with worry, counting off the days till his birthday. The ever-wise grandmother only puts 10 candles on the cake, as, every day, the soldiers are shooting up the streets.

Although it has caused alarm in the north, the lad isn't forced to take sides, which is a bit of a cop-out when you consider the circumstances of joining the exodus to the US.

Still, well worth a watch during the school break.

JEFF SAWTELL

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monster House (PG)

Directed by Gil Kenan

POSSIBLY the best of the summer's animated offerings, this take on The Burbs sees a troublesome trio of tykes joining forces to take on the haunted house across the road.

A typical psycho-style house, it's owner is a bad-tempered old geezer who confiscates everything that happens to fall on his well-trimmed lawn. The reason? Well, that's what you pay your money for.

Suffice it to say, fat people don't get a good press, with the mouth of the house set to devour everything that strays on its path, where it is snapped up by the hall carpet tongue and swallowed with accompanying flatulence.

Based upon every child's favourite horror story, the empty house in the street, the kids are inevitably trapped inside, where they realise that they have to discover the heart of the house.

Sadly, there are a number of caricatures beyond the pale, such as when the fat policeman turns up. His black sidekick has the rolling eyes and foolish patter so beloved of racist movies of yore.

Too tame for adults, possibly too scary for the wee ones.

JEFF SAWTELL



------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lady in the Water (PG)

Directed by M Night Shyamalan

IF YOU are not into fairytales, a warning. If you find that you cannot suspend your disbelief in a world of water sprites called Narfs and wolfish monsters called Scrunts, then you might find it impossible to accept this 'bedtime tale.'

On the other hand, we live in a Tolkien-Lewis world, so why not?

M Night Shyamalan has been in the critics' sights ever since he won plaudits for The Sixth Sense.

Nothing that he has done since, they say, has been any good. 'Too pretentious,' 'too twee.'

But he still spins an interesting yarn and sometimes jokingly punctuates the po-faced.

The best in this one has Bob Balaban as an arrogant film critic trapped in a corridor with a scrunt giving an analysis of how this works in conventional horror films.

Bryce Dallas Howard is the ethereal sprite, but the focus is on a very sympathetic Paul Giamatti as an apartment superintendent, the rescuer who enlists all the multinational folk in the building to find their true selves and perform a ritual to save the sprite.

Well, that may sound too much of a sweet thing but, for the willing, allowing for a couple of banal bits, it works nicely.

PETER MALONE



------------------------------------------------------------------------ Alpha Male (15)

Directed by Dan Wilde

A CRASS champagne class tragedy is summed up by one character stating: 'You live in a mansion and you've a fortune built of selling recyclable plastic cartoons, so what's your problem?'

Precisely. Despite the excellent acting, we're supposed to believe that a couple of rich kids can't get it together because their dear darling daddy has kicked the bucket, leaving them all living in clover. Oh dear.

JEFF SAWTELL



------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nacho Libre (12A)

Directed by Jared Hess

HOW stupid is stupid? Nacho Libre is pretty stupid. Not that audiences can't enjoy something stupid. We do. But this one is really hit and miss.

A hit if you like Jack Black, who has been pretty funny in the past in School of Rock. But he is a calculating comedian, one of those actors who can never get enough applause. You can see him working out how to win over the audience.

A miss if you don't like impossible farce, silly dialogue and storylines - and if wrestling is not your favourite sport.

PETER MALONE

From Morningstar Online