1. Tideland (2005)
What happens when Terry Gilliam tries to be like Terry Gilliam? Tideland is what happens, and let me tell you, the results aren't pretty. This unwatchable mess of a movie is surely one of the most insane and disturbingly awkward experiments ever undertaken by a respected auteur - it's not that Tideland is bad, it's that it's almost a resignation on Gilliam's part. Lacking everything except for mindless excess, it's as if the otherwise talented writer/director set out to purposely create a movie highlighting exactly why nobody should let him make one ever again. The tagline for this movie, by the way, was: "the squirrels made it seem less lonely." Seriously. I'm not kidding. To try to explain the plot to you in a paragraph would be an insult to both explanations and paragraphs - it boggles the mind as to how far down the rabbit hole Gilliam decided to go with this one. Let's just settle for the director's own description: "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho." I'm not sure that's apt, though, because it gives a sense of narrative comprehension, which this movie lacks entirely. So here's a film that has been been designed to be as weird as possible, in the most excruciating sense imaginable. "How weird can I go?" Gilliam presumably asks himself when he sat down to write Tideland. I wonder if he ever stopped to ponder whether anyone cared.
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