Also over at SciFiWire is an interesting tidbit on Terry Gilliam, talking about audience reaction to his latest film, Tideland, the film based on the book by Mitch Cullin about a 9-year-old girl with heroin-addicted parents, whose imagination creates a vivid fantasy world filled with disturbing imagery for most people.
Gilliam is possibly one of the few visionaries in mainstream films today... perhaps even a true artist like the masters we read about in books... the ones who are so misunderstood by contemporary audiences that they are driven mad, only to become revered long after their death.
While his films don't necessarily lend themselves to a cohesive narrative all the time, one cannot deny they are visually brilliant, with imagery that stays with you long after you've seen the film. The following quote of his really stood out for me, because it was exactly along the lines of what I was thinking about this morning on my drive into work... when I was mentally comparing The Godfather with the relatively meager The Godfather Part III:
I would love everybody to love my films. ...There's no question. I would love to please everybody. But that's what most of the other films are doing. Everybody is out there watching films, and the problem is most films, ... I don't know what they are anymore. I get no reaction out of them. ... I want to make films that do what earlier films did to me. They got in my brain. They got in my viscera. They wouldn't leave me alone. They got into me and inhabited me. Films don't do that to me anymore, and they don't seem to do that to the audience half the time. They go in for two hours, check the brain in, go zip-pow-crash-bang-wow, and then you come out and [say], 'Well, that was all right.' And that's the end of it.
The rest of the piece is interesting, if only to read former Monty Python alum Michael Palin's quote: "Terry, it's either the best film you've ever made or the worst, I don't know."
