I have seen A LOT of movies. A lot of grotesque blood-curdling, disturbing, avant-garde films--some were incredibly bizarre, imaginative, and provocative. But Tideland remains the WORST film I have ever seen.
Painful and sickening, perhaps its greatest attribute is that it succeeded in doing what no other film has been able to do--it made me feel like I was staring at a corpse rotting for over two hours. There is NO LIFE in this film, which is a perversion to the concept of cinema or "moving pictures." While the medium of film is supposed to "give life" to pictures, every single moment of Tideland I watched had been dead for several months or years. Art films like Decasia treat the materiality of film as decay, but Tideland is really embodied in the character of Jeff Bridges--a decaying corpse.
Another reviewer wrote that he/she had to take a shower after watching it. So did I. I felt that the rot from the screen had affected my own presence. I needed to be cleansed.
Painful and sickening, perhaps its greatest attribute is that it succeeded in doing what no other film has been able to do--it made me feel like I was staring at a corpse rotting for over two hours. There is NO LIFE in this film, which is a perversion to the concept of cinema or "moving pictures." While the medium of film is supposed to "give life" to pictures, every single moment of Tideland I watched had been dead for several months or years. Art films like Decasia treat the materiality of film as decay, but Tideland is really embodied in the character of Jeff Bridges--a decaying corpse.
Another reviewer wrote that he/she had to take a shower after watching it. So did I. I felt that the rot from the screen had affected my own presence. I needed to be cleansed.