Adapted from Mitch Cullin's book of the same name, it's been described as "Alice in Dali-Land" and as "queer and surreal as a movie can get" to possibly the best thing Terry Gilliam (Grimm Brothers, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Jabberwocky, Time Bandits...) has done in a long time. With a limited budget invention became the mother of this film... Jeliza-Rose's mother is dead from a heroin overdose and her father, 67-year-old Noah (Jeff Bridges), who's a drug-addicted, 'has-been' rock guitarist, leaves his wife's corpse on the bed in their sleazy L.A. apartment and takes the girl on a Greyhound bus to his long-dead mother's home in rural Texas. Pinning a map of Denmark on the wall, he sits and stares trancelike for days on end. Jeliza-Rose makes her own way finding her childhood in the long grasses of the texas plains (filmed in Canada!) and soon encounters Dell, the eccentric neighbor woman who always wears a beekeeper's veil and has a brain-damaged brother named Dickens.


Conversations between Jeliza-Rose and her most trusted confidants (disembodied Barbie heads she wears on her fingers that come to life) serve to illumine the girl's disturbed state of mind and to further the surreal plot. As Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world collides with Dell's secrets, a bizarre history and surreal adventure takes shape, at once twisted fairytale and portrait of a young girl's unbearable childhood, the visual unfolding of her fevered imagination is both the nightmare and the escape mechanism for Jeliza-Rose's brave effort to save herself.




source info: Publisher's weekly, bn.com, Smart Co., imdb

This entry was posted on Friday, September 08, 2006 at 10:10 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.