Early Grimm review
Jul. 5, 2004




Terry Gilliam's THE BROTHERS GRIMM was one of the films that I was most looking forward to this coming year, but it was recently pushed into February of 2005, so I guess we'll have to wait a little longer to see Matt Damon, Heath Ledger and the very lovely Monica Bellucci portraying this legendary tale on the big screen. But just to tide you over, we recently received an "early review" from someone who claims to have seen an early cut of the film shown during the last week of June. I don't know this person and cannot vouch for the authenticity of their claim, but if interested, read on. Sounds good so far. The review comes from 'T. Jones':

Hey JoBlo, I saw a test screening of The Brothers Grimm the other night and I thought I'd post a review on your site.

I've been a Gilliam fan for many years now, so my excitement level for this flick was pretty high. So basically it's about two brothers (Matt Damon & Heath Ledger) who have been scamming people for many years by making up stories of how they hunt ghosts, setting up villages by making them appear to be haunted, then "exterminating" the ghost and making it disappear. After celebrating another successful con, they both get captured by an annoying French man and taken to the king of France where they are to be put to death for fraud. Before they lose their heads, they strike a deal with the king that if they can get rid of the spirit haunting a poor village where all the young girls are mysteriously vanishing. (Insert R. Kelly joke here) When they get to the village, they team up with a tough-as-nails hunter chick who wants to avenge the death of her father and rescue her little sister who disappeared several days before. Now the brothers have to prove themselves in order to save their skin, as well as the entire village.

I stayed for a brief audience survey after the screening and listened to some other jackasses explain through the course of VERY inane and repetitive answers which showed nothing other than how pretentious these people really were and that they looked way too deep into the movie for their own good.

If you're looking for deep symbolism, metaphors, and life lessons, go somewhere else. If you're looking for another lame kids movie... kill yourself. But if you're looking for 2 hours of grade-A entertainment, an original story, and a creepy little mud-man, then the Brothers Grimm is for you! The great thing about this flick is that it keeps up the old Gilliam humor, and still maintains a serious fairy tale plot. This was actually the first movie I've probably ever seen that can pull that off. The cast was also impeccable. First off, you have Matt Damon. Second, Heath Ledger, and even though I'm not a huge fan, he was perfect for the part of the wimpy little brother. Best of all, you've got the queen of hotties...Monica Bellucci. The only thing I didn't like was that there wasn't more of these creatures, like the mud-man, or the evil trees. (Don't ask.) This was a very rough cut of the film, so the CGI wasn't great, and the soundtrack wasn't finished. When they are, they'll be the icing on this cake. And I'm getting myself another slice when it hits theaters.

Moriarty Walks Through The Forest With THE BROTHERS GRIMM!!



Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

I love Terry Gilliam movies.

Let’s get that out of the way right up front, so we’re all clear on it. I love Gilliam’s voice as a filmmaker. I love that his movies are messy and rarely play by the conventions of Hollywood, and you can always sense Gilliam just off-camera, giggling gleefully when the artistic mayhem pays off. His masterpiece, BRAZIL, may be my favorite film of all time, and I’m pretty head-over-heels for TIME BANDITS, 12 MONKEYS, FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and, especially, THE FISHER KING. I’m amazed at how close he let the filmmakers behind THE HAMSTER FACTOR and LOST IN LA MANCHA get to him, and I find his still-difficult treatment by the studio system to be consistently disheartening.

But even in the rare Gilliam misfire (and it’s hard to think of a better word for a film like MUNCHAUSEN), there are moments of such grace and wit and unfettered imagination that I find myself dazzled anew with each viewing. When your worst movies are worth watching more than once, you are an uncommonly good filmmaker. Think of that gorgeous waltz between John Neville and Uma Thurman, as the years just fall away from Neville, the two of them dancing higher and higher on air. The very least I expect from a Giliam film is a handful of those sort of magic moments.

And on that level, I enjoyed THE BROTHERS GRIMM, the most nakedly commercial and impersonal film that Gilliam’s ever made. The film is obvious, just to the edge of crass, and that’s got to be due to the thick-headed script by Ehren Kruger. It’s one of the worst scripts I’ve seen this year, mechanical and lifeless from the set-up. The film feels too calculated for you to ever really root for it, but it’s almost like Gilliam knew that when he signed on, and so did the cast, but they didn’t care because they knew it was Gilliam directing. It’s almost like the film exists in spite of the script, not because of it.

And so the film has this crazy energy about it, and sure enough, there are some dark fairy tale images in the film that feel like authentic nightmares, surreal and impossible to forget. Gilliam plays with CGI for the first time to mixed results. Some of it’s a little shoddy, but when it works, it’s original and striking, and even when it doesn’t work, it’s interesting. I wish that Kruger’s script played more with the specific iconography of the Grimm stories, instead of just a cursory nod at Red Riding Hood and a vague mention of a mirror on a wall, but the script misses so many opportunities that it’s hard to complain about any one specific one. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm are fascinating historical figures, and I think people underestimate the cultural significance of what they did. They worked as Royal Librarians in Berlin and, together, they were creating an Encyclopedia of Grammar, serious work that earned them scholarly acclaim. It was Jakob who came up with the idea that changed the direction of their lives, though. He proposed a project where they would collect stories that were passed down as part of the oral tradition, folk tales that he believed revealed the truth about the inner lives of common people. They spent years traveling, writing down stories everywhere they went, and in doing so, they captured something for the ages that would have been lost otherwise.

So, of course, forget all that. Instead, this is basically a rehash of SCOOBY-DOO in which Jake (Heath Ledger) and Will (Matt Damon) are sort of the Mystery Machine Gang and Old Man Withers all wrapped up in one. They travel from village to village solving hauntings and curses that mostly seem to be scams that the Grimms run on the poor unsuspecting locals. It sounds like more fun than it is onscreen. It’s all sort of frantic and labored, and there’s a scene at the beginning of the Grimms as children to explain why Will doesn’t believe in magic but Jake does. It takes a while for the film to find its tone. That happens right around the moment that Jonathan Pryce makes his entrance. He’s wise to the game that the Grimms have been playing, and he could easily put them to death for it. Instead, he presses them into service. There’s a small village that’s reporting the same sort of incidents the Grimms have made their reputation on, and Pryce wants them to investigate and figure out who’s behind it.

Gee... y’think maybe this one’s real?

If you can’t guess from the set-up that the Grimms are going to have to defeat a real supernatural foe, then you’ve probably never seen a movie before. Every obvious choice that the script can make, it does. The way Gilliam handles it is by layering in some rich texture to even the most ham-handed scene. Take the henchmen played by Richard Ridings and Mackenzie Crook (better known as Gareth on THE OFFICE). Gilliam uses them as visual punchlines even when their scenes are poorly written, and they work as such. Same thing with Peter Stormare, who plays Cavaldi, henchman to Pryce’s character. He takes a fairly generic bad guy and lets his freak flag fly. Lena Headey, the female lead in the film, doesn’t salvage her deeply underwritten role. She’s a bore, and no matter how had the film tries to set her up as the love interest, she and Ledger never strike any sparks, so it never really clicks. Monica Bellucci’s ravishing when she’s supposed to be, but she’s barely in the film. It would be hard to even call what she does a performance. Basically, she’s there to model the extravagant costumes by Gabriella Pescucci, and she looks great doing so. As far as the leads are concerned, Heath Ledger seems to be much more in tune with what Gilliam's doing than Damon is, and the two of them have some funny back-and-forth, but again... the writing's just flat and obvious and too much of it fails for either of these guys to shine to their full potential.

Have you seen those amazing posters for the film? If not, check them out. I wish the film really did look like that all the way through. Newton Thomas Sigel’s work can be pretty great at times, but there’s something about this film that feels rushed, unfinished, lowball. I’ve heard all sorts of whispers about Dimension tampering with the film from the moment it started shooting. Whatever the case, I’d say this is ultimately an inconsequential film for Gilliam except in one regard: at least he finally got a new film made. Anyone who saw LOST IN LA MANCHA saw a beaten Gilliam, a guy finally and fully defeated by the process. THE BROTHERS GRIMM isn’t a great film, but even here, there is considerable evidence of the enormous talent that continues to make Gilliam one of the most interesting filmmakers alive. It’s worth seeing at least once, on the biggest screen available, when it opens August 26th.

Now I’ve got to run start working on my other two articles for the weekend... a trip to a set in Vancouver that was sorta neat and the return of Moriarty’s DVD Shelf. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.

Brothers Grimm

Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Robin Williams, Jonathan Pryce, Lena Headey
Directed by Terry Gilliam
2005 Comedy
Rated PG-13


Terry Gilliam rarely has it easy making movies. Whether its his unfinished Don Quixote or the brilliant Brazil, the suits always want him to change things. The Brothers Grimm, with the shots called by the brothers Weinstein, is no exception. The $80 million biopic, starring Matt Damon as the skeptical Will Grimm and Heath Ledger as his susceptible brother Jacob, is so loosely based on the nineteenth-century German siblings who wrote Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and other famously grim fairy tales that there's hardly a word of truth in it. If you're a Gilliam junkie, as I am, you go with it, even when the script by Ehren Kruger (The Skeleton Key) loses its shaky hold on coherence. Damon quickly loses his hold on his accent and his wig. Ledger fares better as the nerdy brother who goes along with Will's plan to scam German villagers with fake witches that the boys banish for a fee. But Jake keeps looking for real magic. Ledger lets us see the hope in Jake's eyes when the brothers enter a forest ruled by a genuinely evil Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci). It's Gilliam's chance to run amok, and watching him do it is eye-popping fun. Gilliam is Jake at heart, and it's a treat to see this former Monty Python (the troupe's only American) fart in the general direction of the Age of Reason in the persons of French governor Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce, pure ham and fromage) and his Italian henchman Cavaldi (an untamed Peter Stormare). Even when Gilliam flies off the rails, his images stick with you.

PETER TRAVERS
(Posted Aug 11, 2005)

Brothers Grimm con their way to No. 2 at the Box Office
By Aaron Zundel
Published: Friday, September 2, 2005


Brothers Grimm Review
By Aaron Zundel

This movie focuses on the famous Brothers Grimm (yes, the same Brothers Grimm who wrote all the fairy tales) as they traipse about Bavaria "defeating" the supernatural and chronicling their experiences. In truth they are a couple of con artists preying on the superstitions of poor villagers...that is until they run into a real witch with real powers and a real haunted forest. The movie has bits of famous fairy tales generously sprinkled throughout, and it was kind of a pleasure to see where all the "ideas" for those stories supposedly came from in a "Forest Gump-y" sort of way.
The movie is the latest foray into cinema by Monty Python alumni Terry Gilliam, and he may have backed himself into a corner on this one. You see, Gilliam films-Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, among others-have historically been geared to a very specific niche audience, but this time around Gilliam has taken a more mainstream approach. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that Gilliam didn't steer it into the mainstream enough. As it sits, The Brothers Grimm seems trapped in this funky limbo between trying to please the eccentric, artsy Gilliam fan base while still trying to please everyone else. The result is just the opposite. Fans are going to decry it, and regular audiences won't be able to get behind it.

That's not to say I didn't like the movie. I did. But I think I'm in the minority on this one.

Stylistically it reminded me of a darker, edgier, more serious Muppet movie. But without Muppets. I know that must seem like a strange thing to say, but then again Gilliam movies are strange to begin with. The lighting, the sets, and the characters (Peter Stormare as Cavaldi in particular) all felt a little...well...Muppety.

The acting is a little over the top (in classic Gilliam style), but still fun to watch.
Heath Ledger as Jacob, the quieter, brainier of the two brothers, gives his best and deepest performance in recent memory, though that's still not saying much. And Matt Damon makes a standard, if still well executed, showing as the flashy Wilhelm. If you want to see this movie for the Ledger/Damon hotness factor, though, you're eating the wrong candy. Ledger sports a ratty, face obscuring beard and they both wear baggy, grimy eighteenth century attire the whole movie. Sorry, ladies, no secret agent six packs in this one.

All in all I recommend the movie. I would just suggest that you get in the right frame of mind before you go. This is neither a so called "Gilliam" movie, nor is it a popcorn thriller, and people expecting either will be disappointed. It is simply a fairy tale wrapped inside a fairy tale. If you enter the theater with the same awe and wonder you had when you listened to stories as a child, but temper it with the sensibilities of an adult, you might just enjoy yourself.