Looks Grim for Grimm

[Krug]

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,4029,1556577,00.html

Having suffered seven years of career freeze, the director Terry Gilliam might have felt entitled to a warmer reception when he finally returned to the day job. It was not to be.

His comeback film has been mauled by the press ahead of its American release today.

The Brothers Grimm is Gilliam's first completed picture since his 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In the meantime his most notable appearance was as the hapless star of the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, which charted - in excruciating detail - the collapse of the film-maker's long-cherished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp. In the aftermath of that calamity, Gilliam struggled to raise funding for a string of projects and admitted that his confidence was at rock bottom.

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The Brothers Grimm was intended as a riposte to those who suggested that the man behind Time Bandits and Brazil is too unruly and iconoclastic to be entrusted with a large-scale Hollywood production.

Budgeted at about $80m, the flamboyant Gothic concoction stars A-list actors Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as a pair of charlatan siblings who uncover a fairytale curse in the forests of 19th century Germany.

At this year's Cannes film festival, the director admitted that he hoped the film's success would pave the way for another stab at Don Quixote.

"Johnny [Depp] and I made a deal when Quixote collapsed," he told the Guardian. "He said, 'You make a commercial film, I'll make a commercial film and we'll get the money to do Quixote.' He made Pirates [of the Caribbean]. Grimms is my commercial film."

But those plans are now in doubt, with US critics lining up to deride the film. According to Robert Koehler in the film industry newspaper Variety: "The Brothers Grimm is deeply lost in the woods. From its depiction of the German author-kin as conmen to its frenetic and exhausted conclusion there's little appeal, save for those looking for a late August distraction."

In the New York Observer, Rex Reed was still more scathing. "Gilliam has no clear idea what he's doing," he wrote, "so the movie is nothing more than noise, costumes and disjointed special effects."

 

[Hand of Evil]

I still am seeing it.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I am planning on seeing it still as well. Here is what the reviewer in the Boston Globe had to say today:

Quick, what do you get when you mix Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White, the Frog Prince, the Gingerbread Man, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, werewolves, the Napoleonic Wars, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, a 1,000-year-old Thuringian Queen, and a director with Monty Python in his DNA and a penchant for shambolic overbudget follies?

You get an absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

...snip...

'The Brothers Grimm" never quite makes up its mind whether to play as the broadest of farces -- that's certainly what the director told Stormare, who quickly grows tiresome -- as an action-filled buddy movie, or as a tingly eldritch mystery of pagan beliefs taking back a little post-Enlightenment ground. When all the cylinders click, the effect is transporting, as when a glop of enchanted mud wipes a child's face right off her head and uses it to morph into a bratty gingerbread kid. When the pieces don't fit, the movie's just dank noise, a poor cousin to Gilliam's ''The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

 

[Desdichado]

I'll see it too, but my expectations are severaly lowered. From Roger Ebert, "The movie seems like a style in search of a purpose."

Eh.

 

[sniffles]

I love Terry Gilliam's style. The only movie of his that I haven't seen in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So I'll probably see Brothers Grimm and enjoy it. Sometimes a movie doesn't need a purpose to be fun to watch.

 

[Hijinks]

I'm more turned off by Matt Damon than by the director. I dunno, I just don't think Matt has made good film choices in later years (what was UP with that stupid siamese twin thing?!?) and so if he's in a film, I tend to think it's gonna suck.

Feel the same way about Ben Affleck.

Both of them have faces that seem somehow unformed, like they're still waiting for their faces to solidify.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I'm more turned off by Matt Damon than by the director. I dunno, I just don't think Matt has made good film choices in later years (what was UP with that stupid siamese twin thing?!?) and so if he's in a film, I tend to think it's gonna suck.

Feel the same way about Ben Affleck.

Both of them have faces that seem somehow unformed, like they're still waiting for their faces to solidify.

Hey, Stuck on You was cute but I aggree he is not really 'A list' and I will not go into my dislike for Ben Affleck.

With The Cave and The Brother's Grimm being out, gas prices, hurricane, I see Grimm doing 24 to 30 million, feel it will be more to the 24.

 

[Henry]

Stuck on You was pure fun distilled into a DVD case.

I know very little about Gilliam's recent movies (Time Bandits was a hit with me as a kid), but one thing I DO know, is that when a critic can't pin a movie down, and slams it because of that fact, then the movie in question stands a good chance of being absolutely fantastic. Critics sometimes don't know how to handle a unique movie, and this bodes well for viewers looking for something outside the box.

 

[Mark CMG]

Looks Grim for Grimm

That would be a shame. I saw Lost in LaMancha and it was very sad how much "the Fates" conspired against the making of his film. I hope the early reports of Grimm are incorrect. The idea of a couple of conmen getting caught up in an adventure and having to take on the persona of the Brothers Grimm sounds fantastic to me. It follows in the same vein as The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Time Bandits, and other films by Gilliam, where some person or persons get swept up in an adventure they hadn't planned. I've always liked that premise.

 

[KaosDevice]

I'll see anything Gilliam makes. He's pwned me since 'Brazil'.