Mari Ness - Because I'm already irritated -- the Brothers Grimm

My review:

Go rent The Adventures of Baron Munchasen instead.

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That's not a review.

It is so a review.

No, it's not. You have readers now. Not many of them, I admit, but all two of them want an actual review. They want to know what you thought about the movie.

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The Brothers Grimm: A Review.

Go rent The Fisher King, which also has Robin Williams in it.

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Do you not get the concept of review?

Um.

Hmm.

Yes. I do. And that was my review.

Listen. A review's gotta have a couple of things in it. It's gotta mention if you liked the movie or not. The movie's flaws. The movie's good points --

Good points?

Every film has its good points.

Were you watching Dungeons and Dragons?

Even that film had its good points.

Name one.

It ended.

Ok. The Brothers Grimm ended.

We already knew that.

Trust me. At various times during this film we were all wondering if this film would ever, ever end. So, I am now not only giving a review, I'm providing useful information.

Try again.

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The Brothers Grimm: A review

People keep licking toads in this movie. Let's talk about that for a moment. Thing is, toads, even toads not from the exotic island of Madasgascar or the vibrant rain forests of Costa Rica, are nasty. They taste bad. They taste terrible. The reason for this is that toads, and more specifically the bacteria on the toads, are constantly secreting toxins that cover the skin of the toad to keep you and other predators from eating or licking the toad. Many of these toxins are alkaloids that will kill you, so if you are running around licking toads, which you shouldn't be doing anyway since in the very vague explanation that serves for plot in the film you are supposed to be saving young children, not licking them or their toads, you would most probably stop licking the toad as soon as you tasted it or keel over dead or perhaps imagine very odd things, like living in a world where people insist on only filming intelligent scripts.

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In a long, long history of film criticism several chapters have been undoubtedly devoted to the rule that film reviews should not include long and generally useless diversions about alkaloids on toad skins that were never once mentioned in the movie.

It would have been a better movie if they had talked about this.

Undoubtedly, but here's a thought: try reviewing the film and not discussing toads?

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The Brothers Grimm: A review.

Brazil is a dazzling set piece, a mass of confusion and visual works that simultaneously draws you in and repels you and makes you wonder what the hell is going on and if Gilliam's visionary creativity can ever actually be captured on film giving the limitations of film back in the 1980s and even today.

The Brothers Grimm doesn't do any of that.

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There.

You can't just review a movie by making constant comparisons to the director's earlier work. In fact, any review that just rests on comparisons to earlier films is total crap. It's awful. It's wrong. It isn't a review.

You're not doing much for my self-esteem here.

I'm telling you to write the review.

I hate to tell you this, but those two readers you mentioned a short while back? They've already fled, since they're the sorts that get easily irritated by this type of meta-critical dialogue that allows us to pretend that we are delighted to be working within the tropes of post-modernism or just trying to be a bit clever. That, or they didn't like the part about the toad licking.

Then it doesn't matter if this review's any good or not, does it?

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So I'm sitting at The Brothers Grimm last night with a couple of friends heartened by the film's one clear good point -- it was being shown in a nice, air-conditioned theatre -- and getting mildly concerned by the previews, which were uniformly awful with the exception of the preview for some horrible film called Emily Rose, which added vaguely nauseating to awful, and sipping some Coke so that the caffeine would allow me to, you know, focus on the film, which I was starting to think would not be a good idea, when the film started, and I realized that indeed, Coke was not the appropriate product for this film. Valium, sure. Tylenol PM, even better.

It's a mess.

(It also, as an aside, has pretty much nothing to do with the movie poster, which leads me to think that what actually happened was that the marketing department took a look at this film and had just no idea what the hell to do with it and gave up in utter despair and created a poster with two good looking guys on it. Which has its points.)

The mess begins with a script that, even by the standards of Terry Gilliam films, makes no sense. Yes, even less sense than the end of Time Bandits. It continues with poor direction, poor editing, truly horrible special effects (and, general word to the wise: do not, but do not, put a single werewolf in any film released post Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban unless you have close to that film's budget, because otherwise, your audience will be drawing comparisons between the two werewolves, and it will not be to your advantage) and actors unsure of both their characters and their characters' accents. The tone, too, is uncertain, lurching between farce to action/adventure to horror, with the audience pretty much laughing only at the horror parts. The film also tries to reference, cleverly, various Grimm fairy tales for no particular purpose, which would have worked better had the film stuck to using only Grimm's fairy tales, and not also including various tales from Anderson. For some unknown reason the Gingerbread Man also makes a very unfortunate appearance which had the audience in stitches, and not for the right reasons.

Perhaps faced with the realization that their characters really won't make sense, no matter what they try to do, the actors, with the exception of Heath Ledger, pretty much give up entirely and instead entertain themselves by flipping through various accents. Matt Damon looks very very bored, which works in the first half the film but is slightly disorienting in the parts where he really shouldn't be bored because things are attacking him, and jumps between an odd British accent, something that sounded mildly Hungarian, and then pure American. Peter Stomare, clearly, took one look at the script, shrugged, gave up and started capering around and jumping between French and Italian accents. His performance is mildly amusing but makes no sense. The girl in the film has nice cleavage.

At a certain point, too, we have to wonder why, exactly, Gilliam cannot let a movie slide without inserting a torture scene, or, in this case, having had one torture scene, for no particular reason interrupt the film to have a second torture scene that makes absolutely no sense plotwise or otherwise, and also has a strange and frankly unconvincing bit with a kitten. (And when a kitten isn't convincing, you know you have a problem.)

Gilliam, as always, is fascinated by the line between the rational and irrational, between reality and dreams, and his thought - that the rational can never fully repress the irrational, and that perhaps reality is actually composed of dreams, not reality -- is one that usually makes his films breathtaking or annoying or provoking or, most importantly, watchable. But in this case, neither his rational or irritational halves have created anything that makes the slightest bit of sense. And it's a pity, because a few scenes here and there suggest that The Brothers Grimm could have worked as a horror film, or as a fantasy film, or as a comedy. But as it is, it fails on all levels.

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Thanks.

I really think I should have just stuck to the toads.