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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
 Posted - 01/29/2006 : 11:37:12 AM
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Well, it's like this:
There are great movies. Movies on the high end of the bell curve that you can literally press play on the DVD again right after watching it. Movies so well crafted that they ought to be studied by filmmakers to try to understand what alchemy makes them so good.
There are good movies. Those that are entertaining. They make us laugh. They make us cry. But they are largely forgetable save for maybe one or two scenes.
There are mediocre movies which we brainlessly stare at the screen We may laugh. We may cry. But we don't remember much afterwards. So later in the video store, we forgot we had seen it already and rent it again and feel an uncanny sense of deja vu while watching. Although we probably felt deja vu the first time we watched it.
Then there are the films at the low end of the cinematic bell curve. The absymal moves. The ones so uncannily inept that they make their own alchemy in being so poorly made in nearly every conceivable facet. The MST3K movies are in the medicore-to-abysmal category.
The Brothers Grimm is none of these.
It is not even on the cinematic bell curve. It is anti-entertainment. The experience of watching this movie is bested by the experience of not watching this movie. Every moment this movie is on your screen, you want it off your screen.
We often say of a movie that we want the time we watched it back. In this case it is literally true. My life is that much worse now because I have seen the Brothers Grimm.
Thinking on it, it felt like commitee design at work again. I could almost see the suits sitting around a big, long table discussing other successful revision horror movies that take already established characters and situations and tweak and change them into something similar yet different like Sleepy Hollow and Van Helsing ("But Van Helsing wasn't successful, JP." "Don't bother me with details, Johnson!") and decided to give the brothers Grimm the same treatment. So the brainstormed coming up with all kinds of ideas of how to revised the Grimms in this way and came up with several interesting directions to go in AND USED EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Even if they contridicted themselves.
Personally, I was not enjoying the movie much at all. I found the French to be a big, black hole in the movie. Their presence was completely unnecessary and every appearance they made brought deep loathing from me. They were unintelligible partially due to their accents, but mostly due to they hammy performances that made me hungry for Easter dinner.
That is I was hungry until one particular scene. I had already given up on the movie by that point as ever being good, the reasons why it bombed at the box office abundantly clear. I am sure there is a movie where a puffy kitten getting splattered and then a tiny piece of it getting eaten would be gut-bustingly hilarious, but this was not this movie. I felt about it kind of the way a lot of people feel about South Park and it's reliance on shock humor. The difference being South Park can sometimes manage to be funny.
I don't know. It was just a scene that would have needed to be handled just right to work. The audience had to be carefully guided into the proper state of mind to find humor in such a thing. What it did was just accent how poorly the filmmakers were in control of the audience's experience. |
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Neville
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Spain
1590 Posts |
Posted - 01/29/2006 : 1:06:18 PM
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I quite enjoyed the movie when it came out. Not that is specially good, the script is absolutely horrible, with lots of useless things happening to keep the pace brisk but without real depth.
But it really shines when it comes to its real purpose, to bring to life all those fairy tales we all know by heart, to paint them on the screen in vivid colours, without wimping when it comes to their more horrific aspects and accepting heartily their soapy endings. Acting is OK, with Damon being too dull and Peter Stormare too over the top, but Heath Ledger is great. |
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Prankster
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Canada
727 Posts |
Posted - 02/02/2006 : 6:41:26 PM
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It's bad, but not THAT bad.
From everything I've heard, it was a collision of Gilliam's demented, anti-commercial sensibility with a very Hollywood script (which actually might have been entertaining if directed by a more conventional director--Gilliam changed a lot of stuff).
By the way, I've seen Gilliam's next movie, "Tideland", and found it to be rather brilliant. It's not even trying to appeal to a mainstream audience. A lot of the other people who saw it hated it, but it was more like "That movie made me feel BAD!" hate than "That was a really bad movie" hate. But for the sickos who enjoy that kind of thing, it's a great flick.
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Check out my online comics at [URL]http://www.phantasmictales.com[/URL]! |
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