It’s clobberin’ time!
12 o'clock, August 29, 2005
Oops, sorry, wrong Grimm. But clobberin’ is what the reviews have mostly been doing to Terry Gilliam’s new movie. Non-reviewer Jamie Zawinski, who was apparently driven bugfuck crazy by the Grimm experience, tells us that “Van Helsing was a far, far better movie,” and it’s not as though he’d somehow been fooled byVan Helsing.
Anyway, having sat through Van Helsing myself, not to mention such explosive summer blockbusters* as The Matrix Reloaded and Star Wars: Episode III, I didn’t think Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm was nearly that bad. It wasn’t even as bad as The Village. In several places, yes, it was in-a-bad-way Hollywoody, and yes, some of the fairy-tale logic was illogical in a merely illogical way (as opposed to a fairy-tale way), but the performances weren’t at all bad and there were some truly Gilliam moments. (The Gingerbread Man scene alone was worth the price of admission. Matinee admission, anyway.)
If you go in hoping for Grimm to be to fantasy what Twelve Monkeys was to time travel, well, yeah, you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you go in as if it was just another committee-written summer movie, you may be pleasantly surprised.
P.S.: Gwenda’s description of the film as “a terror of mediocrity” is not exactly undeserved. However, one could do a lot worse with one’s moviegoing dollar, this summer, than mediocrity.
* I guess “explosive blockbuster” is kind of redundant, being as a blockbuster is a kind of bomb. Hey — bomb, Hollywood. Think about that.
I quite enjoyed it. The gingerbread man scene was indeed awesome, and I thought a lot of the forest stuff was sufficiently spooky to be far above average hollywood summer blockbuster fare.
i wouldn't say it was a *great* movie. but it was a *good* movie, and i suspect it has what it takes to become an underground cult classic, as well.