Ever since that documentary LOST IN LA MANCHA, Terry Gilliam has a reputation as the bad luck director who can’t finish a movie without the Lord dropping down on him like a bag of cinder blocks. I heard he writes his shooting schedules under a ladder on the 13th day of the month. It’s been what, six years since FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, he’s been trying to make movies since then but this is the first one to make it to the screen. People figure it’s a miracle if he can shoot a scene that is not interupted by an act of God, let alone finish a whole movie and have it released in theaters. So in that sense, THE BROTHERS GRIMM is a miracle. Because it is a finished movie with credits and everything. They even made a poster I think.
As far as actual entertainment value though it’s maybe a little less miraculous, in my opinion. The main problem: the first hour. A man of my knowledge and insights, I oughta be able to put my finger on it more than that, but all I can say is I was bored as shit for the first half of this movie. Nothing really painfully lame or anything but it’s just not involving and not in the usual Terry Gilliam way where he overwhelms and disorients you with his powerful imagination rays. It looks like a Terry Gilliam movie, it seems like an okay premise for a Terry Gilliam movie, but it just doesn’t click. It’s not funny. It’s not that clever. And takes for fucking ever to get going.
I don’t know for sure what happened but this is my guess. The poor bastard spends all these years doing these weird fantasies about the power of imagination and what not, then suddenly he takes a left turn and makes that great adaptation of FEAR AND LOATHING. It makes sense that he was the guy who could pull that movie off, but at the same time it’s pretty different from castles and hot air balloons and flying around on wings and shit. And all that heat, something in his brain cracked. So now he goes back and tries to do Don Quixote, he can’t do it without disaster: floods and sickness and I forget, did anybody get eaten by locusts in that documentary? He has such a hard time he figures what the hell, after all these years of fierce uncompromising independence, it’s time to take one for the team. He does one for hire, from somebody else’s script (the chump who wrote SCREAM 3) just to get his camera rolling again. But I bet he doesn’t really have his heart in it. (more…)
