August 26, 2005
THE BROTHERS GRIMM is one of the types of movies these summer retrospectives were made for: it was kind of a big deal at the time (because of who directed it), I’ve barely heard anyone talk about it since, and I’ve never really considered revisiting it before, so doing so becomes a weird sort of time travel. Something like BATMAN BEGINS or WAR OF THE WORLDS has stayed in my brain and in the culture, so it’s ongoing. I have to put myself in a certain mindspace to remember what it felt like at the time. But does THE BROTHERS GRIMM even exist outside of the year 2005? I don’t know, I’d have to see more evidence.
It was an intersection of a bunch of different things happening in that moment. Terry Gilliam was a respected, still-we-hoped working director for people who loved film. Dimension Films was dominant and this was their most expensive film ever. Hollywood still saw screenwriter Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES, THE RING, THE SKELETON KEY) as an exciting new voice, and there was a bidding war for this spec script. When you think about it this is exactly the kind of high concept screenplay that always ends up on The Black List, which started that year, so it just missed it. (read the rest of this shit…)
