Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

Terry Gilliam has an incredible visual imagination. When this is allied to a strong script with interesting characters, he’s produced some amazing films – e.g. Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. But with a weak script and boring characters, the result feels very unbalanced. And because I’m not really a visual person I find this type of film very unrewarding – visuals on their own aren’t enough to make a film worthwhile to me.

The Brothers Grimm definitely falls into the latter category. I found the plot dull and the characters pretty bland. So all this time and effort had been put into the “look” of the film, but there was nothing to make me actually care about what happened in it.

The other thing that annoyed me rather was the fairy tale references. The film was full of them, but they didn’t mean anything. It was like they were just there so the audience could say “oh, I recognise that – how cute”. While that was okay in, for example, Shrek, I would have hoped for something a bit more sophisticated in this film. In fact, Shrek did occasionally play with and subvert the fairy tales, whereas Brothers Grim mostly just put them up on screen and then took them away without doing anything interesting with them.