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The Brothers Grimm
Cast
Wilhelm Grimm: Matt Damon
Jacob Grimm: Heath Ledger
Delatombe: Jonathan Pryce
Angelika: Lena Headey
Cavaldi: Peter Stormare
Mirror Queen: Monica Bellucci
Mother Grimm: Barbara Lukesova
Sister Grimm: Anna Rust
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by Ehren Kruger
Running time: 118 minutes
Dare I fall into the cliche trap of the inevitable play on words from this debacle's title to describe it? It certainly is
the right word for the film. It would have been interesting to have seen a good biopic about the siblings who wrote some of
the world's most loved fairy tales - but this isn't it - and it has about as much relation to fact as do Goofy and Biffo the
Bear.
Director Terry Gilliam and screenwriter Ehren Kruger have told a story using the brothers Grimm, Wilhelm (Matt Damon)
and Jacob (Heath Ledger), as characters in a tale that brings in many of the themes of the tales they told. There's Little
Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel and Rpunzel and lots of other characters from their fairy tles, but they aren't performing
the tales. They are, for some reason, thrown into the film. Unless the entire movie is allegorical, this film is more nonsensical
than the skits of Gilliam's primogenitor, Monty Python. Python's skits however were brilliant, original and funny. The Brothers
Grimm is about as hilarious as non-anaesthetic molar extraction.
Says Gilliam, "Fairy tales have always been the way the world exercises its fears and its darkest imaginings and,
also the way it sustains its belief in happy endings. I believe fairy tales were always meant to be a little dangerous and
disturbing, to stir things up."
That's what he does here. The French are clearly bad guys. General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) is imposing his will on
the German countryside where the Grimms are working a con, swindling people out of their money, so he wants to find out what
they're doing. He assigns his henchman, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) to find out what's going on. Stormare's performance as the
ineffective Cavaldi is hideously panto-hellish, and the usually sublime Pryce gives an atrocious performance more befitting
of Acorn Antiques than a major film in broken English ("zees ees...how you say"-type claptrap) which is especially
hateful. Matt Damon's career will backtrack about 10 years after this garbage, and as for Heath Ledger - what makes anyone
think this total ham/charisma-free buffoon can act?
Back to the story. The brothers Grimm are con men, but they are found out and arrested by the Napoleonic French who are
occupying Germany. They are forced to try to solve a problem in an enchanted forest which was created entirely on a sound
stage and it looks like it.
This is not just too phantasmagorical to be entertainment, it's incoherent. Apparently the brothers Grimm find themselves
in competition for the beautiful Angelika (Lena Headey), who is living by herself on the edge of the enchanted forest. Will
is peripatetic, but peripatetic isn't funny. Jacob is bookish and writing all the time. The trees walk. There's an old witch
who occasionally asks a mirror 'who is the fairest of them all?' There's a wolf who turns into a man. You get the point. Gilliam
seems to be trying to tell a modern story by using all the Grimms' characters but without telling us anything at all about
the Grimms themselves. Aren't these two brothers who created fairy tales that have proven the test of time worthy of a real
biopic?
Maybe Gilliam has a point to make. If so, it was too abstract for me. He seems to have no control over the performances
of his cast and the c.g.i. effects are tiresome. This isn't just a complete waste of money and time, it's an opportunity lost.
Tim Burton's 'Corpse Bride'
With the voices of:
Victor Van Dort: Johnny Depp
Emily, the Corpse Bride: Helena Bonham Carter
Victoria Everglot: Emily Watson
Nell Van Dort/Hildegarde: Tracey Ullman
William Van Dort/Mayhew: Paul Whitehouse
Maudeline Everglot: Joanna Lumley
Finnis Everglot: Albert Finney
Barkis Bittern: Richard E. Grant
Pastor Galswells: Christopher Lee
Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
Written by John August, Pamela Pettler & Caroline Thompson
Running time: 75 minutes.
Tim Burton's 'Corpse Bride', a literally eye-popping film may be the purest expression of Burton's comic-nightmarish neo-gothic
vision so far. It also restores the venerable technique known as stop-motion animation to its rightful place as one of cinema's
greatest forms.
Set in a Victorian town, the film begins as a dark fairy tale unfolding the story of Victor Van Dort (voiced by Johnny
Depp), an enormously orbed stick-thin fellow who would look right at home in Edgar Allan Poe's study next to the raven. Prodded
by nouveau riche parents, henpecked fishmonger-mogul dad (Paul Whitehouse) and a shrewish mother (Tracey Ullman) with an outlandishly
bulbous figure, Victor is about to marry Victoria (Emily Watson). She is the lovely daughter of the squat, toadlike Finis
Everglot (Albert Finney in full croak) and lantern-jawed harridan Maudeline (Joanna Lumley). The Everglots are bankrupt aristocrats
descended from a long line of ancestors twisted into grotesque shape by vanity and greed.
When Victor botches the wedding rehearsal and is chastised by a beastly hoop-shaped Pastor Galswells (Christopher Lee
in thunderous voice), he goes to a moonlit, enchanted-looking forest to hide his wretchedness. There he practices the wedding
ritual and inadvertently places the ring on the boney finger of a corpse buried in a shallow grave.
Voila! He's now married to Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), an otherwise lovely bride in a wedding gown fashioned by the
House of Usher. The newlydead/newlywed wife and reluctant husband are then transported to the Land of the Dead, where skeletal
children play in the streets, skeletal dogs bark and frolic, the furniture is recycled caskets and most of the inhabitants
are skin and bones. Minus the skin Emily is sweet and even beautiful, but she's literally falling apart. Her right eye keeps
popping out to reveal a talkative green maggot (Enn Reitel in Peter Lorre vocal mode) living in her head.
Co-directing with animator Mike Johnson, who worked on the similar Burton-produced "The Nightmare Before Christmas"
(1993), Burton has magnificently transformed the artistic vision he has expressed in drawings and storyboards into amazing
three-dimensional figures.
A gorgeous, cadaverously hued danse macabre, "Corpse Bride" employs a technique that harks back to cinema's
origins and yet looks as current as any CGI flick, perhaps even more so. The Land of the Dead sequences have a colour palette
of gangrenous green, grave-mould blue, bruised purple, jaundiced yellow and, of course, funereal black. The film combines
elements of macabre visuals recogniseable from previous Burton outings. A piano Victor plays in the film is not a Steinway,
but a Harryhausen, as a wee tribute to Ray Harryhausen, the grand wizard of stop-motion effects.
All in all this is yet another tremendous piece of work from Burton - one of the grand pioneering masters of modern cinema.
Lord Of War
Director: Andrew Niccol
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ethan Hawke
Running Time: 122 minutes
It's rare for a big-budget film to insert political allegory into the requisite mayhem when tackling the issues of the day
directly - so much so that one that does it's like a splash of cold water. Told through the eyes of a soulless gun-runner,
Andrew Niccol's Lord Of War looks at the nuts-and-bolts business of contemporary warfare from the supply side, and comes to
some disquieting conclusions about whose hands are really dirty. Niccol invariably operates in broad strokes - his previous
features as a writer-director (the lacklustre media satire Simone and moderately successful Gattaca) and screenwriter (The
Truman Show) reveal a knack for high-minded high-concept. His bluntness although on paper entirely appropriate here, has a
natural outcome of having a strong, clear, passionate vision blunted by a far too streamlined 'success' story from the main
protagonist. From the inspired opening credits, which follows a bullet from its creation to its target/final resting place
in the skull of an underaged warrior, Lord Of War charges bravely and relentlessly into volatile territory, with the hope
of leaving the viewer scarred by the experience.
A freewheeling political entertainment, the film nestles inside the head of a weapons dealer whose moral equivocations
are the only form of first-rate salesmanship he saves for himself. Raised among Ukrainian immigrants in Little Odessa, Nicolas
Cage forgoes the family business for a career in the gun trade, which makes the most of his language skills, business savvy,
and slumbering conscience. Partnering with his brother Jared Leto, whose cocaine addiction eventually limits his participation,
Cage supplies arms to war zones around the world, from Afghanistan to the Balkans to various African genocides.
It's a lucrative field, but business really picks up after the fall of the Soviet Union opens up massive stockpiles of
weapons like the popular Kalashnikov assault rifle, which he proudly hawks for its reliability. As he makes covert government
deals and slips nimbly through loopholes in international law, Cage finds his only real resistance in Ethan Hawke, a relentlessly
straight-arrow Interpol officer determined to catch him in a mistake.
Through constant use of the now-hackneyed voiceover narration method, Niccol attempts to get inside the head of this death
merchant as he goes about his business, presenting the latest weapons to despots as if they were carpet samples. In his mind,
he's merely satisfying marketplace demands: He can put AK-47s in the hands of warlords, but he can't be held responsible for
what they do with them. Niccol implies that First World countries, in their covert support of warring factions around the
globe, share that same cognitive dissonance by policing gun-runners with a wink and keeping them around as a necessary evil.
Lord Of War drops the hammer slowly, laying out the fascinating parameters of Cage's world before opening up its argument
in an inevitable denouement. In the business of killing, Niccol implies that futures are a solid investment.
A brave attempt but ultimately shot down with stock cliches and Nicolas Cage overhamming his role - sadly yet again.
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