“Light” Grimm:
(From The Youth that Learned to Shudder.)
Oh, thank god. I thought it was just me wondering if there was going to be a tentacle-rape scene in there somewhere. 
I saw it yesterday, and my friend and I decided that the movie can not be called good nor bad. It’s just weird. Very weird. It didn’t know if it wanted to be creepy or funny, so it tried at both with mixed results.
I saw it the other day and wouldn’t say a word against it.
I have more collections of folk tales on my bookshelf than is strictly appropriate for a single guy in his thirties, though. I don’t know if that worked for or against it, on balance. Great fun, but I was a little disappointed that they stuck to the most recognizable of the tales that the Grimms collected, when there are so many really weird ones that hardly see the light of day anymore.
You just gonna leave it at that, with no links?
Shame.
:dubious:
I’m not sure which ones Larry Mudd meant, but when I found an illustrated version of this one about five years ago meant for little children, I was horrified. Yes, the witch’s last scene was illustrated.
I too thought it was mediocre. It had its clever moments, but was not terrific. The acting in many cases was poor, I especially disliked the guy who played Cavaldi. Unlike the OP, I liked Angelica. I would call this one a renter.
Saw it a few hours ago.
Wasn’t very good. It clearly had the look of a movie that had been rewritten right up to and sometimes after shooting. The worst example being
The first scene at the Mirror Queen’s tower, which just goes on and on and on and has the characters standing around, doing nothing, and jumping from place to place depending on the editing. About 40 different shots in no particular order and with no particular purpose until the forest, which by that time was probably as bored as I was, finally attacked. It was filmmaking at its very worst.
The extraordinarily formulaic script didn’t help either. It was essentially a Special Effects Thriller For Windows XP script:
Of course the heroine was a plucky feminist-friendly heroine who could kick ass. Of course her recently disappeared father was the werewolf. Of course you had a chief bad guy and a slimy subbadguy. Of course there was a love triangle. Of course there was a “Believe in yourself” message. Of course it was an Evil Spell that had to be broken before the full moon came back.
I thought the acting was as good as could be expected under the circumstances.
I thought the movie was a blast. Admittedly it wasn’t as seamlessly immersive as other Gilliam films, but it was still massively entertaining. I’ll be interested to check out the director’s cut of the film if one becomes available. The script came across as somewhat uneven; although the fusion of pseudo-historical European setting with elements of dark folklore was an intriguing idea to hang a movie on, the end result seemed kind of off-kilter. That’s unfortunate, because I would have thought the source material would be right up Gilliam’s alley.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen covered similar territory, yet in my opinion was much more successful in its presentation. Although The Brothers Grimm had a lot of interesting stuff onscreen, at no point was I persuaded that I was looking at anything but a movie set. Maybe the film’s budget had something to do with that, I don’t know.
That said, I feel that my movie dollars were well spent. The film is a sprawling, disorganized mess of intriguing oddities with a healthy share of genuinely disturbing moments. In the grand tradition of the original Grimm fables, people are tortured, set on fire, impaled and decapitated, while children and animals are horribly abused. The whole ‘gingerbread child’ scene at the well is one of the more bizarrely unsettling bits of film I’ve seen in a while. And if nothing else, it’s worth the price of admission just to watch Jonathan Pryce and the Italian guy with their Outrageous Accents[sup]TM[/sup] and constant “Dueling Banjos”-like attempts to out-overact each other.
In summary, this is without a doubt the best movie I’ve ever seen with a spider-infested horse in it.