Magic Beans: A Review of 'The Brothers Grimm'

It is saying very little to claim that the work of Terry Gilliam is anarchic. ‘Brazil’, his best film, is a meanderingly scattershot exercise in existential paranoia. Oddly, the time-travelling paradoxes of ’12 Monkeys’ afforded him his most fully formed work, as the myriad of quirks on screen were simultaneously explained as psychological derangement and temporal reverb. ‘The Brothers Grimm’, under the over-watchful producing hands of the Weinstein brothers at Miramax, is an attempt to ground these flights of fancy on an even more rigid blockbuster format: ironically, given a subject matter that plays so directly to the gallery of strangeness, Gilliam is stricken by an insidious imperative to conform.

Set in what is tellingly described as ‘French occupied Germany’ in the early years of the nineteenth century, the film offers a fictionalised supposition about the lives of those famous purveyors of fairy tales without which Lacan and Propp (not to mention kindly, plagiaristic Uncle Walt) would be left somewhat stranded, as tricksters inventing monsters to slay, for which they receive the gratitude and pay of the townsfolk. These early scenes – the entire first thirty minutes, in fact – are something of a struggle, like a Monty Python sketch performed by an amateur company who have no idea how to end it, so just keep going.

For those who nail themselves to their seats, things improve considerably when the brothers arrive in Marbaden, recruited to discover the mystery of several missing young girls, presumed to have been abducted by con-artists in their own vein. A general vibe of thrown-togetherness lingers, but the energy level rises, and the film starts to complicate its conceit by engaging in an intriguing dynamic concerning imperialism, partisanship and myth, alongside the expected nods towards the narrative and storytelling process. Considering the spectral events occurring in the marginal village to be a threat to the French empire, General Delatombe (who would surely have been Napoleon, but Gilliam was not so brave as Quentin Tarantino to re-write historical continuity) configures those who believe in fairy tales as a threat to imperial unity and infallibility. Superstitious townsfolk become wood-bound freedom fighters. An interesting comparison is there to be made between ‘The Brothers Grimm’ and the latter two installments of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, which adapted a singularly manufactured exercise in theme park entertainment into a vicious attack on the fascistic enterprise of the East India Company.

Of course, this dynamic happens on the margins. But then, everything in this movie seems to happen on the margins. It’s nothing but margins. Which is why it is unfortunate that the last twenty-minutes are so rigorously bolted to a template of heroic empowerment, unmasked evil, and triumphant gallantry. I may not have read the Grimm fairy tales particularly closely, but I don’t remember many fistfights. Gilliam’s unsteadiness reveals itself in the fleetingness with which he deploys his most striking images: a white horse falling through a dark forest, a child with the features of her face removed, the fragmentation of a character whose skin is a mirrored façade.

One has to take pleasures where one can then, especially considering the horrible cinematography which confuses plasticised rot and awkward camera movements for atmosphere and suspense. A pleasure indeed is the performance of Matt Damon, whose Will Grimm is a womanising, self-aggrandising jerk. Damon always makes his quiet superiority a hindrance to his characters, but here displays a comic timing and energy which is much appreciated. Heath Ledger’s Jacob is, perhaps, less successful, although I concede that it may be the case his bumbling, bookish brother is potentially a more impressive piece of stagecraft. No argument can be broached in the case of Peter Stormare, as an Italian torturer, and Jonathan Pryce as General Delamorte: both are unremittingly terrible, clowning around like drunk uncles at a party they don’t fully understand or care to try.

What does ‘The Brothers Grimm’ teach us? Nothing at all about the siblings themselves, and very little indeed about their work. It taught Gilliam to stay away from similarly top-heavy projects for some time (he has been quoted as saying his great work only happens when he has to fight something during a project: it seems the Weinstein brothers were too great an opponent, and their marketing-over-creativity fingerprints can consistently be glimpsed draining the life from the picture). Perhaps the best thing to learn is that any kind of adult Harry Potter-esque japery is doomed to failure, and this sort of thing should be left to the children (and grown children) for whom subtext is one text too many.

Alien Zone: A Review of 'District 9'

In hindsight, perhaps the oddest thing about ‘District 9’ – and there are so many very, very odd things to choose from – comes not from the film itself but the manner of its marketing. London residents will no doubt have seen the phone boxes emblazoned with faux-warnings to “non-humans”, a campaign which is effective, but also clearly something of a triage manoeuvre, a response to the lack of any name actors and the strange stylistic affectations that begin the film. What is odd about this street advertising, as well as the trailer and poster, is that the film itself is stuffed (over-stuffed, really) with digital creatures, massive explosions, running firefights and gory deaths: exactly the kinds of things that sell movies, but here come as something of a surprise.

In the manner of Brian DePalma’s ‘Redacted’, the first act uses documentary footage and interviews to sketch out a world in which a massive alien spaceship has come to rest above Johannesburg, the immigrants on board interned into an unpleasant slum near the city, mistreated by officials, and economically abused by Nigerian warlords. So far, so bracing. The staging and cutting of this first act, while not wholly convincing, certainly grabs the attention. Considering the allegorical tone the low IQ levels of the aliens (insensitively called ‘prawns’) is potentially offensive, but the bureaucratic, ad hoc, and callous response of the South African government is invigoratingly realistic.

Slyly, and almost imperceptibly, the film shifts out of this documentary mode, but is still filmed in a hand-held, naturalistic manner, even while the plot becomes increasingly formulaic and hole-ridden.

Touching heavily, but not probingly, on issues of immigration, racism, and (non-existent) corporate humanity, ‘District 9’ suffers from indulging in its own baser instincts. Several dozen people are violently eviscerated in the course of the staggeringly action-packed second half, and the influence of producer Peter Jackson begins to be felt in the ‘Braindead’-esque zaniness of the combat, as well as the continued punishment metered out to the protagonist (indeed, for all the prosthetics on show, Sharlto Copley’s transformation from hapless office lackey to hapless action hero is the most spectacular).

The acting and effects are grounded in a way that gives the running-jumping-shooting an excitement not found in, say, the ‘Transformers’ films, but director Neill Blomkamp seems overly enamoured of this advantage. Watch the film expecting a rich tale of racial antagonism and you will, ultimately, be disappointed. Better to expect a piece of blockbuster entertainment which fudges together ‘The Office’, ‘Alien Nation’, and ‘Battletech,’ which – bizarre as it sounds – just about works.

The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Some Thoughts on ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’

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Abstract: The title of the film, a plateau of signifiers with seemingly arbitrary grammar and word ordering, is entirely appropriate, indicating a narrative without a strong purchase on character, morality, logic, or much of anything.



Some way through the wearyingly vague plot of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the titular character forms an unlikely alliance (or rather, re-alliance) with a high-ranking US military official who has offered him the tools with which to avenge the death of a loved one. ‘I come with you,’ conditions Wolverine, ‘I’m coming for blood. No law, no code of conduct – you point me in the right direction and you get the hell out of my way.’

Hardly a new sentiment – the Hollywood summer blockbuster seems built on twin narrative foundations: on the one hand a craving for bloody revenge, on the other a desire for acceptance as both a member of a group and respect as an individual. Ethan Hunt is an effective member of an elite government spy agency; framed, he proves himself as capable on his own terms; at the close of the film he both destroys the people who harmed him and is re-accepted into the Impossible Mission institution that formerly rejected him.

Yet the words ring hollow in Wolverine’s mouth. Why? (Readers who do not wish the excitements and surprises of this Marvel origin story enunciated before they watch the film for themselves best look away now.) Born in the middle of the nineteenth century, this man has lived his life in warzones, fighting on the morally correct side in the American civil war and both world wars. Vietnam, however, offers the breaking point, when he and his similarly immortal brother Victor come to blows over how much violence precisely is too much. A later sojourn the two undertake as part of a secret government program ends similarly; once again, Logan (Wolverine’s erstwhile moniker) criticises, saves a life imminently jeopardised, then walks away, ignoring entirely the situation and its consequences until they come knocking on his door six years later. Victor returns and apparently murders Logan’s wife, drawing the mutant into a violent feud. Many ineffectual ‘oh, this is actually what’s going on’ denouements later, Victor and Logan are fighting side-by-side, Logan’s wife is up and swinging, and the villain to be overcome is the previously mentioned military officer.

This is all very convoluted, as though the writers considered revelations and reversals to be synonymous with drama and involvement. What should be most concerning for an attentive viewer are the moral implications of such shifting alliances. The military official, Stryker, is played by Danny Huston. He is a bad man. He plays bad men. He is hissable. Wolverine is played by Hugh Jackman. He’s muscular, charming, funny, blue-collar. He hosted the Oscars. His mission to avenge the death of his beloved is justified – Victor is a violent, animalistic killer.

Yet the death of the wife was staged. Discovering this, and in tandem with the appearance of another threat, Logan and Victor forgive each other their trespasses. Neither’s character has changed; rather, a specific event was misinterpreted. Stryker, manipulator-in-chief, has meanwhile quietly been given motives for his dastardly deeds: Stryker's own son is a mutant, and killed Stryker’s wife. Thus, Stryker wants to win a vaguely defined war that will soon break out between humans and mutants. Never mind that the film at no point makes any efforts to establish the relationship between these two groups, or even establish that there are groups at all (the word mutant is not used until well into the film, many of the mutants we do see have undetermined powers of moving really fast and jumping really high, and Logan himself is perhaps the least aesthetically mutable and most human-like of all mutants). Stryker murders the General who comments on his matricidal household – he reacts emotionally and violently to a defined historical event.

This is exactly what Wolverine does, promising ‘no code of conduct’ in his mission for revenge. Hollywood exceptionalism allows the protagonist to be special, to break laws, interrogate suspects, operate outside a codified system of correct action. Everyone else must follow this code, but the chosen alpha-masculine figure is allowed – nay, must – operate beyond the moral standards of everyone else. As the saying goes, this time it’s personal.

Stryker too operates outside the code of conduct. He is acting pre-emptively ‘to save countless lives.’ He is acting illegally and immorally because the legal and moral gains will more than reset the balance. His logic, given the information the audience are about his history, seems sound. He did not even order the murder of the lovely Mrs. Logan like we thought he did.

Wolverine pursues Victor and plans to cut his head off. His quest is personal: it is important enough to operate beyond the law. Yet his wife is alive, and when Logan discovers this he realigns his priorities almost instantly, and saves Victor’s life during their nuclear-cooling-tower-topping kung-fu shenanigans. Wolverine’s thirst-for-blood is not only sanctioned, it is easily adaptable. Rather than suffer an existential crisis when he discovers his motives are groundless, he just carries on fighting.

The film may be unremitting dross (and indeed, it is), but that does not excuse it from being so ethically muddy. Stryker’s special ops team of mutants, who operate outside the law and are criticised by Logan because of this, merely offer a standardised version of the later Wolverine’s own self-justified mission. In a cosmopolitan and democratic environment if one person is exceptional, then we all are. If his emotional crisis justifies lawless bloodshed, so does mine. The tone of the film, jumping as it does from one dramatic arrangement to another, should work to undermine this exceptionalism, but fails. Despite revealing the malleability of character and events, both of which can be lied about or misinterpreted, the arbitrariness of moral particularism is never grasped by the characters. Perhaps this is because they do not live in our world, but some strange digital creation of blue screens, wobbly effects, and blurred edges, as though the comic book world tried to break into the real one, but got stuck in some interstitial space of digital communication in which economic, rather than creative, imperatives predominate. Or maybe that is the real world, and it is this fuzziness that allows for such irresponsible laziness in moral definition to be pedalled as summer entertainment.

22 Things I Learned From 'Star Trek'

1. Starfleet spacesuits come in a range of primary colours.

2. The senator for Iowa has enough pull to ensure spacecraft construction occurs there. Rather than in space.

3. After five television shows and eleven films, I still have no idea what Starfleet is actually for.

4. Mining ships are equipped with bunker-busting missiles and near-impregnable shields.

5. No one ever thinks to bring a phaser to a sword-fight.

6. Bruce Greenwood is far too old for this ship.

7. There’s no corner that can’t be written out of with recourse to warp drive or the ability to beam anywhere in the universe in seconds.

8. It’s no fun when the unstoppable bad guys are so bad and so unstoppable.

9. Chris Pine’s William Shatner impression is at times uncanny.

10. Karl Urban’s DeForest Kelly impression is just the right side of weird.

11. Simon Pegg’s Simon Pegg impression is just the wrong side of tacky.

12. Apple (or possible Brawn GP) do Starfleet’s interior decorating.

13. Starfleet’s ‘peacekeeping armada’ is neither an oxymoron, nor in any way effective. In the twenty-third century equivalent of an oilrig taking on an aircraft carrier, the former consistently wipes the floor with the latter.

14. Engine Rooms on warp-drive equipped space ships look like a warehouse in Swindon with overlarge see-through plumming.

15. It still isn’t advisable to be the third man on an away team.

16. It takes three years of training, a famous father, and being an insufferable git to gain control of the flagship of the Federation.

17. There’s more cataclysm in ten minutes of this film than all seven seasons of Jean-Luc Picard’s tenure.

18. It’s not blockbuster entertainment without a spot of genocide. (See also Star Wars.)

19. Director J.J. Abrams never met a lens flare he didn’t like.

20. Writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci never met a character they wouldn’t undermine.

21. The Enterprise’s mission to explore new worlds and civilizations will have to wait until next time.

22. With its bright lights, uncomplicated morality, and lack of responsible adults, this is a children’s film at heart.

22 Things I Learned From 'The International'

1. Trailers that suggest a film is going to be a Jason Bourne-style frantic-a-thon are often misleading.

2. Always look both ways before crossing the street.

3. All Italian police are corrupt.

4. Evil banking consortiums hire the best architects.

5. Hiring an assassin with an identifiable physical abnormality may be de rigour for this kind of thing, but it’s still a stupid thing to do.

6. The walls of the Guggenheim Museum are bulletproof.

7. The people who control the money don’t necessarily control the world, the people who control the debt do.

8. Airport security works just fine.

9. The ubiquity of capital investment in dodgy political regimes is now presented in film shorthand via an African despot (see also Casino Royale and the current season of 24).

10. Inside Interpol, Scotland Yard is referred to as “the Yard”.

11. Armin-Mueller Stahl hasn’t forgotten how to act, it’s just that he hasn’t been trying lately.

12. Armed goons still aren’t a cost-effective problem-solver.

13. Attempting a Noo Yawk accent for two lines of dialogue is enough for Naomi Watts, thank you very much.

14. Compared to the International Bank of Business and Credit, Halifax and Northern Rock conduct themselves ethically and sensitively.

15. Helicopter shots can still be breathtaking.

16. Clive Owen is now the icon for the modern man: single-minded, confused, belligerent, ultimately ineffectual.

17. Acting is only as bad as you think it is.

18. The mafia always get their way in the end.

19. As in property, as in spy films: location location location.

20. Crossing Michael Clayton with Quantum of Solace and throwing in some Niall Ferguson-style economics works rather well actually.

21. Director Tom Tykwer is a much smarter man than he wants you to think.

22. Movies that are only released to cinemas for about twenty minutes aren’t necessarily crap, just misunderstood genius.

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of ‘Watchmen’

...and I feel fine: Faithfulness to the quintessentially novelistic source material turns out to be the weakest link of Watchmen.

A joke: a man in the midst of a deep depression visits the doctor in an attempt to alleviate his malaise: he can find no solace in a harsh world and its vague future. The doctor prescribes a visit to world famous clown Pagliacci, which is sure to cheer him up. The man bursts into tears – I am Pagliacci, he explains. What hope do we have when the distractions we have assembled to take our minds off the nastiness of the human condition become themselves afflicted?

This anecdote appears in Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel ‘Watchmen’, released in the mid-eighties, and evoking a M.A.D world on the brink of nuclear armageddon, peopled by a citizenry who are fanatical about anything but love or truth, burying their heads in gang-culture, nostalgia, and even comic books so as to avoid sensible engagement with an increasingly eschatological world. Masked avengers in this work are not emblems of justice in a gothic metropolis, but are rather symptom of personal gratification and the power of consumer branding.

In adapting the novel to the screen, director Zack Snyder and his team have retained this grim yarn, as well as most of the words and images, translating them sometimes slavishly onto the screen in a similar, if with a more varied palette, manner of the Snyder’s popular version of Frank Miller’s 300. But this is not a story about Spartans and Persians and constant mythologizing and bloodshed. Moore’s novel, and by extension the script of the film, is an attempt to strip away myth and grandiosity, replacing it with troublingly deep psychology and an acute examination of why people dressing up in masks and fighting crime appealed and appeals so much to the American psyche, and how this appeal is tied up with the outcome of the Second World War and the unseen forces at work in the subsequent Cold War. That’s a lot to squeeze in, even with Watchmen’s two hours forty minutes running time. In making the attempt, the film reveals the massive potential of its own medium – unfortunately, by failing to fulfil it.

As with the novel, there are a wide variety of characters, themes, alternative histories, flashbacks, locations, plots and sub-plots. Without the structuring of chapters, and even the careful positioning of cells on a double-page layout, many elements lose their force. A cannier director may have made more of an attempt to translate the visual and thematic language which Moore and artist Dave Gibbons worked with so carefully into the filmic dimension. Instead, he transliterates. Snyder reproduces, rather than reinvigorates. The narrative feels like a constant plateau of meaning and emotion, only rising and falling by tiny increments, rather than tightening the nearer the metaphorical doomsday clock gets to midnight. Never mind that the surprise reveal of the villain is undermined by fresh framing and sequencing, the finale fails to flare the imagination more than the rest of the film because it is handled in the exact same manner as the rest of the film. Shot, reverse-shot, slo-mo punch, smashing of a glass table, repeat. The title sequence, in which ideas and referents from the novel are presented as Wes Anderson-like tableau’s to the unmediated tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, manages to avoid this flattening-out, as does the depiction of a trip to Mars (don’t laugh) and the metaphysical anguish one character feels by his very existence and responsibilities, all set to some of Philip Glass’ music from Koyaanisqatsi (a 1984 film concerning the disharmony and unsustainability of modern life).

These interesting and unexpected musical cues are not alone: also used are Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel, some more successfully than others, but all adding some cultural heft otherwise absent: no use listening to Rorschach, a single-minded vigilante, bitch about the state of New York (“this city is like an open sewer with sidewalks of blood”) when the film makes no effort to ground itself in the streets he walks. Like the back-lot of a Spiderman film, or the digital sets so beloved of late, even constant views of the Twin Towers on the skyline fail to position the audience as anything other than outsiders looking in on a fish-tank, our perception warped, the objects we study unreal. This quality might suit the plotline involving two retired Watchmen who re-don their costumes for the thinly-veiled sake of some soft-core action and empowering beat-downs (focussing as this strand does on the infantilism and egoism inherent in the genre), but the sheen does not sit well with either the intensely violent and uncompromising Rorschach or the corporeally challenged Doc Manhattan, a scientist turned to pure energy in an experiment who can eviscerate opponents and used this skill to win America the Vietnam War. These two characters, as well as the fallen comrade who opens the film and the truly Machiavellian adversary who was behind the whole scheme (nothing less than saving the world from itself), are all embodiments of moralistic outlooks, each embedded strongly with American (and human) history. Watching such lofty personifications duke it out at one-quarter speed is disappointing, at best.

What then of that poor, existentially troubled clown? Perceived wisdom is that the superhero comic book is an escape, a fantasy of masculine power and ethical simplicities in which good triumphs and no thanks ma’am, no need to thank me, just doing my job. Comics may not be the opiate of the masses, but they help the opium go down. In examining this phenomenon in such detail, and stressing the danger it poses not just to American foreign policy but also to the basic human ability to relate to one another, Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ bit off more than it could chew, but asked questions about the nature of escapism, and the danger of fabulist story-telling and mis-used imagination. Snyder’s Watchmen, through the configuring of an invisible Russian threat and a caricature Nixon, fails to exhibit the same apprehension about its own medium, instead settling on being a spectacular, morally swampy distraction.

I Love You This Much: A Review of ‘Rachel Getting Married’

Explain Yourself: Try as she might, Anne Hathaway's Kym cannot get away from the mistakes of her past.

On my way into the screening of Rachel Getting Married I was informed by the woman tearing my ticket that it was not a romantic comedy. Warned, perhaps, rather than informed, as though the first Anne Hathaway bridal comedy I was hankering after had been all booked up, and this was the second, more dangerous choice. Not to cast aspersions on Gary Winick (whose work on Ugly Betty has been exemplary, I am sure), but when forced to choose between his Bride Wars and the latest Jonathan Demme, which in a way I was, I will always choose the latter, taking the risk of another The Truth About Charlie if I must.

Hathaway here plays Kym, a damaged, self-involved young woman who has just been released from rehab (again?) in time to attend the wedding of her older sister, which is being extensively prepared for and rehearsed. Tightly wound and pale-skinned, Kym moves through her childhood home like a ghost, before stumbling to and from a narcotics anonymous meeting; she is an instantly likeable but at the same time callous and scathing character. Not for her the sharp put-down barbs that we have been trained to expect from the jaded teen-grown-up.

The film seems to be positioning itself as a comedy of humiliation in the same vein as some of the more cringe-worth episodes of The Office as Kym desperately draws attention away from her pre-nuptial sister and towards her own neuroses with the repeated excuse that it is part of the ‘healing process’. Entertaining as this might be, it is something we have seen before, as is the suggestion of a redemptive romance with the best man. When Kym stands up during the rehearsal dinner to make an impromptu speech the room around her tangibly recoils with embarrassment. However, she does not make a comic foil of herself, but rather only a nuisance, and the scene continues. In tandem with Kym, and with a sensitive touch, the film begins to shed its self-destructive and unenlightening narcissism. A later moment involving the competitive filling of a dishwasher, in which Kym dissolves into the crowd around her and is happy to remain a spectator rather than a participant is quietly moving, although the scene turns on a small revelation that comes indirectly from Kym herself and which – the more we learn of the family and recent history – implies some kind of cosmic moral punishment of Kym, who, as we have seen, does a perfectly good job of punishing herself.

The script is by first-time Jenny Lumet, daughter of the world-famous Sydney, and it shows the same intensified, guilt-ridden family dynamics of her father’s recent Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, only shorn of the cumbersome criminality and temporal editing games. Both her and director Demme are smart enough to play the story straight, the latter’s experience with concert films perhaps contributing to his confidence and lightness of touch in filming an actuality without intruding upon it. (Even the title seems to purposefully toy with the grammar of reality: ‘what did you do yesterday?’, ‘I saw Rachel getting married’, ‘who’s Rachel?’) He is, of course, assisted by his actors – Hathaway has justifiably drawn praise, but credit is due to Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel, and the chemistry that the two share. Bill Irwin’s paterfamilias Paul is perhaps the most surprising interpretation of a role on display, his flighty attempt at fortitude becoming more compelling as the film goes on.

While occasionally heavy-going, the film is never heavy-handed, and seems rosy-cheeked during the moments it is put in the position of being as dramatic as the people depicted, preferring the momentous commitment of marriage between two people. The most striking aspect of Rachel Getting Married may be the way it conjures up the spine-tingling mixture of momentousness and pure joy which attends the union of two people very much in love. Depending on your mood, Rachel and her fiancé Sidney’s success, feeling quiet even in the face of all the fuss and bluster created around it, creates either hope for all the Kym’s of this world, or pushes them into oblivion because of its incredible unassailability.