DVD Review

The Brothers Grimm (2005)

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Credits

Release Date: Aug 26, 2005; Rated: PG-13; DVD Release Date: Dec 20, 2005; Genres: Comedy, Fantasy, Horror; With: Heath Ledger and Matt Damon; Distributor: Dimension Films

By Ty Burr

Ty Burr

Ty Burr is a writer at large for EW and is no relation to Raymond or Aaron

''I'm Terry Gilliam. I guess I'm responsible for some of this,'' begins Gilliam's commentary track for The Brothers Grimm — way to take ownership of your work, Terry! You can't really blame him for ducking responsibility, since the movie was by all accounts a typical ordeal to make, with stars dropping in and out and the Weinstein brothers meddling with everything from cinematography to Heath Ledger's facial hair. The result is a shambolic, lurid, fascinating mess that barely dented the box office, with Ledger and Matt Damon's Napoleonic-era ghostbusters vying with a 1,000-year-old Thuringian queen (Monica Bellucci), a hammy Italian torture master (Peter Stormare), and splattery CGI. It's every fairy tale ever written trash-compacted into two hours; serve with red wine and extra-strength Tums. EXTRAS Deleted scenes (including a shot of possessed trees that Gilliam crows is the most expensive in the film), bland making-of featurettes, and the director's exhausted, mordant commentary. Of the sequence in which Stormare drop-kicks a kitten into a whirring fan and Jonathan Pryce wipes off a tiny gobbet of flesh and tastes it, Gilliam drily notes, ''There's a lot of ideas going on in here.'' And they are...?

Posted Dec 16, 2005

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