| Film and DVD Reviews FILM REVIEW
The Brothers Grimm
By Patrick Ryan
There’s nothing like a great movie to cheer you up. And this is nothing
like a good movie. On paper The Brothers Grimm has it all — a wonderful
cast, a great director and a fantastic idea.
The reality is somewhat different.
Ledger and Damon play the famous brothers as a pair of conmen who are
inadvertently thrown into battle with an evil witch who is stealing kids
from a nearby village.
With Gilliam at the helm this should have been at the very worst an enjoyable
genre romp.
Instead we are given an incoherent mess that looks like it was made 15
years ago.
The effects are so bad that you will be hard pressed to suppress laughter
when you are supposed to be awestruck.
This wouldn’t be so bad if there were other redeeming factors. But there
isn’t a single one.
Both leads are badly miscast. Both sport the sort of dodgy English accents
that can only result in tears of laughter.
Even the sets, which should have been the film’s redemption, aren’t up
to the task.
Everything looks like it was filmed indoors, no doubt because it was,
and there’s a real sense of cost-cutting going on.
It might not be the worst film of the year, but given the level of talent
involved it certainly has to rank alongside the most disappointing.
Starring: Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Lena Heady, Peter Stormare and Monica
Bellucci.
Directed by Terry Gilliam.
War of the Worlds
DVD REVIEW
By Patrick Ryan
Spielberg's big budget adaptation of HG Wells’ classic novel was one
of a handful of movies to buck the recession and soar at the box office
this year.
It isn’t hard to see why.
A slightly miscast Tom Cruise plays a divorced dad who spends the weekend
with his estranged kids. Their domestic squabbles are put aside as aliens
launch a devastating attack wiping out everything in their path.
It’s this part of the movie that works best. Spielberg revels in the
amazing effects and there are obvious parallels to be drawn with the events
of September 11.
It’s to Spielberg’s eternal credit that he doesn’t allow this to descend
into a sub-Independence Day romp. There’s nothing jingoistic about this
at all. It’s grim, gritty and unrelenting.
It’s also refreshing to see that in the age of over-elaborate computer
effects (cough, cough George Lucas) there is one director who remembers
less is more.
Cruise might not be believable as a blue-collar dockworker but he more
than convinces when the story heats up, in every sense of the word. His
relationship with his daughter, played by Dakota Fanning, and teenage son
is put through the mill and there is a real sense of desperation to their
plight.
The ending may have been a bit of a letdown to some audiences, their
main gripe being they had to think about what happened, but War of the Worlds
retains an integrity that most modern blockbusters have eschewed long ago.
Other critics felt the ending a bit saccharine-heavy. But after the unrelenting
grimness of what has gone before, surely a light at the end of the tunnel
isn’t too much to ask?
Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto and Tim Robbins.
Dir: Steven Spielberg
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