And yet every movie he's made has eventually wound up studied in film classes, on favorites lists, critically acclaimed.

Always in hindsight, though. You'd think execs and critics would figure out by now that Terry Gilliam is always going to be daffy but always very interesting and would stop saying things like "incoherent mess with no clear script or target demographic" and just let him be Terry.

I know studios worry about how much money they ante up and about having flops on their hands but they need to have some long vision and look at Gilliam's films through 3-decade perspective.

They continue to make Gilliam the Welles of comedic fantasy, the director forever fighting to get scenes made. Yet Welles' movies, even though they wound up only a fraction of his vision, are now thought of more highly than those of his more studio-friendly peers.

Anyway, Brothers Grimm is taking a critical drubbing, just like all of Gilliam's films first do.

???

One of my favorite movies, ever.

Seriously.

Oh sure... pick a lesser example. Try Brasil! or The Fisher King! Brilliant I tell you, abso-fucking-lutely brilliant. Try 12 Monkeys! Try Time Bandits! Pretty solid there as well. I'd like to see what Gilliam could do with a studio backing him up and an amazing budget. The guy is so out there creatively he shames most Hollywood "Creative" types.

Brazil is one of my favorite movies, but I still have no interest in seeing The Brothers Grimm.

I've read that "Grimm" had an $80 million budget.

And it's also sat on the shelf for a couple of years...only being released now because Miramax/Disney are flooding the market with flicks that they've been sitting on.

I like some of his stuff as much as the next guy, but generally speaking a studio ( even Miramax, a studio notorious for shelving movies for one reason or another ) won't eat $80 million bucks & shelve a movie for no reason.

Well if it turns out to be lesser Gilliam (looks likely), at least he's already got another pic screening at the Toronto Film Festival next month.

I wouldn't say that I have no interest, but it's really hard to bring myself to go see this based on the weak-looking previews and awful reviews. I'll have to see it eventually, but this looks to be Gilliam's first big dud. Pretty much every other great director has made at least one so I don't see how he could be immune.

I love The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, btw.

i saw this last night with the kids and their friends. it's uneven. the plot line is a little hard to hold onto. it seemed like it just disappears in places and gilliam's imagination just started wandering off. but even those meanderings are worth sticking around for. it got long for me but was incredibly breathtaking and creepy and cool in so many places.

i'd actually like to see it again even though it was random and tedious in places. if you think about it like pages in a sketchbook--ideas formulating for a few pages and then little tangents and diversions happen--it's a lot of fun. parts of it are beautifully filmed and there are so many amusing little things going on all over the place.

as a linear piece of storytelling i can see what the critics are saying. it's no great film by any means but i like gilliam's mad hatter approach to filmmaking.

Now I'm wishing I'd seen this today instead of Wedding Crashers.

Wow...is that the actual poster artwork, cuz it's seriously horrible.

Looks like a B-movie horror poster ( Dakota Fanning IS Damienette in Omen 19 ) , or a Wind-Up Records band album cover.

Gonna have to disagree with you on all counts, and I have to ask: what's wrong with B-movie horror posters?

I mean the girl giving the finger is pretty cheesy and the typeface is bad, but I've certainly seen worse. It at least has me kind of curious about what the movie is going to be about, and the illustration itself is decent. Looks better than any Brothers Grimm preview/poster/etc.

edit: Also I'm pretty sure this isn't going to be an "official" movie poster unless this is a genuine indie film that isn't being distributed by any of the major studios.

Nothing wrong with B-movie posters at all...I love 'em. But I don't think this movie is a B-movie horror flick. Kinda weird to have a poster that makes it look like one, that's all. If I remember right, it's more of a straight drama. And it is a "smaller" film - $15 million budget is what I read.

I'm sure this isn't the poster--there's no poster on the movie's official website (but there are a bunch of short Gilliam interviews and on-set bits), this is just something I found linked on IMDB. The website it came from was Russian, so I'm gonna guess it's a foreign book cover.

From what I've heard, the film festival screenings are an attempt to find a distributor--it was entirely independently financed.

Here's a write-up on the novel:

Traces of Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and faint echoes of the horror film classic Psycho infuse this highly charged, eccentrically imaginative narrative by the author of Branches. The unusual tale comprises mainly dialogues between 11-year-old Jeliza-Rose and her four bodiless Barbie doll heads as she wanders about the isolated landscape of a house beside the railroad tracks in bleak rural Texas, interrupted periodically by the dynamite exploding in a nearby limestone quarry. Jeliza-Rose's mother is dead from a heroin overdose. The girl's father, 67-year-old Noah, a drug-addicted, has-been rock guitarist, leaves his wife's corpse on the bed in their sleazy L.A. apartment and takes his abused, disturbed daughter on a Greyhound bus to his long-dead mother's home. There Noah pins a map of Denmark on the wall and sits and stares trancelike for days on end. Jeliza-Rose soon encounters Dell, an eccentric neighbor woman who wears a beekeeper's veil and has a brain-damaged brother named Dickens. Precocious (and often pretentious) conversations between Jeliza-Rose and her Barbie heads (one is named Classique) serve to illumine the girl's disturbed state of mind and to further the surreal plot. As Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world collides with Dell's appalling secret, a grotesque history is revealed. This brutal portrait of a young girl's unbearable childhood requires immersion in her fevered imagination, and is relieved only at the end by Jeliza-Rose's brave effort to save herself from total breakdown.

Rotten Tomatoes ratings:

12 Monkeys 87%
Time Bandits 95%
Brazil 93%
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 39%
The Fisher King 86%
The Meaning of Life 89%
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 87%
Monty Python and the Holy Grail 93%

Yeah they're always beating up on him. Especially when they forced the studio to release Brazil.

Whoa, that's kinda surprising.

I'll take that one over 12 Monkeys any day.

Further proof you and I are completely opposite in terms of taste.

F&L = boring and stupid

12 Monkeys = one of my fave movies of the 90s.

Critics savage Gilliam when the movies are NEW. Retrospect reviews have been far more favorable.

I don't think F&L is one of his better films. I just really can't watch 12 Monkeys any more. That and Fisher King have aged really poorly, IMO.

F&L has a certain charm even though it's generally too long to watch. Although if I ever have to see Depp play another eccentric, vaguely drugged-out character, I might not be able to watch this any more, either.

(You're still right about our tastes being pretty much opposite.)

You gonna find those flip flop reviews or just quit before you dig yourself in deeper?

No, I'm not going to track down the reviews. All you've got to do is read the current crop of reviews in major publications this week or last to get a feel for how he's always been described by critics. They always want to like him but think his movies are incoherent messes. The give him three or three and a half stars, then proceed to explain why they felt they had to give him that much, usually something having to do with his "manic energy." His most current movie is rarely liked as much as his previous ones. A few years later he puts out a new one and reviewers say it's not as good as the previous one. It's happened for three decades now in probably 80% of Gilliam reviews I've read.

They also do this to some extent with Burton, Tarantino and Jarmusch, though their movies get more initial praise sometimes.

I'll see anything by Burton or Gilliam -- guaranteed better than most of the crap that's out at the time.

Tim Burton got the same treatment for Sleepy Hollow and Big Fish, but I really liked those movies. Haven't even seen Charlie and the Choco yet though...