Grimm (2003)

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Grimm" is a strange re-working of the old story of Hansel and Gretel. However, it's been changed so much that you can hardly call it "Hansel and Gretel"--particularly since the characters' names are Jacob and Marie.This bizarre story begins with a starving family in Holland during a cold winter. They have no food and the father and mother's plan is to abandon their two 'kids' in the woods and have them fend for themselves. However, they are NOT exactly young, as they both look to be about 30! And, you wonder how stupid they must be that they can't find their way out of the woods! Regardless, they trudge about for a while until they come upon a dying dog and eat it. Soon the dog's owner catches them and brings them home--and forces Jacob to have sex with his ugly wife. They manage to escape soon after and this is only in the first 15 minutes of the film! What follows is their trek to Spain with even more VERY child-unfriendly material including incest, robbery, prostitution, a closeup shot of a dead dog and incestuous jealousy. It's all pretty nasty and reminds me of an Almondovar film, such as "What Have I Done to Deserve This?"--where just about every social norm is violated, although it never is 100% apparent if this is meant as comedy or horror film. But frankly, other than shocking the viewer, is there any real point to all this? I sure didn't know and that is why I kept watching...hoping that the film would ultimately prove satisfying.Could this sick material have worked? Possibly, though I doubt it because it was just so sleazy and gross. However, making the two main characters so unlikable (as is EVERYONE in this film) didn't help matters any. It also didn't help that the plot seemed very meandering and often pointless. Overall, the film is just bizarre and yucky just to be bizarre and yucky. The only things I really found of interest was the escape from the ugly woman (this was rather funny) and seeing an old Spanish/Italian western movie set at the end.

Last night this movie was shown on dutch television so I decided to take a look.Why did I do that? This is an awful film without a storyline (or anything remotely similar to it), but with bad dialogues, mediocre acting and unbelievable scenes. The last could be a good thing, but it isn't, I meant it in a bad way.If you like your characters to be unlikable, somewhat retarded, incestuous and totally weird, you might like the movie. but probably not even then...Avoid this like the plague! I'm ashamed to be Dutch after seeing this...

On a winter's day a cold-hearted father abandons his son Jacob and daughter Maria in the woods, while they were off looking for firewood. After they can't find their father, Jacob finds a letter in his coat from his mother telling them to go Spain to live with their uncle. While on this journey they bump into some conniving people, also they commit some of devilish crimes and most of the time find themselves in some bizarre circumstances.*Shrug Shoulders* Um… yeah. Well, that's what I felt after this film had finished. It just has some type of spell over you, because what you are seeing on screen is outrageously awkward, highly unpredictable and a striking amount of imagination. The story loosely takes on the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, but goes for a more grownup approach, which is filled with dark humour, incredibly odd adventures and like the title implies a grim nature. Even with all this imagination that went into it, there's something about it that left me undecided what to feel. It's hardly bad, as it had a hypnotic trance on me, but at the end I wasn't hugely impressed, as it seems to run out of steam after the half way mark. Which is a shame, as it had potential with its surreal setup and strange surprises but it becomes ponderously slow and the bizarre nature of it seems to fall by the way side in the third act. The plot… well, there really isn't one, because it's nothing but one comical episode after another and some don't make too much sense or add any real cohesion to proceedings. To make matters worse the characters, especially Jacob and Maria are glazed over and because of that they're hard to like or to connect with. But that doesn't take away from the overall performances, which I thought was generally good. Also other notables worked into the film is a lot of demented and deadpan humour, which either was an hit or a miss and also the sexual context was downright kinky. These generally bleak adventures the two encounter are highly out of the blue and hold a tremendous amount of impact, as the film bursts at the seams with a touch of fairytale magic. Other things that truly kept me glued were the slick cinematography that captured such ravishing scenery from woodlands, to desert terrains and an eerie ghost town. Backing up what we saw on screen was an impressive soundtrack that mixed a lot twang, from country, to rock and some indie. In all, weird… just plain weird! A promising idea that's hypnotically enchanting, but it never reached the great heights like I wished it did.

You might propably not like this film at all. I think this is of these films that need the viewer to be open minded. You should not go and view it if you are stuck to reality, or too used to Hollywood blockbusters. If you are one of those who say: No, you cannot go from Holland to Spain with one tank of gasoline, you should never watch this film! However, if you feel that odd things might very well be possible in films, and you don't care about odd things in films, this might be the one for you!I think viewing it requires a bit of knowledge about fairy tales. Yes, the ones by the GRIMM brothers. The same way as the Coen Brothers knew how to use an old existing story and place it in modern times without loosing the context, Alex van Warmerdam took a story and found how to remake it in a modern way. The same sense of absurd humor, but maybe a little less funny, than o brother were art thou. van Warmerdam, however knew very well how to keep the way of storytelling by the grimm brothers intact. The flickering way of storytelling, combined with a fine feeling of suspense, makes this into one of my best Dutch films recently.