Entry #2

         While watching the first half of "The Brothers Grimm" in class, I remember thinking, "Wow, the Grimm Brothers really hated each other. How did they write several literary works together like that?" It stuck with me, until finally we had an assignment to read the first chapter of Jack Zipes's, The Brothers Grimm. After reading the whole way through that chapter, I was appalled. So Matt Damon's character wasn't the older sibling? The Grimm Brothers actually loved each other? Questions raced through my head about the abrasive contrasts between the 2005 movie and the original history of the two brothers.

FACTS

        While the movie has countless errors when compared to the actual history, there are a few factual aspects that were incorporated. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, like the movie's Jake and Will Grimm, were two brothers who wrote down countless fairy tales in a book, which would end up being published and placed on almost every child's bedside table. They also were in fact, extremely passionate about their home, Germany, and disliked the French occupation that plagued the area at the time. Lotte, who is only briefly visited in the very start of the movie, truly was a younger sister of the Grimm Brothers, but would not die until much later in life, after growing older and eventually marrying.

FICTION

        Most of the movie was drowning in fictional elements that were hardly correct in comparison to the actual history. For example, their occupation in the movie as conmen acting as supernatural bounty-hunters was everything BUT accurate. They were in reality, scholarly men who attended university and ended up working in very prestigious jobs. They also never followed the story line of Angelika, played by Lena Headey, who helped them along their journey into the mysterious woods of Marbaden (which is not an actual real place in Germany) where the brothers ended up BOTH falling in love with her. In reality, Jacob was a bachelor his entire life, where Wilhelm married a woman named Henriette Dorthea Wild. The source of their collection of fairy tales happened to be inaccurate as well, as the Brothers gathered their stories commonly from middle aged women who were talented in story telling, not from trying to take down a legitimate evil queen with long billowing hair, locked in door-less tower. 

        The entire movie stems from this fictional story that Hollywood created in order to sell tickets, instead of following the original history of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. While there are countless fictional elements, there are however a few areas of accuracy in the movie, which were refreshing to see.