HAIL, CAESAR! A '50s Hollywood comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen

maybe i missed something, but this felt extremely slight. the padding was fun,but it was still padding, and the main narrative thrust was barely enough for a long TV episode. each subplot was given perhaps two scenes, and a couple of narrative threads were just kind of dropped.

slightness isn't actually that bad of a thing, so i might like it more a 2nd time out with diminished expectations.

there is one comic bit, between alden ehrenreich's singing cowboy star and ralph fienne's george cukor-like director, that made me laugh so hard my temples hurt.

channing tatum is great, but he basically gets two scenes, and a dozen lines at most. almost the same with scarlett johansson.

tatum has one wildly entertaining bit of graceful physical comedy in the 2nd of his major scenes. the man has quite a skill set.

"would that it were so simple"

mirthless chuckle

would that it were so simple the best scene for sure. the kid who played hobie was so great!

otm that scene was the only(?) redeemable thing? ugh this was a chore. felt v pasted together under like a day in the life of the brolin studio exec auspices

I liked this quite a bit, but it seemed severely edited - Jonah Hill and Frances McDormand each had one scene; Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, and Tilda Swinton all only had a couple. What was the matte painting gag in the beginning?

yeah it felt a bit like a digest version of a more generous story.

yeah sorta mysteriously perfunctory in its construction; it felt especially strange when it would kind of linger & let a movie scene play out, like the mode the film was operating in wasn't really narrative, more collage. fiennes was such a delight though. it really did feel absent of the kind of investment that can be so rich in their work, like either in making vivid & real the excerpts - which happened a few times with the clooney/caesar scenes, but felt kind of generic in some others - or sort of drilling the characters into your head. brolin's muscular exec is so limp & unconcentrated next to say-the-admittedly-high-water-mark of the harried serious man protagonist.

i really don't get the tepid critical reception, i thought this was WONDERFUL

you're tepid

my, ran out of All About Eve lines at last?

not until the last ILX poster has stopped being a pill

i think the only contemporaneous Coen films are Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, Raising Arizona, and Blood Simple, maybe. even Fargo takes place in the late '80s.

add their most popular movie to that list

deepest examination of the desires and ideas that drive people since, idk, miller's crossing

also the only movie i've ever seen where communists talk like communists

H4A otm, the dude who played hobie was terrific. and i never thought i'd see michael lambert turn up anywhere.

the communist plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense really; who knows what indoctrinating clooney was supposed to get them. i suppose the implication is that even with dr. marcuse advising them (lol) they haven't shaken off the ideology of the hierarchy of stardom?

also the only movie i've ever seen where communists talk like communists

an easy task when you're quoting Das Kapital

i think the only contemporaneous Coen films are Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, Raising Arizona, and Blood Simple, maybe. even Fargo takes place in the late '80s.

add their most popular movie to that list

― 0 / 0 (lukas), Wednesday, February 10, 2016 1:06 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the big lebowski takes place in 1991

i thought he meant No County For Old Men, which takes place in 1980

True Grit was by far their most popular movie in terms of box office

strangely forgotten about now

its p boring

'forgotten' in the sense that stoners never talk it to death?

A Coen version of The Dog of the South coulda been a stoner classic. What might have been

The Coens' True Grit was lovingly adapted from great material, had excellent casting, top notch performances, marvelous cinematography, set design, costumes - the whole package - and if it isn't a top ten western of all time (which is where I'd place it), then it is only barely outside the top ten.

True Grit >>> Big Lebowski

ain't gonna watch it again to confirm

this was just delightful. i can see how some of the narrative beats feel cursory or condensed, but it didn't really bother me.

true grit was an excellent movie!

to be clear, i enjoyed "hail , caesar," it was just a little graceless by their standards, a little cobbled-together.

Enjoyed this, but I think I might have liked it better if it was strictly about Brolin running around putting out fires without the Clooney arc to provide a 'narrative'.

I would've enjoyed 95 mins of Tatum dancing and five minutes of sodomy b/w him and Fiennes.

only 5 minutes?

*mirthless chuckle*

Huh, crazy, I also enjoy watching people have sex.... Anyone else?

only if i'm one of em

the "reveal" of what happened off the set of on wings as eagles was such a predictable letdown! i guess that seems typical of the slight half-assedness of this film. just nothing terribly surprising.

the big lebowski takes place in 1991

damn

I liked this, but found it a bit too busy. More than any other recent film, it reminded me of Inherent Vice, in that it gives us almost too much good stuff, to the point where the whole ends up feeling less impressive than the pieces. I wish it had found a way to mostly stick with Brolin's perspective throughout--where the chaos of the film would at least have been consistent with the character's experience--rather than to keep finding ways of shoehorning movie parodies and new characters into the narrative. I get why some were saying that it felt rushed and unfinished--a consequence, I think, of the Coens trying to fill it with so many different set pieces and cameos.

Not up to speed on the thread, but here's a thing:

Religion often fills the frame in the Coen Brothers' latest, Hail, Caesar!. Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), the film's long-suffering and almost comically decent Catholic protagonist, spends quite a bit of time haunting the confessional, desperately seeking penance for the cigarettes he's snuck. And fatuously awful as it might appear, the production of the titular Biblical epic can't help but foreground the difference between true faith and its shallow performance.

So, is this a Christian tale? Is goody-good Mannix meant to represent Jesus (as a few have suggested) or at least to stand in for his virtuous followers?

Probably not. Robert Picardo's Rabbi is one of the best and most morally authentic characters onscreen. More crucially, of the influential religious leaders attending a Capitol Pictures focus group meeting in a key early scene, he's the only not completely full of sh!t.

That said, we're obviously meant to see the actors employed by the fictional Capitol Studios as haplessly wayward sheep. Their foolish, selfish lives would tend inevitably toward ruin were not Brolin's fixer keeping constant watch over them, working invisibly to nudge them toward "the right thing". Mannix shields his dimbulb charges from exploitative pornographers & ideologues, steers their slutty mermaid asses toward traditional marriage & childbirth, and ensures that evil yet distressingly handsome dance-gays return to the Godless lands from whence they came.

Tilda Swinton's "two faced" twin gossip columnists, meanwhile, stand in for the media's self-righteous naivete. They're not necessarily evil, but only Mannix's paternal manipulation can ensure that they print constructive untruths. The Lockheed Martin headhunter who insidiously courts Eddie with smokes and craters, meanwhile, is clearly the military-industrial devil.

Even so, it's hard to ignore the staggeringly conservative message that emerges from the whole, especially given the Cold War setting and correspondingly dated sexual politics. If the film's Hollywood is a microcosm of midcentury America, then Eddie Mannix represents not Jesus but Herbert friggin' Hoover, sleepless watchman of the liberty we're apparently too damn stupid to deserve.

Picardo's character not full of shit, but he's cynical (his reaction to the film-within-a-film: "meh.") Basically, he's the Coen Brothers.

J. EDGAR HOOVER for chrissake

gah

wth, brain?

i never bothered with the new true grit cuz i like the old one so much i really need to see it?

I enjoyed Picardo and liked the entire scene for multiple reason, not the least of which was the Greek Orthodox, when asked about religious suitably, just starts giving notes about the plausibility of the chariot bit.

Greek Orthodox leader, that is

I like the original but the new one's better.

frankly the coen bros films are the last things we should be searching for hidden or submerged meanings in (a really dull pasttime to begin with)

The interesting thing about looking for hidden or submerged meanings is that, if you want to find them badly enough, they will appear. Although no one else may see them as you do.

Tilda Swinton was my favorite part of this very weird movie

wasn't sure how i felt about this immediately after seeing it but then on the bus ride home i ran into a former friend who i haven't seen in forever and who described his new life pursuit as 'community building through puppetry and object theatre' and his review of the movie as 'red-baiting neoliberal propaganda', which on the whole made me like it more i think.

i don't know about any hidden or submerged meanings but they seemed to be building up a nice meditation on idealism, hypocrisy, naiveté, power and corruption that felt underserved by the apotheosis of josh brolin slapping clooney in the face (however great that scene was)

i thought the film would be better but it was still really good? 'would that it were so simple', brolin consulting the religious leaders, the channing tatum tapdance and everything with the communists it were the best scenes

a really dull pasttime to begin with

beg to defer! it is the best.