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

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.

guh the channing dance sequence was a chore. like if someone remade singin' in the rain starring half a cow.

it was fantastic

would watch an 100-minute cut of the dance sequence.

guh

my faorite part was the love triangle btwn singin' ropin' hobie, miss carlotta valdez and sir laurence laurentz. want a sequel w/ just them.

^v

mirthless chuckle

the channing dance sequence had some really leaden editing--looked more like "dancer in the dark" than "american in paris"! but the dancing/choreography itself was fine!

hobie was very sweet -- wish he had more screen time.

Dance sequence was the best part of the film.

(Tatum dance sequence also the best part of 22 Jump St, and that only went for 1.5 seconds)

movie begins and ends with mannix slapping someone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFwpLIBM8c

some impressive set-pieces but this really feels inconsequential.

Feel like Brolin was the weak link in this, he just wasn't a strong enough presence to hold it all together, and as a result it ended up being a string of fun setpieces for their favourite actors to have a bit of fun with. Clooney/Tatum/Johannson/Fiennes all terrific but it would have been nice to see them onscreen together at some point, or get a sense that any of their storylines really mattered in relation to the others.

This article (from Buzzfeed of all places) has an interesting take on the film

http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/how-the-coens-tricked-you#.iqMjkwvAv5

i liked this a lot. it seems to already be slightly underrated. also wrongly marketed as a comedy, when its not really packed with laughs. nor is it just a gentle affectionate tribute to hollywood. seems more of a kind of existential character study, which i think was done really well, but just not really explored with enough depth, or given enough time to really take shape. i enjoyed all the sub plots, and 'fixing', but they didnt go back to mannix enough, or spend enough time on him. i dont really know their political beliefs, but the radio 4 programme on this made it seem like they were mocking communists, and i think they do a bit, with the tiny sandwiches, etc, but theyre not really dismissed like antonia quirke seemed to think. id say the coens gave the communists a fair shot, esp the end speech here clooney goes into what he learned, and also kind of challenging the whole premise of mass entertainment, and the workforce heirarchy (and also just cos the studio is called capitol). if they had done more with this, this might have been brilliant, it only really skimmed over mannix's doubts about hollywood as a career/worthwhile job/existence. a little too much time spent on the actor playing the cowboy, but i would LOVE to see a whole film based around what he can do :) i def want to see this a second time. wondering why brolin didnt get any oscar love.

also, i raised an eyebrow when clooney did his somewhat derisive speech about palestine being nothing but desert or whatever. that was... interesting.

i def want to see this a second time. wondering why brolin didnt get any oscar love.

The movie wasn't released during award season.

strange that it wasnt though. youd think it would be a shoo in for the academy.

not remotely

Yeah, would that it were so simple

Playfully skewering Hollywood? how does that stack up against targeting pedophile priests, or taking shelter inside your horse?

if grand budapest hotel could get nominated in 2015....

Channing Tatum can't dance. He should stick to Magic Mike movies where that isn't a problem.

Wasn't he a dancer before he was an actor? I've not seen this yet, but I've never noticed him dancing badly before.

This article (from Buzzfeed of all places) has an interesting take on the film
http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/how-the-coens-tricked-you#.iqMjkwvAv5
― i;m thinking about thos Beans (Michael B), Tuesday, March 8, 2016 7:19 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anne helen petersen is a very smart media/film scholar who decamped for online journalism when she didn’t get tenure. her stuff for buzzfeed is pretty consistently decent, which i can’t say about… anything else on buzzfeed, basically.

Tatum learned to do tap *to do* the Hail Caesar routine

You learn tap in 3 months & do better

the shade, ffs

lol @ channing tatum can't dance

he was in step up!!

he and his wife are both excellent dancers

yeah his wife is awesome

i thought the sailors scene was perfectly fine.

this slate piece talks about queers/communists/both.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/02/15/hail_caesar_shows_hollywood_s_queer_communist_hidden_history.html

i think the film does deserve some criticism for doing what anne helen peterson says ("You could argue that, in sublimating their critique so deeply in the inner workings of genre, they’ve negated it") but it does enough to warrant a better appraisal than it seems to have gotten. its def more than just a gentle we-love-you-hollywood! pastiche. i was going to say its funny that so many critics have focused purely on it as a tribute, but then, a lot of film critics love to talk about film itself, more than what films are ever about, so thats prob not such a surprise. prob doesnt help that the coens are kind of aloof about the meaning of anything they do and are willing to humour interviewers on pretty much anything thats posited.

i actually think this film is really about the meaning of work, and employment. that last scene between clooney and brolin in the office, where those themes suddenly become really explicitly debated, is like the film in precis. seriously brilliant.

this washington post interview is interesting -

I was asking if you related to someone like the film’s Laurence Laurentz, the auteur who chafes under the constraints of the studio system.

Ethan: Well sure, we’re Laurence Laurentz, yes.

Joel: The answer is yes, we do relate.

How about the communist screenwriters?

Ethan: Sure. Yeah, we do.

Joel: We relate to them. We also relate to Eddie Mannix.

In what way?

Joel: In the way that you can feel like you’re the only sane person in an insane universe in Hollywood. You have to do your job and manage a lot of personalities.

Ethan: It’s not important that he’s a movie executive. What’s important is that he’s somebody that takes pride in his work, and wants to do his job well.

Reminds me of my exchange with a student last Thursday who wondered why she'd gotten a C+ on a paper.

She: But I wrote about [an impressive topic].

Me: Great. Go back and write that paper."

communism, homosexuality, religion. BIG THINGS that get hinted at throughout the movie but they just seem like mere window-dressing really

definitely. i think they were trying to work all those things into the film, without losing the main thread of being a film about/that recreates golden age hollywood (can you only get movie magic these days by recreating old hollywood?), in the fashion of old US movies that managed to juggle those things without losing their sense of pure pleasure, but maybe held back on going further a little too much. but i still think mannix is the thing holding it together, and his internal angst/conflicts do come through, in a few key scenes that interrupt the other, more obviously fun, cinephiliac stuff.

Saw it last night and suspect there was more to the religious/political threads than just window dressing but I'd have to watch it probably a couple of times again to figure it out. As a series of comedy skits it worked just fine, though some segments were obviously more successful than others.

its hard to make a film about anyone going to confession in 2016 without audiences going 'LOL!' but it was obvious that this was quite genuine about faith, as soon as you see mannix's reaction when he hears the first objection to the big epic's script was a filmic, rather than religious one. im going to see it again. be interesting to see if it reveals more or less a second time.

This was sporadically very entertaining, though it didn't quite hang together for me. It reminded me faintly of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life in that it had something to say in its lampooning of the old Hollywood system; the struggle between art and commerce, how faith got used as grist for the movie industry mill and so on, but its messages got lost in scattering them across a rough patchwork of pastiches.

The parodies were all good fun, but most of them just narrowly missed the target in look and feel, I thought. The Technicolor Biblical epic looked like an episode of Rome, and the Gene Kelly musical - with a Strictly Come Dancing-like performance from Tatum - brought to mind Morcambe and Wise's own "There is Nothing Like a Dame" skit.
Standouts for me were Alden Ehrenreich as the singing cowboy matinee idol, and Frances McDormand as the chain-smoking film editor

Standouts for me were Alden Ehrenreich as the singing cowboy matinee idol

Yeah he was great, don't think I've seen this guy before.

im not even sure you can call them 'parodies'. they were mostly played a bit too sincerely (even when the sailors bump bums to crotches during the tatum routine) for that, even if they were usually interrupted (like at the end of the busby berkley swimming routine) with something to pull you out of reverie.

StillAdvance OTM about this being a film about work. There's a great essay by Sianne Ngai called "The Zany Science" (about the relationship between labour and "zaniness") that I thought about constantly while watching the film, and while that is obviously a consequence of my having read that essay recently and it still being on my mind, it suits the film remarkably.

also, wasnt the studio in barton fink called capitol?

i wonder if it says more about modern hollywood, or rather, film culture/criticism, that reviewers have been so overwhelmingly keen to see this pretty much purely as a frothy comedy/valentine to the good old days of hollywood.