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

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.

Easier than actually thinking about the film.

this video short barely delineates the commonalities of this with The Errand Boy, but anything to expose you ppl to something Lewis-related that isn't speculation about the fucking deathcamp movie...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZbpYq2TA0U

Thinking back upon it now, I didn't realize that the scene where Mannix consults with religious leaders he operates from both sincere and business considerations. When I saw it, I just took it from the modern stance of "oh, dude is just trying to clear it with tribal gatekeepers so he can sell the film." I didn't connect it at the time(probably b/c the scene happens so early in the flick) that he's also doing this out of sincere desire to present an acceptable and accurate adaptation. Dude is hitting confession like clockwork and as mercenary as his studio can be, seems to want to do it right.

feel like so many ironies are getting missed with this movie

the 'hollywood tribute' scenes are all supposedly on-set -- mannix/we see these things being staged; many of them shot with crew hanging around the edges -- but they happen as continuous, composed scenes, nothing like the boredom of the shooting process. it's impossible to know what the dream is.

mannix is devout on one level, but he confesses to the wrong things. he missed dinner. he still smokes. he doesn't tell the priest about rigging marriages, beating his stars, the lying and intimidating that are his trade. it's hinted (barely, but i think it's there) that he doesn't want to take the easy job with boeing because he doesn't want to build a-bombs -- "armageddon" he says -- but he doesn't tell the priest this either. he says the hard job feels right. does he like stress and coercion more than anything else? is that good? how does the movie get us to feel like he made the right choice?

his one scene at home was the most artificial 'hollywood domestic' scene in the movie!

He does confess to the priest that he slapped George Clooney around

but not the actress...

this was great btw

still think this is about hoover's fbi saving america from its own vice and apathy

I wasn't really sure what to make of this, really enjoyed it moment to moment but I'm doubtful that it hung together on the surface, let alone below. Two things in particular, what was the point of the communists' plot? Just to get paid? What was Tatum's role in it other than providing a house? I expect flippancy from the Coens but normally there's some substance there, this was not just flippant but flimsy. And then the ARMAGEDDON motif, blatantly introduced and just as blatantly snatched away and never referred to again, even at the end Brolin says it's 'not a bad' or 'a good' job (can't remember which). So his crisis of conscience doesn't seem to be moral - nor does he seem bothered when he chooses the option that means never spending time with his children. Seemed totally deliberate and yet... utterly pointless. If there's any grand scheme at all here I'd have to say it's the one also strongly apparent in their last two films - comic or tragic, life is utterly devoid of meaning.

yeah the communists' scheme is pretty flimsy i guess:

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?

― goole, Wednesday, February 10, 2016 12:12 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like maybe the whole pt of the movie is that even with communism and catholicism and freedom and truth and work and all of these huge things bearing down on people and driving them, nobody can see outside of hollywood

not just flippant but flimsy

it is a farce

If a farce isn't well constructed it ain't a good farce.

Lebowski was a farce, had nothing at its core maybe, but had a solid foundation, sturdy walls, robust roof.

As I noted very far upthread, before the release, good farce is extremely difficult to pull off.

I got it wrong. My comment about the difficulty of farce was on the threadBest Coen Bros Movie, when this (prospective) movie came up in the discussion.

I think someone needs to cast Alden Ehrenreich as the lead in THE BILLY MACKENZIE STORY pronto.

Wow, the Coen Bros beat these guys to the punch. Just in time for Easter:

http://www.patheos.com/Entertainment/Movie-Club/Risen/RISEN-About-the-Movie-01-27-2016

RISEN is the epic Biblical story of the Resurrection, as told through the eyes of a non-believer. Clavius (Joseph Fiennes), a powerful Roman military tribune, and his aide, Lucius (Tom Felton), are tasked with solving the mystery of what happened to Jesus (referred to by the Hebrew name Yeshua in the film) in the weeks following the crucifixion, in order to disprove the rumors of a risen Messiah and prevent an uprising in Jerusalem.

RISEN stars Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love), Tom Felton (Harry Potter), Peter Firth (The Hunt for Red October; MI-5), and Cliff Curtis (Fear the Walking Dead).

Columbia Pictures and LD Entertainment present in association with AFFIRM Films, a Liddell Entertainment and Patrick Aiello production, RISEN, directed by Kevin Reynolds. Screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and Paul Aiello, and story by Paul Aiello. Mickey Liddell, Patrick Aiello, and Pete Shilaimon produced. Executive producers are Robert Huberman and Scott Holroyd. Director of Photography is Lorenzo Senatore. Production designer is Stefano Maria Ortolani. Steven Mirkovich, ACE is the editor. Costume designer is Maurizio Millenotti. Rafa Solórzano is the visual effects supervisor. Music is composed by Roque Baños. John Hubbard and Ros Hubbard did casting.

RISEN is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for the following reasons: biblical violence including some disturbing images

The running time is 1 hour and 48 minutes.

Tom Felton playing a character sharing the name of the elder Malfoy, in a film with another Fiennes brother.

Oh wait, this already came out.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=risen.htm

Made a little money, I'm guessing

Still playing in Tupelo. (They've settled in to having 2-3 xtian movies playing on the 18 screens there at all times.)

I guess if it keeps the punters packing in?

Sure, the market and the marketers know each other intimately.