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

Saw it again.

Better again.

Very rare in that it could and should be thirty mins longer maybe.

I saw this on a long-haul flight. diverting, enjoyable, but just very, very slight.

(psued-alert) made me think of jameson:

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter

Their worst since *at least* The Ladykillers.

Did you at least like Channing Tatum's homoerotic song-and-dance bit?

meh

Alden Ehrenreich much funnier

but gen too much "lol Old Hollywood so STUPID"

no wonder darraghmac shared in the contempt

I wasnt a fan of it but "lol Old Hollywood so STUPID" wasnt what they were aiming for imo

often seemed so

Totally missing where you're getting that morbs

And most of my fave movies are old hollywood. More than a few recommended by you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVQ0JFzXMgY

anyway ledge otm on the whole dull, pointless kidnapping plot

just join the Navy, Alfred

I watched it for the second time recently, it isn't peak Coen but it made me laugh a lot and feel happy even on the second viewing, which is more than I can say for most movies.

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

― goole, Wednesday, February 10, 2016 6:07 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is very otm

what about Reds?

we must know different communists

"why don't you look around and see how agitated you get?"

a Strictly Come Dancing-like performance from Tatum

This seems a little harsh.

Overall I thought this was a trifle, but entertaining enough not to feel slim - unlike, say, Intolerable Cruelty. Every scene has gems. Ehrenreich's scenes with the Carmen Miranda-type were really charming. Overall it's very broad but not as forced as anything in their awkward phase (O Brother through The Ladykillers).

The reason for the kidnapping seems pretty clear - aren't they looking for a famous figurehead?

I kind of agree with David Edelstein's review - the movie might have been more interesting with Clooney and Brolin swapping roles.

I'm looking for the point of the Coens doing the kidnapping plot.

Intolerable Cruelty is a weirdly maligned near-gem.

Agreed!

Clooney doing "screwball" makes my stomach turn

otm

I can't remember a single thing about Intolerable Cruelty, except that everything seemed to fall flat, Catherine Zeta-Jones can't do comedy, and coming out of the cinema with a "what did I just watch?" feeling. Maybe worth rewatching though?

Clooney's good in Burn After Reading.

Intolerable Cruelty is very funny, with romcom lighting and cinematography rather than a "Coen-y" visual style. Not inappropriately, as it was them taking over a commercial project, but I think the look goes a long way towards distracting people that it was a step up out of their post-maternal-passing malaise.

Clooney doing "earnest" makes my stomach turn

eg the Murrow CBS movie

only thing i remember from intolerable cruelty is "what god hath joined let n.o.m.a.n. put asunder"

i really enjoyed intolerable cruelty when i "rescreened" it recently, would definitely rank it the best of their films in the early 2000s. though o brother where art though, the man who wasn't there, and the lady killers aren't particularly hard to top.

thou, damn autocorrect

where art though

zing

TMWWT is underrated based on my recent rescreen

ScarJo's honking NY accent was pretty good.

One of the better things about the Audie Murphy cowboy character was that he's not stupid (he seems to know what a mirthless chuckle is, as bad as the execution is).

toothless yokel knows his mirthless chuckle

loved that shot of grotesquerie btw

the sitdown with the religious panel near the start really bothered me. even giving leeway for laughs, those characters (esp rabbi) saying some of those blunt things in 1950 didnt make any sense, esp if they are regularly providing notes on scripts. comedy from character is funnier.

also Clooney spouting Marxist boilerplate to Brolin at the end was funnier when Josh Mostel did same to his family in Radio Days

i enjoyed projecting this, and timing the fade-up of the house lights at the end, because i took the final shot, swinging up and around to be swallowed by the light, to be a shot of me

i never developed a theory of its flitting parts, traces of themes, coy references, etc, so i never posted itt after seeing it cuz i didn't feel able to defend my faith that something was coherently going on in it and didn't want alfred to clown me

lots of stuff about labor, obv

looking forward to seeing it again sometime

i didn't feel able to defend my faith that something was coherently going on in it and didn't want alfred to clown me

but you listen to me talk about Reagan

talking better electrically

some echoes btw of sag-president RR in brolin's char's theological affinity for the bosses and their ideal frictionless system

this was okay but did feel a little flimsy. my interpretation is that it's a fantasy of the studio system, from the point of view of the studio system; ie commies behind every bush, disposable/irresponsible/troublesome prima dona actors as constant annoyance, loyal studio fixer as hero, gossip columnists as parasitic harpies, etc. Feel like that was the general focus, which served as a convenient pretext for the various setpieces.

loved the identical twin gossip columnists in this so much

one of the ushers at work made me laugh: asked if i'd liked anything we'd shown recently, i mentioned this, and she made a face and said "i wanted to be like, just SAY what you MEAN"

After watching this I felt very much like "This was pleasant but pointless" and many similar things said in this thread. I like Outic's version a couple posts up, just wish it were more of a complete movie in the process of hitting those notes. Everybody is skin deep and so many things go undeveloped or just forgotten. The really laughable thing is the poster, which gives framed faces to Tatum, Clooney, Brolin, Johansson, and Hill, two of whom are two-scene characters and one of whom is literally on screen for maybe forty-five seconds, versus the banished singing cowboy Ehrenreich who is all over this thing. Obviously this reflects a hierarchy of stars and maybe that's another reflection of the studio system or something. I'd be pissed, though unless there really was a fully fleshed-out Jonah Hill subplot in some lost, four-hour road show cut of the film.

Fiennes was the funniest - perfect delivery. Johansson's story really was pointless, like they were like "what could be another crisis Brolin would have to deal with" and someone came up with a star being pregnant out of wedlock, and they just sort of threw that in without writing anything else around it. I did appreciate the "no dames!" song-and-dance number even if the "gay sailors" aspect of it seemed really lame. Just nice to see a long stretch of singing and dancing in the middle of a movie.

pointless

is a bear pointless if it is a pleasant bear

a pleasant sandwich you would never call pointless

a pleasant person, that is a fine rarity indeed

why must your diversions be so pointy

http://www.cornel1801.com/1/t/THE-POINT-OBLIO/film4.jpg

rewatched this last night and stand by my initial assessment of it: a fantasy of the studio system, from the point of view of the studio system; ie commies behind every bush, disposable/irresponsible/troublesome prima dona actors as constant annoyance, loyal studio fixer as hero, gossip columnists as parasitic harpies, etc.

but overall it's very slight/flimsy and it def feels padded w cameos and setpiece scenes - but then is that also intentional satire cuz of course a studio propaganda movie would be all surface and no depth and jammed w distracting baubles arggghhh

As time passes all I really remember is the ''would that it were so simple'' scene, and so consequently my opinion of the film keeps improving. Was surprised to reread my comments a couple posts up and find them so negative! But then if I imagine actually sitting through the Clooney-with-Marxists scenes again, or the Swinton twin reporter stuff, that's not so appealing.

I've been catching up on all the Coen Bros films that I haven't seen and watched this last night. It's like a rose-scented fart, pleasant enough but ephemeral and pointless. Maybe (probably) I'm missing something but it just seems like a lot of effort for very little on the screen. Best things were the Communist writers congratulating themselves for deftly inserting propaganda into their scripts (historical LOL) and everything L'il Han Solo did.

But I also watched Miller's Crossing, which I somehow had never seen before, and want to watch it like 15 more times.