Hail, Caesar! (4/5 Stars)

The new Coen Brothers movie “Hail, Caesar!” is not so much a satire of the big studio soulless entertainment of film’s first half-century as much as it is a celebration of it. After all, the big all encompassing studio has long since been a ripe satirical target. However the type of entertainment it would produce, as if art were something that could be manufactured en masse in a factory, did have its admirable attributes, lots of which are on display in this movie. Here we have five “types” of movies that the producers churned out: a western with trick horse play, a Busby Berkeley dance number, a high society melodrama, sailors tap-dancing a la “On the Town” and finally a biblical epic starring the biggest movie star of them all, Baird Whitlock (played by George Clooney). The Coen Brothers put on fine displays of them all. It is entertaining though it hardly means anything. But if that is all you want in a movie, than this is a very good one. It delivers just that.

Ostensibly the movie is about Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a producer. He is not the boss of the movie studio (that guy is in New York) but he is the highest-ranking person on the lot. His job is all sorts of things and takes day and night to do it. To over simplify things, he keeps the productions running and the stars (who are full-time employees of the studio) out of trouble. He solves problems. Take for instance the case of DeeAnna Morgan (Scarlett Johannsson) the mermaid in the synchronized swimming number. She is pregnant and unwed. Eddie, conscious of what it looks like to the moral movie-going public of family friendly pictures, helps her as only the representative of a huge corporation could. He plans to keep the pregnancy a secret, hire a professional person (Jonah Hill as Joseph Silverman) to adopt the newborn, and have this person give the child up for adoption back to DeeAnna a few days later. The professional person is just that. Whenever a star does something stupid, he is keen to be framed for the crime. It is let on that he spent six months in jail for a drunk driving incident.

On one of the last days of shooting the big biblical epic "Hail, Caesar" Baird Whitlock is kidnapped from the set. The kidnappers ask for $100,000. Eddie does some math and is content to pay it after realizing it will cost more to delay shooting a week (not to mention the bad press). The kidnappers happen to be a study group of communist screenwriters. They are not so rough on Baird. After slipping him a mickey and spiriting him to an isolated beach house, he is let in on the study group. They calmly and professorially explain Communism to him. He is receptive although that may be only his dim nature.

Mirroring this is the studios treatment of Jesus in “Hail, Caesar” which seems to look a lot like Ben Hur. The studio wants to give the people what they want (Jesus!) but do not want to offend anyone (an opinion on Jesus!). To that end, Eddie invites three priests from three Christian denominations and one rabbi to his office. He shows them the script and asks their opinion. There is nothing to object to as Jesus is seen only once in one scene with his back towards the camera (like “Ben Hur”). Nobody agrees on Jesus but nobody objects to the script because nothing is actually said about Jesus. Hollywood has pulled this fast one from time immemorial and for good reason too. Whenever an artist has something to say (take for instance Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,”) they are met with protests. Jesus remains hidden from big studio mass-market films to this day. 

Not that the Coens do the communists any favors. It turns out, through a lot of intellectual rigamarole and bandying about, the Communists want the ransom money because they are greedy. That claim it as payback for their services because they have been blackballed but are still working. The fact that they care about money does not bother them. An old venerable man explains that history is a science and that the Communist Revolution will come so it does not matter whether the study group acts selfishly. In fact to act selfishly will hasten the revolution so acting in their self-interest is in furtherance of their cause anyway. I dislike communists and though I have sympathy for anyone who is unfairly kept unemployed (what kind of good capitalist would I be if I were not) I love the fact that Hollywood Communists are being made fun in this movie for their stupid political beliefs. I have seen nothing but tragedies about them so far (thanks a lot McCarthy for turning them into noble sufferrors) so I consider this as a relief on the subject. The only thing worse than letting the Communists write screenplays was not letting them write screenplays. At least that way people could have a demonstration of how dumb is the philosophy.  

But I get carried away. The point of the movie is the studio fun. On great display is Alden Enrenreich (as Hobie Doyle) who is the cowboy of the film. He actually can do all sorts of tricks with a lasso. In fact, on a dinner date he takes a noodle of spaghetti, makes a lasso out of it, and hooks his dates thumb from across the table. Amazing! Now that’s entertainment. Also Channing Tatum does a great tap dancing number as a sailor who is not gay among a bunch of other sailors who are also not gay. The song is called “No Dames” and is about how when they are all at sea together there will be no dames. It is not gay. It is sad. Do not be tricked by the smiles and tap dancing.

Inside Llewyn Davis (4/5 Stars)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Comedian Patton Oswalt once described what made a Coen Brothers movie special: Most movies are like a small tent with a carnival barker in front of it. You pass by on the street and the barker yells, “Come see the super exciting special blankety-blank!” You pay your ticket and enter the tent. There is the blankety blank just the way the barker described it. There is nothing else in the tent. A Coen Brothers movie is like a huge warehouse. It’s got one of those large roll down metal garage door entrances. The entrance rolls up without revealing a vast space with all sorts of machines and contraptions dispersed throughout. The warehouse contains no barker, no guide, no suspiciously over-friendly attendant. Come inside or stay without, don’t care. Take a glance around or stare for hours, feel free. There is plenty of stuff inside but it’s anybody’s guess whether it is what you are looking for. Hopefully you are the curious type. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is just like that.

If I were a carnival barker I could describe the plot in a sentence or two. It is about a week in the life of a folk singer named Llewyn Davis (played and performed by Oscar Isaac) circa the 1961 NYC Greenwich Village folk scene. He is good at his job but his job isn’t commercial. He sleeps on the couches and floors of the people he has known for a while or just met. He accidentally lets a calico cat out of one of the apartments and spends a good deal of movie time carrying it around with him. There are also a lot of folk song performances and a trip to Chicago to audition for a big time producer. At the end of the movie he is back exactly where he started having not really gotten anywhere. Not much happens really and what does happen is generally profoundly sad, like a good folk song you know.

But that is not why you want to see this movie. You want to see it because it is an exquisitely refined work of art and perhaps the best movie ever made about an unsuccessful folk singer in 1960’s Greenwich Village. It’s also the only movie I’ve ever seen about that topic, but give that a point for originality if nothing else. 

Let’s start with the music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is not a musical in the sense that characters burst out into singing, but it does have several songs performed in their entire length by the characters on stage or anywhere else you can fit an acoustic guitar. The most comparable movie to this one is the Coen’s earlier effort “O’ Brother Where Art Thou,” which had a wall-to-wall soundtrack of largely forgotten Old Tyme music. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” has a great soundtrack of largely forgotten Folk music. Some of these are very very good songs. My favorite has to be ‘Dink’s Song’ which is the main song of this movie as it is played as a duet in the beginning and in a solo performance at the end. Oscar Isaac performs both of the songs and Marcus Mumford of the band “Mumford and Sons” sings the other part of the duet. He does not show up in the movie because his character commits suicide sometime before the story starts. “Dink’s Song” in addition to beautifully arranged in harmony or without is also especially sad. It is about a woman who loved a man who impregnated her and left. As far as we know the song has always existed. A musician once overheard a woman (named Dink) singing it while doing laundry in a nearby river in the very early 1900s. Noone really knows if she wrote it herself. “If the song isn’t new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song,” says Llewyn Davis. All the songs were produced by the legendary T. Bone Burnett who has catalogued an impressive array of different kinds of folk songs. The Llewyn Davis character’s style is based off a folk singer named Dave Van Ronk, but there is also a ‘Peter, Paul, and Mary’ type of band headed by the supremely competent Justin Timberlake (what can’t that guy do?) who also spends a scene recording with a reluctant Llewyn Davis the annoyingly catchy “Please Mr. Kennedy.” A mariner’s song, a travelling song, and a song about death in childbirth are also included in the mix. Hard living, that is what folk songs (and let’s face it, old songs in general) are about. When the country went rich and memories of the Depression and WWII faded, they were forgotten. Now that the money is gone in our time, perhaps we will be seeing a greater revival of them.

A footnote: This will be hilarious come Oscar Time. Certainly the Academy will want to recognize this movie for its music, but as it is limited to recognizing original music, it will be surely be forced to nominate “Please Mr. Kennedy.” The joke is that it is a hokey song that the main character hates and just the type of shit that will become a hit while his soulful music goes unrecognized.

The movie looks great. It looks like someone took the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and colored the entire neighborhood with it. It’s a faded color with many greens, whites, and grays. It is beautiful absolutely beautiful. The perfect landscape to go with a song like “Green, Green, Rocky Road.” Surprisingly the cinematographer for this movie is not Roger Deakins, the longtime collaborator of the Coen brothers as he was working on James Bond when this movie was made. The cinematographer here is Bruno Delbonnel. The framing of the scenes are just absolutely perfect. All the corners of the screen are filled in with the correct details. Nothing is left out and nothing is included that shouldn’t be there.

Footnote: Ironically, this movie could very well win the Oscar for Best Cinematography, which would be hilarious given that Roger Deakins has been nominated and not won so many times for his work in Coen Brothers films in the past. Now, if a Coen Brothers movie finally wins this time, he won’t be on the stage to accept it. Ho, ho, ho.

The characters in this movie are so well defined that it seems like that they existed before the movie’s camera got there and continued with their lives after the movie left. One in particular, the sister of Llewyn Davis, Joy, played by Jeanine Serralles, sounds just like my grandmother and not just in the way she speaks, but the particular words she uses. The attention to phrases is so detailed. She only has two scenes but speaks like nobody else in the movie, which makes sense because she lives in a totally different part of town from everybody else. Justin Timberlake continues to impress me. His physicality is so specific it speaks paragraphs. Take a look at his reaction to Llewyn Davis’s query during the recording session. It is about half a second but boy that says everything doesn’t it. John Goodman jumps into a car for the road trip to Chicago, knocks all of his lines out of the park and exits just as quickly. Then there is F. Murray Abraham as the producer Bud Grossman. For lovers of movies, Abraham will forever by remembered as Antonio Salieri, the jealous court composer of “Amadeus” who uses his political power to destroy the career of Mozart. And here is Salieri two hundred years later telling Llewyn Davis that his songs aren’t commercial enough. “I don’t see that much green here,” he explains matter-of-factly. Sometimes being good is just not good enough.

Footnote: Somebody should make a YouTube compilation of Coen Brother's secretaries. They always seem to find the most interesting looking people to sit at desks in little scenes. The little old lady in the agent's office is no different in this one. 

The Coen Brothers are an anomaly of filmmaking. Here are two writer/directors who always made just enough money to never ever have had to compromise with their artistic vision. Hell, even Scorsese had to make the “The Color of Money.” The Coens have never had to do that. Their good luck does not seem to be lost on them. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” is about a musician who does not want to compromise and goes broke and beaten in the process. It is an utterly uncommercial premise for a movie and if the backers get their money back any time soon it will probably be due to past goodwill connected with the Coen Brothers. But it was made and it was made well. So for all us losers out there we now not only have folk music, but this movie as well.

True Grit (4/5 Stars)

Papa Ross must have been one hell of a man.

It’s a good thing. Joel and Ethan Coen have now made four movies in as many years. Earlier in their career it always took them two or three years to string together a movie. This was because they always insisted on Creative Control and made movies that never made a lot of money. But that has changed. The word has gotten out that the Coens make good movies. They may be oddball at times but always good. I would suspect that people going to see True Grit (which is the Coens highest grossing movie ever) aren’t going because they fondly remember the original 1969 version or the book it was based upon or even the stars (Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon). I would suspect they are interested because it is a Coen Brothers movie. There are some filmmakers that plain don’t suck. The Coen Brothers are a couple of them.

It is an unwritten rule of the Coens that each movie they do should be unlike any movie they’ve already done. “True Grit” is no exception. It is purely Coenesque in that it isn’t. Get it? It’s an outright Western. It stars Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl out to avenge the death of her father by the hands of an outlaw named Tom Chaney, played by Josh Brolin. She sets out to hire a U.S. Marshall to go after Chaney. Given a list of names, she decides upon the roughest one, a man by the name of Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. He is a man of True Grit, a whiskey guzzling grizzly bearded cantankerous itchy-trigger fingered old fool. A real character as they say. Jeff Bridges, aka The Dude aka the most comfortable actor in the world, is the perfect casting choice for the role. Also on the trail of Chaney for a completely different murder is a Texas Marshall named LeBeef, played by Matt Damon. Damon plays the role as if he's never seen a Western. Here, he’s striking surprised and neurotic nuances that rarely come from cowboys. Then again his character has to deal with Mattie Ross, one of the smartest and most confident girls ever to exist in a western. She’s throwing everyone for a loop here. That includes the bad guys too, both Tom Chaney and the Pepper Gang, led by none other than Mr. Pepper, played appropriately by Barry Pepper with the help of a really nasty set of dentures. Chaney by the way is one of this year’s stupidest sounding bad guys. Brolin plays the guy as if he’s more likely to use a book as toilet paper than read it. He murdered Papa Ross for the stupid sum of two gold pieces. There are no qualms about going to kill him.

“True Grit,” is true to its name in that it has a lot of grit, but let it be known that this movie is also very funny. It’s not a Comedy mind you, but most of the characters are what you would call witty and their different styles make conversation a minefield of quick insults and comedic insights. Cogburn is blunt, abrasive, and clumsy. Mattie is saracastic and a smart-aleck. Damon seems to have self-esteem problems, which regularly pokes holes into his Texas Ranger Pride. They spend most of the time on the trail arguing with each other. Mattie regularly gets the best of Damon. Damon picks on Cogburn. And Cogburn, well he’s got a bottle of whiskey and will not be ashamed.  All of this is done in 19^th Century Western talk, which is different but still decipherable if you listen closely.

Here’s a good question: Is the character Mattie Ross realistic? Forget that she’s a girl. What fourteen year old do you know, boy or girl, can intelligently discuss areas of the law with adults, negotiate deals with horse traders and bounty hunters, or have the confidence and wherewithal to hunt down their father’s killer upon their own initiative. What were you doing at the age of 14? Parents back then must have expected a bit more pluck and self-reliance from their kids, that and Papa Ross in particular must have been one of hell of a educator. Give credit to her church as well. Most of her righteous confidence comes straight from the Bible, which she quotes many times. Anyway, someone somewhere did something right.

“True Grit” isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it is a good one and may get some Oscar nominations simply because it does an extremely competent job at being good. It would not surprise me if the Coen’s longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins got his 9^th Oscar nomination or if the movie itself got a Best Picture nomination. Don’t ask me if this is better than the original movie because I haven’t seen it.

A Serious Man (4/5 Stars), October 11, 2009

Who can say to him, “What are you doing?” (Job 9:12)

Oy vey, the Book of Job gets adapted into a movie by the Coen Brothers. With such source material, it is much funnier than you would think it could be. But this is not a comedy. It’s not even really a drama. And although its got some elements of horror, it can hardly be classified as that either. It’s probably best classified as essay porn (and yes I just made that genre up). It’s a thinker that many religion teachers may someday make their students write a term paper on. Like all Coen Brothers’ movies this one has very little in common with any previous Coen Brothers’ movie. They’ve previously done such works as The Big Lebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Fargo, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading. This movie takes place in a Minnesota suburb in the late sixties. Above all else, it is very Jewish. Like I said nothing like their other movies. But just as quirky, darkly comic, and very original. 

The book of Job was the first book of the Bible I ever read. It always had a scary magnetism to it like a well-written horror story. It is very different from the lovey-dovey New Testament. There is no ‘consider the lillies’ sentimentality in it. In this book terrible things happen to good people and they seem to happen for no reason at all. Job in the course of a day loses his entire fortune, family, and health. Why? He has no idea. He always was a pious god-fearing man. Three friends visit him and insist that he must have done something wrong to deserve his fate. After all God is just. He rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But Job is steadfast. He declares his innocence and voices his desire to obtain an explanation for his sorry state. He doesn’t curse God; all he wants to know is why. Why has God forsaken him?

In this movie, the character of Job is Lawrence Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlberg), a family man and physics professor about to receive tenure. Sure enough, bad things start to happen to Larry. His wife wants a divorce and asks him to leave the house. Why? She doesn’t say. The tenure committee is receiving letters denigrating his moral standing. They are anonymous. His neighbor is oddly hostile and may be encroaching on his property line. His oafish sickly brother (Richard Kind from Spin City) has taken up space permanently on his couch. Then there is marijuana, Jefferson Airplane records, strange deaths, and a daughter who seems to do nothing but wash her hair anymore. Larry is at a loss as to why all these things are suddenly happening. He didn’t do anything. What does it all mean?

A friend says that maybe these things are happening because God is trying to tell him something. What it is she doesn’t know but she suggests that Larry talk to a rabbi. Larry goes to three rabbis. Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg from The Big Bang Theory) seems to be about twenty years old and admits he doesn’t have the kind of life experience that advises a person in Larry’s situation. He does suggest that Larry “consider the parking lot” outside. At times it only looks like a parking lot, but if you look at it a different way and strip yourself of the knowledge of how asphalt and cars work, it can actually look somewhat wonderful and mysterious. In this way Larry can see God in the world. This advice doesn’t go over well, especially since Larry is the kind of physics professor who deals in paradoxes like Shrodinger’s cat and uncertainty proofs. There is a scary/funny scene where Larry fills a giant blackboard with a large complex math proof that proves nothing except that there is no way of knowing anything for certain (it will still be on the midterm though). Such is the annoying thing about God. You can get the best education in the world and not learn a thing about his plans, but steep yourself in ignorance and you can see him in everything, even a parking lot. 

The second Rabbi is not very helpful either. All he does is make jokes. To his credit they are some of the best laughs in the movie. (Did you hear the one about the Goy’s teeth?) But he out and out admits that he hasn’t the slightest clue what God is doing. The way he does it though explains so much about Jewish Comedy. It basically springs from a very human response to a sort of cosmic absurdity: That the people especially chosen by an all-powerful God were fated to be the most put upon and terrorized people in human history. What does that tell you about the nature of God? We laugh because there are no tears left. 

Every person in the movie tells Larry that there is one person he must talk to, and that is Rabbi Marshakt, a very old and wise man. Unfortunately Larry can’t get to the guy, as he is too busy thinking. His son is able to do so though after his bar mitzvah. What the rabbi says to him is worth the great suspense the movie creates for the moment. What it means is something else of course. Is it profound or is it a joke? I suppose it depends on how you feel about the source. 

The Coen Brothers have taken pains not to cast anyone you are remotely familiar with. The only people I recognized were Richard Kind and the delusional nerd from The Big Bang Theory. This gives the movie a very personal and distinct feel to it. There aren’t even any stock Coen Brother actors in this movie. The only person to be in a previous film is Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) and he has but one scene and if I remember correctly no actual lines. It is a very memorable performance nonetheless. 

This movie ranks up their with all the other great Coen Brothers films. It’s not on their top tier with Fargo, The Big Lebowski, or No Country for Old Men. But it is on par with the likes of O Brother Where Art Thou, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Raising Arizona. It may get awards because it happens to be the type of movie that gets nominations. But besides the haunting original score, I can’t say anything in particular jumped out at me. As always Roger Deakins does a superb job as the cinematographer. But unfortunately this isn’t the type of movie that gets noticed for that. His much deserved Oscar will have to wait another year. 

There is one scene that particularly weighs on me as I write this review. One night Larry’s brother goes somewhat nutty and has a breakdown in an abandoned pool at the motel they are both staying at. He denounces God and wails that Hashem has never given him anything. He is especially distressed by his recent blacklist from a neighborhood poker game. All he had in life was playing cards and now he can’t even do that. As bad as Larry’s situation is, it is not as pathetic as his brother’s. Larry, frustrated and confused more than ever just blurts it out: Maybe instead of depending on God, you should help yourself out. What a good question, I mean if God is unknowable why bother with him at all? And perhaps the final scenes are a very cynical answer to that question. 

Burn After Reading 09/15/08

The problem with this comedy is that it doesn't know where its priorities are. Out of the great ensemble within, there is only one purely comic character. His name is Chad and he's a absentminded gym employee played by Brad Pitt. Unfortunately he is the last character introduced and the first one to leave, prematurely at that. As far as I'm concerned, they should have made that guy the main character. He's profoundly more interesting to watch than anybody else. 
There's a bare bones feel to the entire movie. The plot may be original, and yes I haven't seen anything like it, I'll also concede that it has its moments, but it still isn't anything really special. Clocking in at a long hour and a half and ending arbitrarily (some may say lazily) it lacks any real bite or a fever pitch that usually accompanies your average Coen brothers movie. What this movie is, if anything is a weird footnote in the career's of its very accomplished cast. The Coen's have just won the Oscar for best picture, Swinton has just won an Oscar, Clooney has just been nominated, Brad Pitt is a huge star, and Malkovich and McDormand have always been well respected. Put that together with a supporting cast including the likes of J.K. Simmons and Richard Jenkins plus the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and it's a wonder how this movie could be so forgettable.
There are basically two plots that interweave. One features the misplaced memoirs of Osbourne Cox, an ex-CIA man, that falls into the hands of gym employees (McDormand and Pitt) who try to blackmail him. The other plot line has to do with several extra-marital affairs involving Swinton, Clooney, and McDormand. The first plot is consistently funny. The second is completely vacant of laughter and hangs around taking up space, draining away the life of the movie, and wasting time in general. Swinton may be a good dramatic actress but she is completely lost here, not that the script gives her much help. The largest laugh along this story line comes when Clooney is impressed by the white pine floor of McDormand's apartment. It's a random throwaway line that is funny simply because it has no connection with the scene. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. It often doesn't in this movie. There's a complete lack of jokes in some scenes. The cutesy dialogue may garner a giggle, Clooney may mug and gain a snigger but there simply isn't enough material here. And I don't care who's telling a penis joke, the Coen brothers or Rob Schneider, there needs to be some sort of context to it before it becomes funny. Come on Coen brothers, you're better than that. 

No Country for Old Men 12/05/07

I very much want to see this movie again. and I say this because three quarters of the movie was fantastic, and the last quarter was confusing, bewildering, and criminally anti-climatic. The ending was so bad, that I started to question myself: Was it possible that I completely missed the entire point of the movie. It's possible. The Coen brothers are some of my favorite directors, and they have never made a completely worthless movie. Perhaps there was a deeper meaning to this picture, that I missed.
This type of omission has happened before. I remember when I saw 'The Departed' for the first time. I completely misunderstood the woman psychiatrists' role. I kept on expecting her to do different things at different times and was confounded at every turn. When I saw it a second time, her charachter worked perfectly. I wonder if that's what happened here. Next time I hope to pay more attention to what Tommy Lee Jones is saying and hope to not get so caught up in the cat and mouse chase between Llewllen Moss (Josh Brolin) and Chigurh (Javier Bardem). I'll add more to this review if and when I see it a second time.

P.S (added later)
I saw this movie a second time, and it is brilliant. I give my highest recommendation to it, and suggest that people see it twice if they are going to see it at all. The second time everything made sense. My expectations weren't getting in the way of understanding it like they did the first time around.