To my Josh Brolin fans, here is a new fanfic that I’ve had cooped up in my files and have never posted it. I finished it over a year ago and it took me ages to get it proof read as it’s at least over 7000 words long! To anyone that is a fan of Eddie Mannix, Eric Marsh, Llewelyn Moss, “Bigfoot” Bjornsen or Matt Graver, here’s the fanfic for you. If you are under 18, please skip this post, if you are 18 and over, then please continue and read: HERE
Dead Pool ----B+, Not a fan of the obnoxious anti-hero but I like that he likes his work. I liked how much Reynold’s ass was seen (compared to how much lady ass is camera front in another billion movies) but the featured Xmen were my favorites. lots of scenes made me cringe but I didn’t get bored.
Hail, Casear!----B-, The grade is generous because while it did a lot of good in most aspects, I don’t think I can recommend it to other people or watch it many more times but it was a nice throwback to Golden Age Hollywood. At worst all the characters were very flat- at best, gorgeous cinematography.
Episode #016 is now available here or via your podcatcher of choice!
Our cinematic matchup of Coen brothers past and present continues as we get deeper into the connections between 1991's BARTON FINK and the new HAIL, CAESAR! In this half of the discussion, we get into the films' shared lineage as "movies about movies," and try to home in on what exactly gives both films "that Coen Brothers feeling." Plus, Your Next Picture show, where we share recent filmgoing experiences in hopes of putting something new on your cinematic radar.
Please share your comments, thoughts, and questions about BARTON FINK, HAIL, CAESAR!, or both by sending an email to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730.
Hail Ceaser currently stands as one of those Coen Brothers films you can’t put your finger over, and trust me, their are a lot of them. Josh Brolin plays eddie Maxxix, a real life Hollywood fixer who protects stars and the studio that employs them from getting caught in embarrassing mishaps. When famous Kirk Douglas-esque actor Baird Whitlock is kidnapped by a mysterious group called The Future, he must race to the clock to pay a heft ransom to get him back. Actually , that’s not true, he really doesn’t, in fact the trailers were basically exaggerating. Hail Ceaser comes off as a sort of noir-genre throwback in it’s advertising, But the movie, like many other coens bros comedies, seems to go nowhere. it seems like the plot doesn’t really get go going until the third act, in fact it’s barely a mystery, despite being set up as one, but more of random events happening left and right, and characters never push the plot forward, the plot just happens. There’s a subplot involving Scarlett Johanson that goes nowhere, and a twist with Channing Tatum that doesn’t feel like a twist, but more of a out of place twist for the sake having a a twist.
“Hail, Caesar!” is a raging disappointment. If you haven’t already been turned off from going to see the newest movie from the Coen Brothers because of their comments about diversity in movies where they equated PoC to martians, let this review be the final gong to tell you to not see this movie.
(For what it’s worth, this review contains spoilers.)
Let’s start with the differences between the plot that the trailers present versus the actual plot of the movie.
The best of the trailers promise a madcap action comedy set in late1940′s-early 1950′s Hollywood, where a studio fixer (Josh Brolin) gets together a bunch of actors to rescue one of their own (George Clooney) who has been kidnapped.
What you get? Well... there is a kidnapping as the inciting action. And Josh Brolin’s character does interact with studio actors involved in various escapades ranging from getting their pictures taken outside of their contract to being pregnant and with the father unknown and out of the picture. And, of course, dealing with the ransom of the kidnapped George Clooney.
Honestly? The Coen bros wasted not one, but three good plots in one movie because they couldn’t decide if they wanted their movie to vilify Communism to show how good Capitalism is, to be be a madcap comedy about how Hollywood was run while under the Studio System, to be a madcap action comedy about the kidnapping of a Hollywood star, or to be a christian allegory with Josh Brolin’s character as the sacrificial christ figure. They tried to do all four of these things without actually ever committing to any of them, leaving the movie to be an unfocused train wreck with a barely strung together plot.
Major props should be given to the casting director, because this movie ended up with an all star cast. An all star cast that the Coen brothers barely used, but an all star cast nonetheless. The two characters that take up a bulk of the screen time are Josh Brolin’s studio fixer, Eddie Mannix, and George Clooney’s kidnapped big star, Baird Whitlock. Both characters are very effective at what their main traits are: the competent one sane man, and the ditzy sheltered movie star respectively. They are also two of the only characters who, if you cut out their scenes, would radically alter the movie.
The other character who, if cut out, would alter the movie is Alden Ehrenreich’s Hobie Doyle, a western star who speaks like he just came out of backwoods Appalachia and is probably the smartest character in the whole picture. It is Hobie that gives Mannix the idea to look at the extras for suspects in Whitlock’s kidnapping, and, later in the movie, Hobie is the one who retrieves Whitlock from the house where he was being kept. Granted, we never see Mannix taking Hobie’s advice, though we are given the after effects of it, since Mannix is given the information about who dosed up Whitlock so he could be kidnapped. There are only two somewhat unneeded scenes that Hobie is in. the first is a rather amusing sequence between Hobie and snobbish directer Laurentz (Ralph Fines) over the line “would that i’ t’were so simple” vs. “Would that it were so simple” (they eventually settled on “It’s complicated). It went on a little bit too long. The other scene was finding out that his perfect teeth are the product of a full set of top dentures... that he took out while having dinner with a fellow niche movie star in a fancy restaurant.
All the other characters, Scarlet Johansson’s Esther Williams-esqe Aquacade star Deeanna Moran; Tilda Swinton’s twin gossip reporters Thora and Thessaly Thacker; Channing Tatum’s Musical comedy star Burt Gurney; Ralph Finnes’ director Laurence Laurentz; Frances McDormand’s film editor C. C. Calhoun; and Jonah Hill’s everyman lawyer Joseph Silverman, are all, essentially, window dressing. Any of them could have been cut from the movie and the overall plot, what little of it was coherent, would not have been altered one bit, aside from giving Josh Brolin one less thing to deal with.
With that list of characters, the two that featured prominently in the trailers were Channing Tatum and ScarJo. What’s interesting is that Tatum’s Gurney is supposed to be the movie’s triple threat big bad: he sings, he dances, he’s –gasp! shock! horror!– the leader of the secret Communist Cabal that kidnapped Whitlock. But he gets little to no lines until the very end of the movie when it’s revealed that it is his home that Whitlock is being kept in. At the same time, he is barely even a two-dimensional character, a set piece because there needed to be someone at the hidden forefront of the cabal.
ScarJo’s character had absolutely nothing to do with the kidnapped plot. She is there simply to be a problem that Mannix has to solve. In her case it’s a baby plot. Deeanna Moran is pregnant and the father is no where to be seen, so Mannix needs to come up with a scheme so that she doesn’t look anything less than wholesome to the public. By the end of the film, Deeanna marries Hill’s character at 3 am, who is the only one who is even less relevant to the rest of the movie, after having one dinner together. You can see my eye roll from space.
Ultimately, I spent the entirety of the hour and forty minuets of this movie feeling deeply uncomfortable, broken with the occasional tension breaking giggle. I don’t know what other people expect out of a movie, but I expect to come out of a movie feeling good, not feeling like I need to have a brain bleach shower.
Check out Hail, Ceaser, it’s a great commentary on the long lasting state of the Film Industry. The kiss to classical Hollywood is a great concept,too.
Malayalam Film 'Ottaal' Selected In Competition At Berlinale 2016!
0SHARESshare on facebookshare on twitter Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair’s film Ottaal, has been selected in competition for the Generation Kplus section at the Berlinale. Ottaal is a part of the 13 films that will compete for the Crystal Bears and Jury prizes in this category. This is the 2nd Indian film to be selected at the Berlinale, along with Nagaraj manjule’s Sairat, which…
Malayalam Film ‘Ottaal’ Selected In Competition At Berlinale 2016! was originally published on Jamuura Blog
