![]() ![]() Their star had well and truly risen beyond expectation, and the brothers began their risky entry into the bizarre with cult film “The Big Lebowski” (1998), and although it originally divided critics, it’s considered among the greatest cult films of all time. However, their next film “Fargo” (1997) became a 90s classic, receiving a 4/4 from Roger Ebert and 94 percent “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes it also received the Oscar for Best Actress for Joel’s wife, actress Frances McDormand, and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Joel and Ethan. “Miller’s Crossing” (1990) was their first period piece on prohibition mobsters and was considered their first masterpiece, whilst Barton Fink (1991) was their arthouse flick, and their first and only film to nab all three coveted accolades from the Cannes Film Festival (actor, director and Palm d’Or), giving them their first brushes with Hollywood limelight.Īs their confidence grew, the brothers made “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994), their first family friendly work, and it became their first film to lack critical acclaim. Joel and Ethan’s legendary career in film has garnered 13 Oscar nominations for the pair and four wins.Ĭlassified as “genre-busters”, their earliest work “Blood Simple” (1984) was a small-scale messy neo-noir crime flick that set the tone for later crime-gone-wrong flicks, while their second film “Raising Arizona” (1987), a slapstick screwball comedy about a redneck couple who kidnaps one of their town’s famous quadruplets, is completely different from their first film. Their mother, Rena, was an art historian and their father, Edward, was an economist. I guess the Coen brothers found something amusing in all of it, but I couldn’t help feeling I wasn’t in on the joke.Joel David Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Jewish parents. Does Hail, Caesar! have anything new or interesting to say about the movie business? About politics? About faith? I came up with nothing. The rest is cameos (despite star billing, they’re really cameos) and filler. At one point I was wondering just how much real story there was in this film. Studio fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has to somehow keep everything going. Tying all this together is a flimsy plot full of in-jokes that has star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) being kidnapped by a society of communist screenwriters. ![]() I don’t think any of the others even qualifies as droll. None of these has any authentic period feel (they are twenty-first century parodies), and the only slightly amusing one has Ralph Fiennes trying to teach a cowboy actor (Alden Ehrenreich) how to say his lines. There are a bunch of skits to go along with the filming of a biblical epic, some aquatic follies, a Western, a sophisticated drawing-room drama, and a musical. Does going from Billy Wilder to this count as progress? Or going from Barton Fink to this? And heaven knows the film biz has been sent up countless times before. It’s a comedy but there’s nothing at all funny going on. But I have no idea why the Coen brothers made this movie at this point in their careers. The photography by Roger Deakins is sensational in a glossy, artificial manner, and the cast is polished to the point where they even manage to inject subtlety into what are caricatures. ![]() I didn’t hate Hail, Caesar! It’s a very hard movie to hate. Since critics are part of the same perpetual circle jerk, they mostly climbed on board as well. It’s a love letter to Hollywood’s ever-golden age, and there’s nothing Hollywood loves as much as it loves loving itself. I would never want to deny that Joel and Ethan Coen are a pair of talented filmmakers, and they work with some of the best in the business, but doesn’t that make a bit of fluff like Hail, Caesar! even worse? What the hell was the point of this movie? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |