Review: Hail, Caesar!

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Written by Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring Josh Brolin (Eddie Mannix), George Clooney (Baird Whitlock), and Alden Ehrenreich (Hobie Doyle),

Cinematography by Roger Deakins

Edited by Joel and Ethan Coen

Music by Carter Burwell

*Note, I'm going to discuss later plot elements, shouldn't be anything too spoilery, but if you want to go into your viewing totally clean, don't read this.

Religion, A-bombs, communists, kidnappings, drunken actors, gossip columnists, foul-mouthed actresses, hilariously heavy southern accents, and making movies! Oh my! After what seemed like a long wait after Inside Llewyn Davis, it's only the Coen Brothers' latest, Hail, Caesar! Their newest release is an unstable, yet delectable, cocktail of religious symbolism, political and philosophical discourse, dissection of the 50's studio system, and a playful, but respectful, send-up of the contemporary cinema.

At the center of the sprawling web of stories, conflicts, characters, relationships, and film shoots is Eddie Mannix, played wonderfully by Josh Brolin. Mannix is a "fixer" for Capitol Pictures, a job that mainly involves ensuring that the damaged private lives of the studio's stars don't get leaked to the public so their squeaky clean image can remain untarnished. Eddie's position is a perfect vehicle through which the audience can experience the insanity of the multi-layered story. The Coen Brothers rarely stick to standard narrative structures, and Hail, Caesar! is no exception. The plot hangs very loosely and often feels like a series of semi-related sketches (note this is not a critique). The fixer job is a neat writing trick that allows Eddie to insert himself into different, seemingly-unrelated scenarios, while still maintaining the core thread and themes. He's the straight man, that the other less put-together characters can bounce off of, and Brolin hits every note almost flawlessly. He nails just the right mixture of fifties sheen, comical frustration with the inanity around him, and genuine soul-searching about the direction his life is headed.

The main core of the aforementioned shaggy story involves Capitol Pictures' head star Baird Whitlock, another fine "idiot" performance from George Clooney. During the making of the eponymous film, he's taken hostage. Everything spins out from there as Mannix tries to ensure Whitlock's safe return and ends up  coming into contact with starlet Deeana Moran (Scarlet Johansson), tap-dancing sensation Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), aw-shucks cowboy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich in a breakout performance), and politely uptight British film director Lawrence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes).

Eventually it is revealed that Baird has been kidnapped by communists! (bum bum buuummmm!), specifically a cell of the CPUSA composed of Hollywood script writers. Taking a detour for a moment, and speaking as someone who has haunted Marxist circles, the Coens' portrayal of that type of intellectual is actually fairly accurate. They even successfully replicate the specific lingo those groups drape themselves in. I'm guessing the two brothers were either lectured by a radical professor or had an excitable roommate/friend who was really into Das Kapital. Although, one major bit they get wrong is that one of the reds correlates to Herbert Marcuse, a thinker active in the 60's who was one of the major inspirations for the New Left. Marcuse's main focus was on the crippling effects modern consumer capitalism had on the ability of the working class and society in general to rebel and think critically. He was equally condemnatory of the repressive atmosphere of the "socialist" states of Eastern Europe. Furthermore, he was never a member of the American Communist Party, which by the 50's had nothing liberatory or emancipatory about it and had been a bureaucratic arm of the Soviet Union's foreign policy for decades.

But I digress, back at the pinkos' beachfront hideaway in Malibu, there is much talk about capitalism, dialectics, contradiction, economics, the body-politic, and The New Man. George Clooney's reaction to all of this is humorously blasé. When he first wakes up after being kidnapped, he immediately assumes that he just blacked out from a bender gone wrong, and 100% accepts what he's being told by his new friends after about oh... five minutes (he quickly returns to his standard blankness after Mannix slaps him and delivers the best line of the film: "If the picture has worth and you serve the picture, then you have worth"). The socialists' plan is ultimately revealed to be entirely spineless and ineffectual. This brings in one of the central themes of the film, and the Coens' oeuvre in general. That any plans you make and any larger changes you hope to enact, will always fail, both due to your own mistakes and quirks of the universe. Applying this to world of filmmaking is aces, and has been successfully mined by the Brothers before, albeit tangentially, in Barton Fink. The brief peaks we get at the different studio sessions all serve as examples of Murphy's Law. The star can't remember his lines, the starlet is pregnant, the dancer is gay, the cowboy can't pronounce his lines, the editor gets her scarf stuck in the projector, and the celluloid ends up burned. The image does not match reality. While this makes for some satisfying riffing and ribbing, it leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. That the good guys are those who don't ask too many questions, go along with the flow, and trust their guts (i.e. Hobie and eventually Mannix). To me, this is a conservative message, but I'll stipulate that I'm not certain that this is indeed what is being said. In addition, I would like to watch the film again and hear counter-arguments to my own, before definitively making up my min.

A few last thoughts before I wrap-up. Hail, Caesar! is rife with internal repression. Every player is hiding some type of secret or subordinating an inner desire in order to better serve the studio. An actual engagement with the real-life Marcuse's ideas would have been highly appropriate here. Particularly how mass culture can paralyze our capacity to discover our own thoughts, wants, and needs. I'm worried that, so far, I haven't given a good impression of how funny the whole picture is. The Coens will stop everything in order to deliver some clever wordplay or absurd joke. Like when they take a five minute break so Hobie can fumble his way through pronouncing "Were that (t)were so simple". Finally, Deakins does a stand out job (as he always does) of replicating the softness and color of the cinematography of the period, without over-doing it.

Review: Premium Rush

Directed by David Koep

Written by David Koep and John Kamps

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Wilee), Dania Ramirez (Vanessa), Jamie Chung (Nima), and Michael Shannon (Bobby Monday)

Cinematography by Mitchell Amundsen

Edited by Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt

On the surface, Premium Rush sounds like it should be fun time. Hardcore bike couriers, corrupt cops, a twisty crime saga. Unfortunately, there are multiple ways to craft the same story, and David Koep chooses the least engaging way to tell this one. It's a relatively serious action movie, with a little bit of (half-hearted) humor thrown in. What makes this outcome doubly frustrating is that there is a good film buried somewhere in Premium Rush. Part of the problem is that it tries to be multiple movies at once. The fun parts are the ones that tease at a Hot Fuzz-esque parody of extreme sports flicks. The moments that best represent this trend are the scenes of Wilee's "accident vision" where time slows down, he pictures the multiple paths he can take while riding his bicycle through New York City, and predicts that possible pileups that await him.

But the heightened, cartoonish tone is not maintained outside of those sequences. As a result, Gordon-Levitt's character absolutely tanks. If a more a satirical, over-the-top attitude had been consistently applied throughout the entirety of the film, Wilee's demeanor would have been a bit easier to take. As is, he comes off as an absolute douchebag. He rides a fixed-gear bike with no brakes, knowing that it will put pedestrians and motorists in more danger, just to get an adrenaline fix. It's extremely rare in my movie watching that I care more for random passersby's than the main character, but that's how I felt during Rush. I winced every time someone almost got hit or run into due to Wilee's stupid, entirely unnecessary antics, a reaction I can't say I experienced towards Wilee himself. That bike couriers' are presented as having an authentic, serious hardass culture that somehow places them above everyone else, only makes matters worse.

This points to another issue, because a singular tone is not kept up, the style and story ends up waffling and becomes unsatisfying. Neither the comedic nor dramatics beats hit correctly as a result, and the main plot is damaged badly by the inconsistency. A friend of Wilee's and Vanessa's (Nima) contracts their bike service to deliver a package to Chinatown. Eventually it is revealed that the parcel contains an immigration pass that Nima has worked extremely hard for in order to bring her child to America from an undefined Asian country. The plot line feels more befitting of a middlebrow/Oscar-bait picture. Alongside the comedic and action elements, it appears entirely shoe-horned in. Like the creators realized they didn't have much going on up on the screen, and tried to awkwardly fit in a sincere story in order to cynically manipulate a little pathos out of the audience. Same goes for Shannon's dick cop character, Bobby Monday. He should be a delicious, hammy villain, but Shannon doesn't quite go far enough for his portrayal to be memorable. Finally, like Nima's arc, Monday's fate is a little too gruesome for the rest of the picture, and causes everything to end on an unpleasant note.

Certain moments of Premium Rush make for an enjoyable, entertaining viewing experience. However, they are dragged down by a mistaken approach and the poor-fit of the dominant narrative.

Returning from a long absence

Well I've been away from the blog for about a year. I was reviewing films I saw through streaming and rental service, and in theater, pretty regularly (hopefully steadily improving at it as well). The last two things I wrote were a review of The Homesman and a jokey description of Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time. 

The majority of this blog was written between finishing college and finding my first job, so I had a great deal of free time that made it easy and enjoyable for me to watch, read, and write about a wide variety of films. After I attained gainful employment, it was far harder to find the space to keep up with cinema at the level I was accustomed to. It became a huge drain on my energy having to view so many films, and write about them as well, while going to work every day.

That's one of the main reason my blogging dropped off so precipitously. The other reason is that my interest in film waned. I started to get the sense that I had already seen everything there was to see, and it became rarer and rarer that I got that jolt of recognizing an amazing picture. Looking back, this was a foolish feeling, since just a few months after I stopped I saw Mad Max: Fury Road, which hit me in that way only a good movie can.

As my curiosity about celluloid flagged, I became more engaged with following politics, news, and history. Mainly I was concerned with learning about/keeping up with mass, working class-based social and labor movements. I also became involved in activism around workers' and tenants' rights. This activity was fun for a while, but was extremely stressful and strenuous to engage in. The same burnout I experienced with film culture has hit me with politics, so I'm going to take a break from that area and try my hand at media criticism once again. I would like to think that I'll be able to add a substantive political analysis from a progressive/leftist perspective to my writing now too.

From here on out, I'm mainly going to be focused on doing basic reviews of movies I happen to see. These will be both older and newer, since my main avenue for watching these things is through streaming services, and I plan an drastically increasing the number of theater screenings I attend. Eventually, I hope to do a series on Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: An Oddyssey, where I'll analyze all of the films that appear in the series while also doing an overview of each episode. I've gone through the entirety of the show before, but I would like to check it out again with the additional knowledge of having seen and analyzed all of the flicks that are brought up. I went through the most recent British Film Institute's Top Fifty Greatest Films about two years ago, and luckily, there are many films that appear on both lists, so I'll be able to cannibalize some of my work that was never posted here.

Anyway, cheers, looking forward to getting back into things again.