Hail, Caesar!

The latest film from the Coen Brothers 'Hail, Caesar!' depicts life in the Hollywood studios in the 1950s through the role of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as the head of studio whose job it is to keep everything running smoothly.

The main problem he faces is keeping the Biblical epic ‘Hail, Caesar!’ on track after its star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped by a group of communist script writers (see ‘Trumbo’) known as ‘The Future’, who demand a $100,000 ransom in exchange for his safe return.

Then there’s DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), an actress who becomes pregnant out of wedlock in the middle of her film and there's Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a cowboy actor in Westerns being asked to take over a part in a more serious role, where he really can't cut it.

Meanwhile Mannix is being seduced by a possible new employer, who offers him more money and the chance to be home in time for dinner with his wife every evening. 

Writing about it now the plot sounds like it has promise, so I'm not sure what exactly went wrong because it really didn't seem to work. 'Hail, Caesar!' is a rare thing, a disappointing Coen Brothers film.

For a start there are too many actors and actresses fighting for screen time because there are additional roles for Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton (twice, playing twins), Channing Tatum, Frances McDormand and many others.

The film is part tribute and parody of Hollywood's Golden Age with its many references to the films of that era but it’s an unfocussed one, that will fall flat on most of his audience who do not really go back that far.

In a way it’s the sort of film that Woody Allen would make and that wouldn’t have been for me either. It was probably great fun to make, much less to watch.

The Descendants

We have put this off and put this off because it's George and well, it can't possibly be any good, can it? Eventually we cracked. It's been nominated you know and so has George.

The Descendants is theoretically a film about a land deal because Matt King (George Clooney), a workaholic lawyer in Hawaii, is the sole trustee of a plot of land that has been in his family for ages. He and his cousins have to decide who to sell the untouched land to before the trust becomes dissolved in seven years time or they could of course do the unspeakable and leave it unspoilt.

You can probably guess how that turns out but it’s all a bit incidental really, the deal is just a side show in the film. The main plot centres around King’s thrill seeking wife (because he is so dull) who suffers a serious head injury in a powerboat accident. Now King not only has to deal with a wife in a coma but he’ll have to try to communicate with his daughters as well. Scary.

His youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller), has started to go off the rails and is acting up at school whilst Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) has been off them for some time, moving on to drugs and alcohol. King hops on a plane to bring her back from her boarding school, which is on a different island. Unfortunately, the best bit of the film, where he gets his drunken rambunctious eldest daughter on to the plane and then all the way home is cruelly edited out. All we see is him carrying her up the stairs to her bedroom. Cop out. That could have been good.

Then oddly from struggling as the self-confessed ‘backup parent’ remarkably, twenty minutes or so later, the entire family are getting along like a house on fire.

There are plenty of unbelievable moments like that but also some good bits too. There’s a strong scene where he has to tell Alexandra that her mother isn’t going to make it and according to her living will, they will have to take her off life support. Then Alexandra drops her own bombshell; that her mother was having an affair.

Faced with this knowledge, King does not go off the rails or go off to find the man to punch his lights out, as he would have done in many films. Instead we are asked to believe that yes King would want to track down his wife's lover but only to give the man a chance to say goodbye to his mistress. That may be sweet but it’s also slightly insane. At best, wouldn’t you send him an email?

So the whole family, along with Alexandra's annoying friend Sid (Nick Krause) who thinks her Grandma's Alzheimer's is hilarious, embark on one those road trips that America films are so fond of. Sid’s reason for being there is revealed towards the end, when you’re well sick of him, but even that’s an odd moment, where King seems lost for words or just lost and the moment is, well, lost.

Ultimately nothing really happens. When King finally confronts the man, again it’s all so, well nice. The whole film is like that, so lightweight, inconsequential. It’s another film where I was itching to amend the screenplay. In the end, little of it is really believable. Even his wife's eventual death isn't sad because at no point do we really see her alive nor are we given any indication that she could survive.

I can't help thinking that if someone like Mike Leigh had restaged this in some rundown housing estate in the UK with a bit of ‘kitchen sink realism’ we might have had something.

So is Clooney any good? Is he worthy of his many nominations? Not especially, he’s ok. Clooney does what Clooney does but he's been better.

It’s not a bad film, just nothing to get excited about. It’s got a sort of a RomCom feel to it; only without the Rom or the Com. I ought to say here that my partner loved it but for me... nah.

Burn After Reading

The story to 'Burn After Reading' involves a CIA analyst called Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) who quits his job before he is pushed because of his 'drinking problem'. Thinking his role in intelligence was more important than it actually was, he starts to write his memoirs.

When a CD with it on ends up at Hardbodies gym, he finds himself being blackmailed by two of the gym's employees who believe it to contain sensitive CIA shit, as Brad Pitt puts it. Pitt plays a clueless workout freak called Chad who is egged on by Linda (Frances McDormand). Linda is a wannabe gym bunny, that is once she can get the cash together for the plastic surgery.



When Cox laughs off their bribery attempts, they take the CD to the equally disinterested Russian embassy. The film's a kind of espionage thriller without the espionage, instead the film moves around from one eccentric situation to another in a random manner, as the various story lines are intertwined. As usual, with a Coen's film, you don't get from A to B without going via X, Y and Z.

Brad breaks into Cox's house to try to get more of the 'CIA shit', only Osbourne isn't there but Harry is. George Clooney is Harry, in a role, which seems to send up his own image, a man who just can't stop hopping into bed with different women. For reasons known only to him, he's getting extramarital with Cox's icy wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), a woman with about as much sexual charm as a crocodile. I find Swinton unnerving in this role but then I'm still thinking of her as a boy in Orlando.

When Harry comes across Chad hiding in the wardrobe, he somehow, accidentally, shoots him dead. Harry is already paranoid because someone has been tracking him, he doesn't know it yet but it's a private detective hired by his wife, who, of course, is also cheating on him. Thinking Chad is a spy, he dumps the body in the river.

Harry, traumatised by this and presumably from having to sleep with the reptilian Katie, seeks a bit of light relief and solace in a new bed partner via internet dating. The lucky female turns out to be Linda.



In his spare time between his affairs and a spot of jogging, we see Harry constructing something, which is supposed to be a present for his wife. It turns out to be a mechanical sybian machine. Linda seems very impressed.

Osbourne meanwhile, has to break into his own house with a hatchet because the reptile has started divorce proceedings and has changed the locks. There he comes across someone at his computer. It's Ted (Richard Jenkins), a former Greek Orthodox priest, now boss of Hardbodies, who because he gets a bit of a drool on whenever Linda is around, not that she notices, has decided to help out with the 'CIA shit'. Osbourne's had enough; he shoots Ted and then finishes the job off with the hatchet in the street. So as you can see it's a comedy... well only just and a dark one at that.



Where does all this go? Well, it doesn't go anywhere but brilliantly so. It's a clever film about 'intelligence' colliding with people with no intelligence.

It all finishes a bit suddenly, very Coen like, but unlike a normal Coen's film, we do at least get closure. The loose ends are tidied up and summarised in the offices of CIA, as they try to make sense of the nonsense that has happened.

Two dead bodies and Osbourne himself in a coma after being shot by the real CIA. Harry has been seized trying to board a flight to Venezuela, he fled in terror from Linda when she revealed she was working with Chad, the body in his wardrobe. The CIA understandably very keen for him to catch that flight. Linda, of course, will forget about the whole thing, if they pay for her plastic surgery. Result.

I was a little disappointed at first because the Coen's make some great 'serious' films but their less serious ones have been a bit of a mixed bag and this certainly fits into that category. For anyone else though, this would have been an excellent film.

I reckon they knocked this script up in their lunch hour, had they had a few beers and took the writing on into the evening they could possibly have written the best film of the year but then perhaps they didn't want to knock 'No Country' off the top spot.

It's been criticised for having a lame plot but I think that's the whole point. Perhaps that was the challenge they set themselves. Just how good can we make a movie that doesn't actually go anywhere? Bet they're having a right laugh at the reviews.

Whilst the rest of the movie industry are rehashing the same old stuff or doing pointless remakes and sequels, the Coen's are still coming up with something different. How could anyone object to that?