Hail, Caesar! (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2016)

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Dylan
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#51 Post by Dylan » Sat Feb 06, 2016 11:51 pm

Eddie Muller, the president of the Film Noir Foundation, wrote this on his Facebook:
Also, was it just my screening, or did the usually flawless work of Roger Deakins look like a non-color-corrected answer print?
That definitely speaks to what was discussed above in regards to the color in the trailer. I haven't seen Hail, Caesar!, but after reading Muller's comments I'm going to assume the "off" looking colors of the trailer are actually how the film's supposed to look, good or bad.

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Ribs
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#52 Post by Ribs » Sun Feb 07, 2016 12:27 am

The scene in the trailer of them watching the cosutme drama in the theater does not occur in the movie - when we do see clips of the actual film, it is in 4:3 and B/W.

The scene in the theater is actually showing a technicolor western in (I believe) 1.85:1. FWIW, I believe the actual Hail, Caesar! film-within-the-film is 1.66:1 as well but I don't recall exactly.

I thought the period-technicolor-y look most of the studio-bound stuff had was extraordinary but I'm not an expert.

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lacritfan
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#53 Post by lacritfan » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:26 am

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Anyone else notice the plot of the movie within the movie is similar to the upcoming Risen?

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Jeff
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#54 Post by Jeff » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:47 am

lacritfan wrote:
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Anyone else notice the plot of the movie within the movie is similar to the upcoming Risen?
I think the plot was mostly lifted from The Robe.

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captveg
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#55 Post by captveg » Sun Feb 07, 2016 1:48 am

The scene at the well is almost directly from Ben-Hur

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hearthesilence
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#56 Post by hearthesilence » Sun Feb 07, 2016 9:26 am

Forgot to mention, the rabbi (Robert Picardo) steals the show. Absolutely hilarious.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#57 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Feb 08, 2016 2:13 pm

As far as understanding the look of the cinematography, the Coens clearly intend the entire film to be seen as something that could have been produced in the 50s.
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For example, the submarine sequence, although ostensibly occurring for real off the coast of Malibu, uses vintage-style minatures that look straight out of a 50s-era naval film or George Pal production
The film is more charming than the Coens are usually known to be. The performances are grand but the script is more clever than funny. As is usual with the brothers, there appears to be a more serious theme that rests under all the frivolity:
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The absence/unknowable nature of God and how that vacuum inspires individuals to invest themselves in ego-serving ideologies...or something like that!

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#58 Post by beamish13 » Mon Feb 08, 2016 5:55 pm

I thought it was pretty hysterical. A few parts didn't entirely gel, but I think reviewing it again will reveal more layers to it.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#59 Post by TheDudeAbides » Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:57 pm

movielocke wrote:I love the look tone and style of this. Is Ralph Fiennes playing a riff on minnelli or cukor?
Saw the movie the other night, and I think he was supposed to be a combination of the two. He was definitely Cukor but I'm thinking he was also inspired by Minnelli. Name wise Curtiz came to mind; his name is Laurenz and doesn't like to be called 'Lawrence' which seemed to me like Curtiz, who I imagine was probably referred to as 'Curtis' a fair bit instead of the more correct English pronunciation KER-tees

I'm not sure though if the director of Channing Tatum film, which was pretty much on On the Town, was supposed to be Billy Wilder. It felt like Wilder to me, but I'm not too sure.

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Luke M
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#60 Post by Luke M » Sat Feb 13, 2016 12:52 am

I saw this today and the more I think about it the more I enjoy it. As Roger Ryan puts it, it's a charming film. I had a bit of a challenge putting all the pieces together while I was watching it so I think it would hold up better on repeat viewings. I'd say as the Coens go it's mid-tier.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#61 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Feb 13, 2016 1:34 am

After being concerned that this would be another ensemble mess a la Burn After Reading, I was very relieved that I loved this film, and that it is largely peerless in being the sort of movie entirely created for the sort of people who tirelessly participate in the list projects here. Few of the very inside baseball old Hollywood jokes fall flat, and while there are a lot of delightful performances (Channing Tatum's musical number is great and Scarlett Johansson is hilarious), Alden Ehrenreich is revelatory and deserves award consideration if only anyone were able to have a memory extending beyond the final three months of any given year.

I hope the particularly classic film obsessed set of this forum gets out to see this one - I am absolutely not surprised that it isn't doing well in the mainstream and find anyone who snoozes through it absolutely justified in doing so - but if you click with what the Coens are doing here, there is a ton to like.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#62 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Feb 18, 2016 5:57 pm

A lot of fun -- and a rare film that I would perhaps enjoy even more with copious "annotations".

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#63 Post by Tuco » Fri Feb 26, 2016 2:35 am

Aside from the allusions to various real-life Hollywood folks (Loretta Young, Minnelli/Cukor, Hedda Hopper, etc.), I loved the direct visual echoes. The opening with Mannix seems to be an almost shot for shot recreation of a scene from THE BIG SLEEP; the Malibu house is straight out of MILDRED PIERCE (and a later shot looks like the house from NORTH BY NORTHWEST), and of course the BEN HUR reference. I'm sure I missed others - I was too busy laughing. Minor Coen Bros. admittedly, but a helluva lot of fun.

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JamesF
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#64 Post by JamesF » Mon Mar 14, 2016 11:50 am

hearthesilence wrote:Forgot to mention, the rabbi (Robert Picardo) steals the show. Absolutely hilarious.
Picardo might have been my favourite too, along with Robert Trebor from 52 Pick-Up, who I haven't seen in anything for ages. And, as a friend pointed out, hilarious to see both Connor McLeod and The Kurgan in the same film again, even if they weren't in the same scene - just a coincidence, or are the Coens closet Highlander fans?
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Also notable to see Dolph Lundgren was ultimately uncredited for his silent, silhouetted cameo - if you knew it was him, there was no mistaking him!

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domino harvey
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#65 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jun 16, 2016 11:50 am

Ribs wrote:The scene in the theater is actually showing a technicolor western in (I believe) 1.85:1. FWIW, I believe the actual Hail, Caesar! film-within-the-film is 1.66:1 as well but I don't recall exactly.
All of the widescreen films we see are VistaVision, they even use the logo in the Lazy Ol' Moon opening credits. If the fake studio of the film is a mishmash of all the working studios of the era (mainly MGM), in terms of filmstock they're clearly Paramount.

I’ve criticized others for ragging on films that try to recapture antiquated Hollywood style like the Good German and the Artist for coming to it from an “Oh yeah?” perspective, so I’ll try not to indulge too much in that direction myself here, but I thought this was a total failure as a movie, not just because it was consistently anachronistic and eager to make obvious Freshman Studio System 101 references but because it did nothing with its component parts. The Coens are often accused of being inert in their cuteness, but this might be their most empty film yet. Lots of name brand and reliable bit players pop up for a scene or two, but to what ends? So many questions I guess I’m not supposed to ask here… Why cast Alison Pill as the braindead “Whatever you say, you’re the man” housewife who has one scene solely to establish a tired cliche about the period? Why does it matter that the filmmakers are referencing Carmen Miranda or Esther Williams or the studio’s stronghold on a star’s image when none of these things matter within the film we’re given? Take the date between the Miranda figure and the Will Rogers/Gene Autry-stand-in: this is the only time in the movie in which characters behave recognizably human, and the sincerity of the Miranda-stand-in’s enjoyment on the date and the Autry figure’s aww-shucks separation from the whole thing is so at-odds with the rest of the overly self-aware proceedings that I both enjoyed it and am still forced to admit it doesn’t work within the context of the film. Whatever the hell that even is. But I guess the film's appeal is supposed to be found in moments like the mediocre wannabe Gene Kelly-aping number, here zapped of all life or energy (and kudos to the great observation upthread about Tatum and co’s lacking utilization of set space and frame) and punchlined with an odious series of gay jokes that are beyond anachronistic and straight up antagonistic towards the genre-- like, wow, that is just toooooo funnnnnnny.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#66 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:16 pm

I wholeheartedly agree with Dom's assessment here. I think it is the most flaccid and vacuous Coen film to date even surpassing the lamentable Ladykillers remake. Maybe my over-reaction has been due to the zip and promise of the trailer (surely there are alternative takes in there or is it merely that the sclerotic nature of the narrative has sucked the blood out of the paired down sequences? ). Finally the whole sorry mess fizzles out with the overblown submerging visual gag.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#67 Post by Werewolf by Night » Thu Jun 16, 2016 4:10 pm

I think you and I have pretty divergent taste in movies, domino, but I co-sign 100% with everything you say here. I actually apologized (twice!) to the person who watched it with me. Odd how the Coens almost invariably follow up their best films with unbearable and unfunny comedies: Fargo/Lebowski (sorry fans), The Man Who Wasn't There/The Ladykillers, No Country/Burn After Reading, and Llewyn Davis/this.

I read somewhere (can't remember now) that Deakins expected to shoot this digitally but decided to use film only to find himself really restricted in the look of the film by the paucity of available stocks. I was expecting a nice simulacrum of Technicolor, but everything's awash in this pissy gold tone.

I did like Alden Ehrenreich in this, though. The only person not giving an arch performance. I expect great things from him in the future. George Clooney can retire any time now, though.

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feihong
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#68 Post by feihong » Thu Jun 16, 2016 6:23 pm

Having seen the film this last weekend, I find I'm still trying to process my various disappointments. The biggest surprise is that the Coen brothers, presumably film buffs of some stripe, are so unconcerned with the details of the studio system in the era of...what era, again? It seems to be set in the 50s, but some of the pictures and the characters represented seem to come from the 30s and 40s. Besides the anachronisms throughout––most of which come across very jarring––there were many strange omissions. Where is the director of the The Robe/Ben Hur–style picture? I think he might have appeared once, but I can't recall the character. This could have been the opportunity for us to meet a Cecil B. Demille–type character, pious and lip–smackingly lascivious all at once––or even, playing against type, a journeyman director, unimpressed with all the grandeur he's committing to screen. For all the time we spent on studio sets, it's alarming how unreal most of the production details seen in Hail, Caesar! seemed. The dance sequences and shootouts are cut as if they are being performed as single–takes, yet they are in fact a mishmash of angles and different setups. Crew people hardly seem present during these "shoots," performing any of their normal functions––except on occasion to stand behind lights with the faint glimmer of a tear in one eye. There is apparently no mogul behind Capitol Pictures, no Louis B. Mayer or Irving Thalberg. When Mannix drops in to the editing room to watch dailies, they already have the titles on–screen (and the titles are laid over scene action, as well, which still was hardly common in the 50s). There were a lot of lost opportunities in the film as well. When the Gene Autry stand-in Hobie does his western bit, shooting extras left and right, the scene is shown as we would see it in the movie theater, and it seems to me it would have been far grander and more fun if the scene was filled with backstage revelations of how such scenes were made. It seems to me that the film, which is essentially about the labor of making films, would have benefitted from a gaze that saw all the parts of production––but the Coen brothers instead opt to have us immersed in the scenes being made, rather than the making of the scenes. In other ways, the Coen brothers exhibit a crisis of focus. The date between Hobie and Carlotta was the highlight of the picture: it was genuinely warm and funny, and probably the only point in the picture where I found myself laughing, really––but what comment it is meant to be implying about pro forma socializing in Hollywood is patently unclear. Generally the studios would set up their gay, lesbian or bisexual stars with dates this way––Randolph Scott and Cary Grant had dates hired for them by their studio in order to stop them attending premieres together. But that doesn't seem to be what's going on when Hobie and Carlotta attend the premiere together. It almost seems as if they are developing genuine romantic chemistry, prompted by studio control. The film seems to often be suggesting that the studio––and its agent, Eddie Mannix––really do know best, and that following Mannix's lead will eventually work out best for everyone. Mannix matched up Hobie and Carlotta, after all; he must really know what he's doing.

In that vein, there were some really disturbing creative decisions, which by and large left a sour taste in my mouth. The choice to portray the Hollywood Ten as the inept patsies of a genuine "red" conspiracy felt very insulting, and it seems to me a very alarming stance for the Coen brothers to take. These characters represent disgruntled writers looking for profit participation, on the verge of unionizing––and the Coen brothers seem to be implying that they are patent idiots, chasing a pipe dream. The implication is that their goal––a reasonable one that many leftist and non-leftist writers in Hollywood fought hard over many years to win for their guild––is foolish and insubstantial. But the Coen brothers carry this further, implying that their desire for profit participation is the result of prompting by a red agent–provocateur. It's kind of an incredible stance to take––a very unorthodox view of communism in Hollywood. It's almost as if the Coen brothers thought that the blacklist was somehow justified.

That might have been the worst feeling I got from the movie, but a close second was the miserably reductive whitewashing of Eddie Mannix himself, changing the fabled fixer from the hard-boiled, abusive tough-guy who cleaned up after other peoples indiscretions into some sort of salt-of-the-earth figure; the calm, solid paterfamilias, corralling a room full of empty-headed nitwits and flighty goofballs. The You Must Remember This podcast does a very nice episode on Eddie Mannix, revealing the much more complicated character behind the man, and it would have been far more interesting to get a sense of the real guy on screen. Mannix was not the stuff of dreams himself––in fact he was a man who felt justified in his own brutality and pragmatism. He was always rumored to have mob connections, and he had a very complicated and somewhat suspicious role in the life and death of George Reeves. But he must have been as enraptured by movie glamour as some of the most dedicated cinema-goers, and this movie really fails to bring across the contradictory character of the person on the one hand entranced with a dream world and on the other dealing constantly with the most unvarnished realities of the industry. Mannix in this film is never fooled by movie–magic. It is pretense, and he is a manly man, here to slap the frippery and obstreperousness out of the childlike picture stars, who, with Clooney's Baird Whitlock as a representative––a weird cocktail of Clark Gable and Charlton Heston––are lost in self-deluding fantasy. What's more, the film treats Mannix like the boss of the studio; he wanders the lots, trailed by a secretary, talking up his daily itinerary. He has stars called to his office, where they sit deferentially and act tremendously polite while he tells them how it's gonna be. He takes his orders directly from Nicholas Schenck in New York, as if the job of sweeping up the studio's dirty secrets was one handled primarily through the most official channels. Mannix appears to have no superior on the lot, and there is no readily identifiable adult on hand to call any of his calls into question. This movie Mannix is pious, a good father and a good husband, whose only crime is loving his job a little too much, working just a little too hard. His wife is like Jocelyn Brando in The Big Heat, too "father knows best" to be real. Mannix's real wife at the time was carrying on a less-and-less reciprocated affair with George Reeves, while Mannix had his own lover. The "stoic, sensible wife and the hard-working guy who loves his job" setup presented in the movie is just purposely disingenuous. Would our sympathy for Eddie Mannix have been dashed if he had as complicated a home life as he really had? Do we really have any sympathy for the Mannix character to lose?

It does a real disservice to the history of the Hollywood "fixer" to be reduced to this studio functionary, tidily cleaning up little messes and peccadillos of a child-like stable of stars. But it also makes for a dramatically inert movie. None of the problems Mannix handles rise to the level of what the real movie stars got up to in their day. The Esther Williams character's adoption gets wound up with absurd tidiness, before it ever rises to any level of threat or even hysteria. Even the kidnapping refuses to wind up into anything––Baird Whitlock's bender of indoctrination has no more level of danger to accompany it than Baird Whitlock's alcoholic benders, presumably. It is resolved with a simple drive up to Malibu, which in movie terms hardly stirs the blood. The movie has made such an emphasis of Hobie's casual can-do spirit and his conviction and grit; it's a shame that Hobie can't be afforded some way of proving his valor besides giving Baird a lift home. Nothing in the movie amounts to this level of excitement, however, and the hyped-up musical numbers in the film come off as amateurish and uninspired.

There is a point near the end of the movie where Mannix nearly falls apart in the confessional, grousing about how hard his job can sometimes be. But we never feel the stress of the job in this film. Which problem that he faces seems too hard to handle? The general smoothness of Hail, Caesar!, and the sense that movie-magic can dispel problems on any studio set makes it so that Mannix glides through the film, unchallenged at every turn, and Mannix never meets an adversary that is really his match. The Coen brothers have been frequently unable to develop compelling, consistent through-lines for their principle characters––most of their films are comprised of scenes that exist as self-contained setups for humor and mayhem, eye-catching routines that make the protagonist's journey a very secondary motif. But they also persist in casting a particular kind of lead actor that contributes to this problem, and they've done so here. George Clooney is the best example of this kind of actor––a guy with adroit comic timing, but who often has a lot of trouble holding audience sympathies and underwriting character with an inner life over the course of a 2-hour film. Josh Brolin is an actor who often demonstrates some of the same problems. These are actors predominantly successful at presenting a surface, but chronically blocked from revealing hidden emotional depth. An apt comparison would be to Nicholas Cage in his Bad Lieutenant remake. Even though that picture is built upon increasingly zany set-piece scenes, it's interesting to compare the way Cage almost effortlessly conveys the sense of events spiraling out of his control with the way Brolin fails to do so in Hail, Caesar! It feels as if Brolin lacks the necessary gravitas to make Mannix a necessary or relatable figure, whereas Cage can hardly help but reveal the underlying insecurities of his "bad lieutenant." Nothing really penetrates Brolin's manly demeanor. As Mannix, he's never caught doing anything unseemly; his only weakness is revealed in confession, which is letting him off pretty lightly when he's supposed to spend most of his time papering over the mania inherent in a business full of ebullient, theatrical personalities. What's more, all of Mannix's decisions seem eminently sensible, so there's never a sense of desperation behind his facade. The events of the film don't even come across as any kind of bad day for Mannix, so we never feel like he has been tested, and his confession that the job is harder than he can sometimes bear never seems to be earned by the picture. If Hail, Caesar! is only meant to be light entertainment, it is too light by half. It feels a bit like a boxing match that ends in a disqualification, and I'm left feeling as if I didn't really see any kind of contest in the end.

Robert Picardo is really enjoyable as the Rabbi, and he brings good value to the film, but his role calls to mind my most personal set of questions while watching Hail, Caesar! In a way these questions are a result of my thinking about the Coen brothers whole filmography. Very often in these films, the social life of Judaism is sketched out as part of the movie's comic payload––this picture and A Serious Man deliver a lot of this material. But the visual iconography of most of the films is obsessively Christian, and very unanalyzed in its deployment of symbolic representation. Unlike Roger Ryan, I don't really get much of a sense that the Coen brothers feel there is an absent or unknowable god. Hail, Caesar! especially pushes forward and rewards Mannix's faith with a tidy sense of well-being, and cements this outlook with an absurdly sincere speech by Clooney during the crucifixion scene. This Whitlock guy, who we've had presented to us as a stooge, hardly with a mind of his own, ultimately gets up and delivers this speech that tears up all the production people––it is Baird Whitlock's validation, in that instance he does work as an actor which moves people––but it's also presented as the film's vindication of all the under-the-table shenanigans Mannix has gone through to commit that piece of vaguely Bible-related hokum to celluloid. The scene as we see it is uncut corn, but Hail Caesar!'s soundtrack rises to meet the tenor of the speech, and the film's editing rhythms move in concert with the scene the characters are filming, in order to flatter meaning and emphasis on Whitlock's line delivery. It is the same level of syrupy orthodoxy as what has often concluded a Steven Spielberg picture; the miserable "good man" mumbling that eats away at the provocative revelation of meaninglessness in the violence of Saving Private Ryan; the same miserable goo that we find ourselves wading through when Robin Williams rediscover's Tink's little chair in Hook. And just like in those instances, the sentimentality caught in my throat, practically stopping the movie in its tracks for me. It's hard not to see the Coen brothers as forcing this scene upon us as an offering, summing up their thoughts about the film's themes, but as to what those themes are, I'm left pretty confused, and really left out in general.

There's also the repeated shots of Mannix in supplication––asking his savior for guidance, I suppose. I should say here that I'm an atheist, born and raised without any kind of religion, and I have a hard time unpacking religious symbolism in movies. Basically I feel as though I shouldn't have to. I don't have to understand much about religion to appreciate, say, Winter Light; and I can understand the artistic drive towards something a religious person might call "the sublime" in Andrei Rublev. I can appreciate the context of the upside-down christ statue in the ruins in Ashes and Diamonds. I can see it as representing a world inverted by war, in which the values the characters have grown up with are similarly upturned, without ever having to unpack the story behind the crucified figure, the specific religious values the image is meant to symbolize. But Hail, Caesar! presents me with a lot of religious imagery, decidedly not explicated. I'm not sure what to make of all of Mannix's worship scenes, or of the "holy" tenor of Whitlock's tear-jerking monologue. I can't tell whether I'm supposed to be into the interior feelings of the characters at these moments, or whether I'm supposed to be regarding them from an intellectual remove. It feels very much like I'm supposed to identify with the crew members tearing up at Whitlock's speech, and that I'm supposed to identify Mannix's worship scenes as evidence of Mannix's struggle. I can't even quite tell what Mannix's struggle is in the movie. There is this persistent sense during the film that Mannix is searching for a way to make the make-believe magic of the movies seem manly and thus significant vis-a-vis his image of himself. The recruiter from Lockheed and others in the movie certainly shame Mannix for being involved in a trifling fantasy world, and Mannix takes umbrage at that, but he never really articulates a different outlook from theirs. It's almost as if Mannix implicitly agrees with the Lockheed recruiter, but he just doesn't want to agree with him. The film's assertion of the "shame" of an adult being immersed in the fantasy of the movies is another element of Hail, Caesar! that just doesn't feel earned to me, and I guess I'm saying that the christian iconography in the film doesn't feel earned, either. Rather, it seems disingenuous. That imagery is really integrated into the story of No Country for Old Men, though I can't really get into that picture precisely because it is so reliant on the symbolic values of its Christian iconography to carry its thematic weight. Nonetheless, No Country for Old Men at least earns its interrogation of religious philosophy, and in Hail, Caesar! the emphasis on religion as a grounding for Mannix feels tacked-on in order to give the very slight incidents portrayed in the film greater weight or significance. I just don't feel as if that extra weight or significance is at all delivered. It feels more and more like there is a kind of secret symbolic lexicon to the Coen brothers work, that they share together but that they only accidentally share with us; a private world in which Christian symbols stand in for universal philosophical ideas, where there is an inherent shame to be overcome in the idea of make-believe, and where ancient, moldy values of what makes a man manly are relevant examinations for the modern age. The most successful Coen brother movie for me is Miller's Crossing, in which the subtext of shame in macho values is explicated with the most persistence, and made to seem immediate and topical. Gabriel Byrne is also the kind of actor whose natural gravitas lends the film a consistent through-line, but more than that, Miller's Crossing is a very open film about the shame the Coen brothers seem to associate with revealing personal feelings. It's the main film of theirs in which macho identity is an impairment which the characters are trying to surmount or transgress. The heroes of that film can't really admit the depth of their feeling for each other, but there is a sense of complicated yearning in that picture that is the very successful obverse of the attempt to convey feeling in the recent movies, and in Hail, Caesar! most especially. Mannix's inner struggle just does not come across, nohow, and when I try to unpack what it is he is so conflicted about, I come up with nothing very tangible––most of what I can unpack seems insultingly simpleminded.

I suppose I'm going out on a limb with the last few paragraphs, and I hope no one is too offended, because that really isn't my intent. What I really mean to say is that I feel very alienated by the religious symbolism in the Coen brothers films, especially this last one; that I feel that the symbols haven't any clear meanings within the context of the film, though they also don't function especially as open or unassigned symbols, a la Antonioni. It makes me wonder if the Coen brothers are themselves religious, and if they're in fact Christians, for whom these symbols might have a kind of meaning I simply have no access to––or if they are just very establishment-minded, using familiar symbolism to carrying this point or that feeling to what they presume to be a fairly broad audience––one familiar with those symbols. Like Domino, I also found the mockery of gay figures in the film ancient, unfunny, and unappreciable. And I wonder how it all squares with the more wide-ranging and interesting presentation of gay characters in Miller's Crossing (to my recollection the gay characters in Miller's Crossing, while mocked by some of the unreconstructed macho characters in that film, never have their taste or attitudes played for laughs by the filmmakers––yet the same filmmakers are pretty directly mocking in Hail, Caesar!). The film's red-baiting attitude was similarly anachronistic and bizarre, and that, combined with the many anachronisms within the fictional film studio in the picture made me wonder if the Coen brothers don't have some powerfully skewed version of history in their heads––a very reactionary one at that.

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domino harvey
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#69 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jun 16, 2016 6:59 pm

Some interesting thoughts, feihong! I will say this in the film's defense: it's nowhere near as awful as Trumbo, which usurped the Carpetbaggers as the worst film I've ever seen about studio-era Hollywood. Now there's a film that comes across like it was made by one of George Clooney's characters in a Coen Brothers movie (i.e. It's as dumb as a bag of bags)

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#70 Post by Ribs » Thu Jun 16, 2016 7:03 pm

Believe it or not, the original ending of Trumbo as scripted saw John Wayne apologize to Trumbo, having realized the error of his ways. So they avoided that at the least.

Also, it's pretty clear they chose Eddie Mannix because it's a great name for a fixer. I'm sure the Coens knew all the business with him murdering his wife and all that jazz but since when do they care about little things like that?

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#71 Post by feihong » Thu Jun 16, 2016 9:16 pm

Gawd. My boss recommended Trumbo to me. Sounds like a must–avoid, though I'm still tempted to see. I don't usually enjoy watching bad movies––Hail, Caesar! bothered me in so many ways––but maybe I'll get some mileage out of that one.

I see what you're saying Ribs, about the name. It's interesting, and there is a passing resemblance between Brolin and Mannix in a few stills of Mannix––more just a visual sense about him that they've gone to some trouble to highlight and convey.

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Feego
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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#72 Post by Feego » Fri Jun 17, 2016 9:35 am

feihong wrote:The dance sequences and shootouts are cut as if they are being performed as single–takes, yet they are in fact a mishmash of angles and different setups.
Haven't seen Hail, Caesar! yet (I've never entirely warmed to the Coen brothers), but this comment struck me. It's alarming just how many movies do this! I've lost count of the number of times I've seen "backstage" Hollywood movies (from all eras) depict an entire scene being shot in a single take, yet somehow miraculously composed of various angles when the final cut is shown. It's one of my pet peeves of such films. I mean, I get that it's probably just shorthand and the filmmakers are counting on most audience members not knowing or caring enough to notice, but it's still kind of annoying.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#73 Post by matrixschmatrix » Fri Jun 17, 2016 10:09 am

Feihong, I was troubled by the odd red-baiting you discuss too, though I think that it was meant to be some kind of ironic or satirical take on something, as much as Channing Tatum's communist movie star- it's hard to put my finger on what, though. There's a strange vibe throughout the movie, and it reminded me somewhat of Barton Fink in that respect (and I don't love Barton Fink, either)- a lot of deliberate anachronisms and surrealisms in a way that don't quite seem to add up to much of anything, but which take on their own seem to be oddly, intensely conservative. There's a fairy tale quality about the whole thing, and a degree to which this, by virtue of being their followup to Fink (both are set in the same fictional studio) implicitly sets them at odds with one another, but I felt like there must be some guiding principle to it that I was missing.

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#74 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jun 17, 2016 10:15 am

I thought Tatum's character was meant to be a realization of all the overblown worries of the McCarthy trials, the absurdity of a major star being a defect danger. With so much wrong here, it wasn't one of the parts I had issues with (other than that the Coens miss all opportunities to make this a funny idea with any kind of payoff)

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Re: Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2016)

#75 Post by matrixschmatrix » Fri Jun 17, 2016 10:30 am

It's not so much that I had a problem with it as I couldn't make it add up- the idea that the whole movie is essentially a Leo McCarey fantasy makes a lot of it come together (Mannix as father figure and the movie's admiration for him, all the business with the communists, etc.) but that seems not to fit will with all the Hobie business (which I thought was a lot of fun, taken on its own merits, at least.)

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