Hail Caesar! review

With their new farce “Hail Caesar!” the Coen Brothers conjure up the glory and garishness of gimmicky 1950s Hollywood. Like their other broad comedies, such as the cult-hit “The Big Lebowski,” their Americana ode to The Odyssey “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” and the still-underrated espionage spoof “Burn After Reading,” “Hail Caesar!” is less interested in tight storytelling or following a discernable plot than it is with putting a genre’s idiosyncrasies under a microscope and under zooming in until they appear absurd.  There’s a love displayed for the type of bloated studio-era schlock that the Joel and Ethan are spoofing and that love shines through in perfect recreations of iconic film moments and stock genre tropes. In fact, the verisimilitude of the spoof is so earnest in its presentation that the comedy often gets lost in the movie’s high-concept production values.

If there is a single story to follow it’s that of Josh Brolin as a studio executive named Eddie Mannix - a no-nonsense busy-body who’s trying to juggle a handful of large film projects being mounted on the lot of Capital Pictures. The key film in development is a roman swords-and-sandals epic that features big-time prestige actor Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a witless Charlton Heston type. The production is put on hold when an extra kidnaps the actor and holds him for ransom at a nearby beach mansion, occupied by a group of disgruntled Hollywood writers turned communist.  Alden Erhenreich plays a country bumpkin movie star who also finds himself caught up in the mystery.

There’s no lack of whimsy here and the movie is full of moments of pure exhilaration within its reimagining of Hollywood cinema, including the best song and dance sequence I’ve seen in the last 15 years, starring Channing Tatum and a group of actors dressed as sailors. Key scenes play out like sketch comedy, such as a silly dialogue set-piece between a small group of preachers, priests, and rabbis who are brought in to share their opinions on the depiction of Christ in one of the movies within the movie, as well as another scene in which Erhenreich tries to choke down his thick southern accent for a director played by Ralph Fiennes after getting cast last-minute in a formal costume drama.

Had these scenes, or the many others like them, existed without the connective tissue of the plot to justify their use within the film,  they could support themselves as Funny or Die videos or SNL digital shorts. The movie never quite gels as a story because said connective tissue--Josh Brolin and George Clooney’s overarching plot—is never tended to with the same amount of interest or care.  As the audience’s cypher Brolin never drums up enough pathos or relatability, or even enough of his own comedic presence—like, say, Jeff Bridges does as ‘The Dude’—to pull together all of the competing plot threads and many muddled themes regarding industry politics, personal morals and religion. That said, you can never ding the Coens for lack of trying.

Ehrenreich as the dopey Hobie Doyle, Tilda Swinton as a pair of yellow journalist twins and Scarlett Johansson as a jaded starlet all give loopy, mannered performances that live up the bigness of the movie’s comedic style, and if the “Hail Caesar!” had used one of them to follow as our main character, instead of Brolin’s bland almost-detective, it may have created a better sense of dramatic traction. The larger than life aesthetic gags are too slick and impressive on a technical level to register as comedy and a movie this big and this silly can’t sustain cinematic parlor tricks on this kind of scale without being a lot funnier. Ironically, the final result is a film that resembles the type of bloated, misguided star vehicles that the Coens are working so hard to send up.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2016

Listen to more discussion about "Hail Caesar!" on this week's Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

Sicario review

There’s been a long tradition of southwest, boarder-town noirs that reach as far back as Anthony Mann’s 1949 film “Boarder Incident” and as recent as the Coen brother’s “No Country For Old Men,” as well as television’s “Breaking Bad.” Surprisingly, as worn as this genre may be, Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario” still manages to find new life underneath old tropes and effectively tightens the screws with tense, Hitchcockian set-ups.

Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, a moral FBI agent who’s hired by a government special operations unit to take down a powerful cartel leader who’s responsible for a number of indiscriminate killings and mutilations. In hopes of doing the right thing to get to the worst evils of society, she realizes that the deeper she gets involved the less her convictions and her morals will help her with the job at hand.

From the opening sequence when we see Blunt and her fellow agents break into a remotely located drug-house, with gunmen behind every corner and dead-bodies shrink-wrapped behind the dry-wall, Villeneuve establishes a Dante-like hell that increasingly challenges our hero as she descends deeper into each circle of its depravity. Josh Brolin plays her duplicitous guide into this journey named Matt Graver, a man who smugly wears flip-flops to office meetings and hides his elusive motives behind a casual smile. Benicio Del Toro’s Alejandro is an even tougher nut to crack, as he seems to be able to brutally operate outside of the strict confines of the law with complete immunity. Blunt serves as the audience’s surrogate but also as the movie’s moral center and its heart. To her credit, given the mechanical function of her character, she manages to breath in sync with the camera and effectively embodies Villeneuve’s tone of paranoia.

As with the director’s last film “Prisoners,” this feature was shot by the much-celebrated cinematographer Roger Deakins, and like his past work—including “No Country for Old Men”—every shot is precisely considered and milks each frame for ominous drama. Deakins’ artful approach to photography, along with the film’s doom-laden score by Jóhann Jóhannsson perfectly accents the movie’s many apocalyptic establishing shots and creates a malevolent sense of dread within the world these characters inhabit.

Luckily “Sicario” understands that aesthetics alone doesn’t make a movie without an assured story to tell and a confident director at the helm. Taylor Sheridan’s hard-boiled screenplay examines the war on drugs as a complicated parable with a “Chinatown” sense of pessimism. Villeneuve perfectly captures this with his nightmarish vision of violence as the last form of communication between the law and lawless.


This certainly isn’t a happy film and if you’re not inclined to watch a crime story that stares deep into the abyss without any tangible hope to keep from falling directly into it, then this might not be your ideal Saturday night. I, however, can’t recommend this movie highly enough. The performances across the board are fantastic—perhaps the best I’ve seen from all the leads in years—and it’s great to see a mainstream movie that’s isn’t satisfied with simply fulfilling its genre conventions.  Instead “Sicario” digs its familiar premise deeper for existential conflict and a darker tonal ambiance. 

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2015

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For review

                2005’s “Sin City” was a visually ambitious effort by troublemaker director Robert Rodriguez, adapting the black and white Frank Miller comic book as accurately as possible. In employing never before seen green-screen technology, animating almost everything except the actors, he envisioned a graphically unique movie universe that romanticized and exaggerated the film noir style, digitally sculpting entire sets and moods with angular lighting concepts and isolating certain characters and props with splashes of sharply contrasting color. Sure, it was gimmicky and the style vastly outweighed the substance, but, it in a midnight-movie way, it was purely cinematic and it suggested whole new possibilities between the worlds of digital animation and adult-themed action movies.

                Then again, what we took for granted in Rodriguez’s successful experiment was the apparent tight-wire act it accomplished with tone and execution. Lesser adopters of this technique, like Zach Snyder’s “300,” “Watchmen,” and “Sucker Punch,” proved that world building and visual panache must to be balanced with sensitive direction, considerate acting , and, at the very least, functional storytelling to pull a film together, lest the entire thing becomes an overblown videogame cut-scene. While the original “Sin City” was light on story, it was effectively moody, paced exceptionally well and doled things out in such a way that it continually surprised the audience. Now, nine years later, Rodriguez’s long-planned sequel “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” performs like an over-confident cover-band, lazily going through the motions, believing that it doesn’t matter if it slogs through the song as long it nails the guitar solo.

                Like its 2005 predecessor, this is a triptych narrative that interweaves three short stories, all staring different protagonists. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Johnny, an egotistical gambler who gets in over his head when he wins a game of poker against the cartoonishly evil Senator Roark—played with some conviction by Booth Powers. The second plot, in which the film takes its name, tells the backstory of private eye Dwight McCarthy (previously played by Clive Owen , now Josh Brolin) who gets tangled in the web of a spider-women named Ava (Eva Green), and who vows revenge after a brutal double-cross leaves him disfigured. The last tale tracks the mental deterioration of a stripper named Nancy (Jessica Alba), who seeks to kill the Senator responsible for death of her fatherly protector Hartigan, played in both films by Bruce Willis.

                In this triple-scoop serving of splat-tastic pulp there’s no shortage of stars hamming it up as they deliver the Miller’s tough-guy dialogue, as well as no shortage of ultra-violent black and white money-shots. However, for all its hack and slash and stylish masculine bravado, what the movie does lack is any tangible sense of mood, danger, or dramatic tension.  

                 The Joseph Gordon Levitt short is inexplicably split apart, and though the first half builds to an interesting conflict, when we pick back up 25 minutes later the story putters out in a flatulent anti-climax.  Alba was always distractingly miscast as Nancy Callahan but now that she’s expected to do more than just provide cheesecake as a damsel in distress, her failings as a dramatic actress are even more apparent in this totally unnecessary follow-up  to the last movie’s most emotionally resonant segment.  Here she broods at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, talks to Obi-Wan Bruce Willis from beyond the grave and comically takes to the streets on a motor-cycle.  The title story, based on a vintage Sin City text, narratively anchors the rest of flab around it, highlighting the movie’s best performance in Eva Green vamping it up as the archetypal femme fatale. But even with this Rodriguez manages to spoil the experience by over playing his digital color-correction tricks and over-exploiting the 3D exploitation.             

                Unfortunately, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is a depressing disappointment, not only for the audience who may still remember the energy and audaciousness of the first film and have been anticipating this sequel for many summers, but for the talented cast and creators responsible for its deflating results.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014