Hail, Caesar! — Page 2

Two people can have equal skill at acting.

I thought it looked good too. Sad to hear mixed things.

I caught this last night with some friends. There were enjoyable, funny, moments, great performances, and the Art Direction was superb. The plot was a mess. I honestly couldn't figure out what happened, and half the characters added nothing to the overall story.

Fantod said: "Two people can have equal skill at acting.

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The comment was about your grammar: two people cannot be THE BEST ACTRESS.(which states ONE)

They can be two of the best actresses, however.

The message is that movies, like God, are the light that shows truth, so we should worship them, I guess.

Saw this yesterday and was surprised by how dull it was. The trailer is 100x more interesting than the actual film, though I admit it certainly did its job in generating my interest. Frances McDormand hands-down steals the film with her brief cameo, providing the only scene that truly reminded me of the strong classic Coen brothers style. Other notable highlights included Alden Ehrenreich (and his middling rope tricks when he used an actual rope, rather than the crazily obvious CGI rope that was switched out in the same scene), everything Scarlett Johansson said and did and the true headliner of the film, George Clooney's thighs. The Esther Williams mermaid number was the signature fun Coen production number of the film, reminiscent of the bowling girls from Big Lebowski, and it truly delivered. The sailor number was overly long and painfully highlighted Channing's discomfort and inadequacy to lead a Gene Kelley number when set among actual dancers. It was just embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as David Krumholtz in a small but unforgettably grating role.

There were a couple of funny moments, but I found the direction, art direction, cinematography and costumes to be awkward stumbles in the Coen canon. The filming of Tilda's characters looked like rehearsal footage, capturing a performance that was as awkwardly finished as her costumes. The screenplay is so unfocused and fractured, the point (of which there seemed to be a great effort to make in the most convoluted way possible) is completely lost. It reminds me of The Hudsucker Proxy or Barton Fink had they decided to keep working the screenplays to death without any objective editing.

While the pros I listed may sound plentiful enough, they represent mostly brief scenes that make up a total of about 10-15 minutes of the film. I kept waiting for that moment the film would really grab onto something interesting. It didn't happen until the last quarter of the film and it didn't end up lasting or paying off in any way.

If you really feel the need to see this, I'd recommend waiting for Netflix or Redbox. Spend as little as possible. I put this down at the bottom of the Coen heap with the unfunny Ladykillers and the deadly boring Man Who Wasn't There.

To me, the holy men scene played the same as the communist scenes. They were these Woody Allen-esque scenes of heady discussion trying to wedge (some of) the core ideology into the film's narrative, but it was so clumsily written, directed and performed, it just skimmed across the surface of the screenplay without resonance. I felt like I was watching scenes from films of the Coen brothers, Woody Allen and Wes Anderon that had featured similar topics, but were frankensteined together into an unrelated and incomprehensible mess. Satirizing the morality, religion and politics that ran the 1950s Hollywood studios sounds like a good idea, but it can't work without a cohesive point of view.

His scene with Ralph Fiennes (who was also great) was really the only funny scene for me.

The line-feed scene was one of the two LOL moments in the film. The other being McDormand with her cigarettes and her scarf.

Updated On: 2/7/16 at 02:08 PM

RippedMan said: "Coehn Bros movie coming out after the Oscars noms? I can't imagine it's very good.

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It's very good. But it's not an Oscar movie in the least. Manohla Dargis hit the nail on the head in her review for The New York Times: "Hail, Caesar! is one of those diversions that they turn out in between masterworks and duds."