Tag: Josh Brolin

Hail, Caesar!

hail-caesar-posterThe Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” acts as a sizzle reel for all the classic Hollywood film genres the pair could’ve honored and lampooned throughout their career but never got the chance. It shows how the Coens might do a sword and sandal epic, a lush costume melodrama or even a Gene Kelly musical. But “Hail, Caesar!” is a movie about the future, a post-modern mish-mash of genres and styles that hints at where history will take cinema as much as it is a throwback. The Coens are having a lot of goofy fun but still manage a surreal, captivating art picture on par with many of their classics.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) was a real VP and “fixer” in Hollywood up through the ‘50s, but here he’s an executive with the fictional Capitol Pictures, the same studio that employed Barton Fink. His job requires wrangling stars and getting films completed, and he’s the through line connecting all of “Hail, Caesar!’s” disjointed cinematic set pieces that traverse genres. Set during the 1950s, Capitol’s major prestige picture, also called “Hail, Caesar!,” is a story of Christ featuring the massive Hollywood star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, playing a doofus as he so often does in Coen films). A pair of extras drug Whitlock on set, abduct him to a meeting of Hollywood Communists, and demand $100,000 in ransom.

Meanwhile, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich, delivering a breakout performance) is a burgeoning Western star reassigned to a fancy production called “Merrily, We Dance.” He can’t really act to save his life, and he doesn’t gel with the loquacious, British thespian of a director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes channeling Vincente Minnelli). It’s Doyle who becomes “Hail, Caesar!’s” unlikely hero instrumental in locating Baird.

“Odd” does not quite capture how perfectly weird “Hail, Caesar!” actually plays. No scene or gag feels cut from the same cloth. The Coens will stage an opulent aquatic ballet in the spirit of an Esther Williams/Busby Berkeley routine starring Scarlett Johansson as a mermaid starlet, with the kaleidoscopic colors and aerial shots at times recalling “The Big Lebowski’s” dream sequence, only to abruptly cut away and become a shadowy noir.

Even the Coens humor ranges from absurd to deadpan to modest to rapid-fire wordplay. There’s Tilda Swinton channeling Old Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as not one, but two twin sisters, never on screen at the same time and each one-upping the other in terms of their readership. There’s the cleverly circular dialogue between a group of religious experts debating whether “Hail, Caesar!” will pass censors. And of course there’s Channing Tatum, who explicitly reminds everyone why he’s the contemporary Gene Kelly, donning a navy sailor suit and charming the hell out of the audience with a showy tap dance number.

Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle is the real surprise, a baby faced dolt with a stoic, stilted demeanor. In one shot he performs a lasso routine just to pass the time, and his eyes barely emote a thing in a way that makes his act hilariously Buster Keaton-esque. And in a verbal showdown with his director Laurence Laurentz, a simple line reading, “Would that it were so simple,” becomes the film’s unusually outrageous centerpiece.

What do the Coens have to say with all this madness? If the set pieces seem cold, or if the individual sequences feel disconnected from the rest of the film, it’s the act of showing the movie’s seams that stand out. Between flashy wipe cuts and gorgeously artificial backlot sets, the color and visual design of “Hail, Caesar!” leap out at you. We recognize Hollywood as the beautiful forgery that it was, and we can appreciate the Coens’ tribute to the era in how they call attention to everything it stood for.

Hollywood was all of these things in its Golden Age, and in the subtext are Mannix’s internal malaise, the arrival of the H-bomb at Bikini Atoll, and the coming drama of the Blacklist. “Hail, Caesar!” does this period better than “Trumbo.” But it invokes the arrival of the near future, how genres would be blended and how the world would become less clear. “Hail, Caesar!” is a lot of movies rolled into one, but it captures the spirit of an era in a way very few films have.

3 ½ stars

Sicario

Denis Villeneuve’s slow-burn thriller about Mexican drug cartels stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro

sicarioposterFBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is recruited by the CIA’s Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to help infiltrate a Mexican drug cartel. She feels lost and out of bounds, outside of her comfort zone and jurisdiction, and she asks the DoD “consultant” Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) what exactly is their objective. “You’re asking me how a watch works,” Alejandro implies, intricate and detailed yes, but more importantly difficult and near impossible to understand.

“Sicario” is a film about frustration. Like “Zero Dark Thirty” before it, Kate Macer is a woman trying to see in the dark and coming up empty. Denis Villeneuve’s tightly wound thriller binds its main character in confusion, ambiguity and a lack of information. The audience finds only a little more clarity but can feel the slow-burn tension sink in as Kate continues to go deeper, unsure of what she’ll find.

Kate’s most recent raid uncovered a house filled with bodies lining the inside of the drywall, each bound and wrapped in a plastic bag around their head. Despite the gruesome failure of the operation, she’s whisked away by the CIA’s Matt Graver, his flip flops and casual demeanor in stark contrast to her worn and by-the-book dedication to her job.

Matt’s details are scant, and instead of taking her to El Paso, she’s brought along on a job in Mexico. She’s part of a massive convoy that rolls into the country to pick up a cartel prisoner, then crosses back over the border to interrogate him. Villeneuve makes us helpless passengers and reluctant spectators, with the convoy calling complete attention to itself and with sinister looking gang bangers itching their trigger fingers in between rows of civilian traffic at the Mexican-American border. The musical score in this scene has a wonderful low droning of horns and the dragging of chains or stones as a chopper flies by.

The intention of this and several of the film’s operations are never completely clear, but in Benicio Del Toro we get a brilliant character who stands apart from the other agents and strikes fear into everyone on screen. Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan carefully tap into the idea that Kate and everyone else involved are really playing toward his agenda. His ruthless, yet incredibly subdued performance is one of the finer supporting jobs of the year.

This fear of uncertainty of an agenda and of a direction manifests itself brilliantly in a night-vision sequence that recalls and perhaps surpasses “Zero Dark Thirty”. Villeneuve has a different approach to tension and suspense than Kathryn Bigelow. As in “Prisoners” the tension is heavy but it’s a constant, slow burn simmer rather than a gradual build-up and eruption. When Kate and the team put down cartel gunmen at the border, they do so not in a chaotic firefight but in a terse and emotionless takedown.

“Sicario” never finds as compelling of a feminist role for Kate as one might hope, and yet the film is not trying to be a “Silence of the Lambs” story of a woman in a man’s world. Sheridan also tries to build sympathy for a Mexican cop and his family who get caught up in the action, but Villeneuve never earns the real pathos Sheridan is looking for.

Still, “Sicario” is a knockout, a riveting, art house action thriller that’s complex and ambiguous. It’s a film about seeing in the dark, and it’s no wonder the results come out just a little murky.

3 ½ stars

Inherent Vice

“Inherent Vice” is a movie you simply inhale, so rich with characters and humor as to live inside it.

Inherent Vice PosterPaul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” Thomas Pynchon’s classic pulp crime novel, isn’t so much about drugs as it is the idea of drugs. It’s quite easy to say the whole thing is a trip, but then there’s an unspoken nuance to all the little details that make it feel like a hallucination. The plot is so dense you couldn’t map it with a flow chart, but the subtle humor behind PTA’s rich and ever growing cast of characters puts a satirical edge on the whole cloak and dagger ordeal. You don’t unravel “Inherent Vice’s” plot; rather, to perpetuate the drug analogy, you just inhale.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a ‘70s private investigator with a mutton chop beard sitting in a hazy blue bungalow, marijuana smoke drifting in from the frames. Like a sudden beacon of light in his calm world of Gordita Beach, Cali comes Shasta (Katherine Waterston), donning an orange, curvy sundress and “looking like she always said she wouldn’t”. Shasta’s an old ex of Doc’s, so she asks for his help. Her latest boyfriend is the wealthy real estate mogul Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts), and his wife and her fling want to commit Wolfman to a mental institution and steal his fortune.

Meanwhile, Doc gets a visit from the Black Panther Tariq Khalil (Michael Kenneth Williams) asking him to locate one of Wolfman’s associates, an Aryan Brotherhood biker named Glen Charlock. When Glen turns up dead, with Doc’s passed out body lying right beside him, Doc is hauled in by Lt. Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Bigfoot has a flat top hair cut and the hardened features of a man’s man who could find his place in just about any decade. He suspects Doc could help lead him to Wolfman and Shasta, who have now disappeared, and that Doc, stoned as he perpetually is, may know more than he actually knows.

That’s only the crust of all “Inherent Vice” has to offer, but this story and these characters alone feel so well drawn that you’ll follow it down just about any rabbit hole. The dialogue and narration by Joanna Newsom is all Pynchon, and in mere sentences he conveys personalities that seem fuller than anything in literature. Like “The Godfather”, these characters even have names that sink in even if you can’t place who they are. When they speak, they’re all business, but on closer scrutiny it’s pure screwball. At one point, Doc is attempting to track down The Golden Fang, which may be a boat, a gang, a company, or all three. How that makes any sense is anyone’s guess.

Very much like Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye”, whom Anderson owes a big debt in several of his films and especially this one, “Inherent Vice” is essentially a big pot for this rich cast of characters to stew. The film never stays put, but as Anderson follows Doc from place to place, there’s a sense of humor, sex appeal and sinister undertones that he carries along. We see it as Wolfman’s “sexy chicana” house keeper bends languidly in front of Doc as she serves his drink, or as Mrs. Wolfman’s hulking mass of a squeeze is introduced to us from the neck down.

But where Altman was potentially uninterested in the plot details of Raymond Chandler, Anderson is in deep with Pynchon’s mystery. At any point the film seems to be deceiving you, whether it’s a TV commercial beginning to talk directly to Doc, a group of troopers suddenly sneaking up on a remote building and disappearing behind brush, or perhaps most hilariously of all, a sudden outburst of “pussy eating”.

Did we really just see all that? Is any of this really happening? That Anderson plays with that perception constantly and still finds a way to cobble together all the pieces in ambiguous, uncertain ways, is part of “Inherent Vice’s” appeal to watch it not just once, but again and again, forever getting lost in its hazy, drug addled fever dream.

3 ½ stars

True Grit

The original “True Grit” was released in 1969. It was a classical Hollywood Western when Butch and Sundance and “The Wild Bunch” were redefining the genre. The film was a fun throwback, and there are likely no better directors today than the Coen brothers to attempt to revive that same nostalgia.

To belabor the point about Henry Hathaway’s original film, John Wayne, late in his career, was the perfect casting choice as there was no one more Hollywood than he was. His sheer charisma combined with the film’s camp appeal (and not to mention a G-rating) elevated “True Grit” to that of a real “movie” for all those that always loved taking in their old school magic.

So Joel and Ethan Coen had a test on their hands. How do you capture the charm of one of the biggest movie stars of all time, keep the film fun and in the spirit of all the greats from the ‘30s, ’40s and ‘50s and modernize the film to avoid making a shot for shot remake? Continue reading “True Grit”