Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cast: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich*, Ralph Fiennes
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Feel weird missing out this long on new Coen Brothers, but it has, indeed been one of the weirdest, most exhausting decades one might have been able to imagine. Some things are bound to slip through the cracks.
Did I Like It: It’s a strangely slight movie. Likable, sure. Funny in the strange ways one comes to expect from the Coen Brothers, sure. But a prestige film clocking in at less than two hours smacks of studio interference, as if something had been gutted from the core of the film to ensure that it could run a maximum amount of times on opening weekend.
But that just may be the movie projecting on to me. Maybe no movie ever needs to be beyond two hours in its runtime. It’s a scary thought to entertain.
It’s probably wrong. Where would Zach Snyder be with thinking like that?
The real thing I’m struck by as I watch this is a fundamental paradox at play. Fundamental rule of movies: Regardless of when a movie takes place—the time of Jesus, the here and now, in the far flung future—you’ll be able to tell when the movie was made. As the odyssey of Eddie Mannix (Brolin) unfurls, there’s never a moment where I don’t think that the film was made sometime in the last ten years. And yet, each and every time we see something of the movies Capitol Pictures is making in 1951, they are absolutely believeable as movies of the era, yet are populated with the likes of Clooney, Channing Tatum, and Scarlett Johansson.
How do they pull of a trick like that, and also not pull of a trick like that.
*An actor whose name I find it increasignly difficult to spell. You just through as much of the letter “h” as you can, and just hope everything works out.