drama, since the days of the Greeks, has been represented by the dueling masks of comedy and tragedy the latest Coen Bros. film works well as the former and as a companion piece to the latter's Barton Fink.
set at the same fictional Hollywood studio as "Fink," Capitol Pictures, and ten years after the events of that story, filmmaking in Hail Caesar is heavenly where Barton Fink followed that writer's descent into hell. the title here refers to Capitol's big-budget biblical epic (subtitled "A Tale of the Christ"). Capitol's head of physical production, Eddie Mannix, himself plays God while trying to rescue the picture's main star (Clooney) who has been kidnapped by communist writers for ransom.
as in other Coen kidnapping stories (Big Lebowski, Fargo), the plot itself is almost incidental to the events swirling around the players. has anyone ever actually gotten away with the ransom money in any of their films? I don't recall but maybe it happened once.
Mannix's attempts to ensure that the Christ depicted in Hail Caesar as non-denominational and acceptable to all faiths, contrasted with the writers' indoctrination of Clooney's character into Marx's theory of capitalism, raise interesting questions about the eternal "commerce v. art" debate, although not on the existential level as in Barton Fink. and the Coens' have a lot of fun playing in the genre sandboxes of the WWII-era studio system -- oaters, chamber dramas, Esther Williams, and the bloated, turgid epics that Hollywood rushed out in reaction to the explosion of television.
not quite top-tier Coens but a fun diversion, especially for writers who want to be part of what's left of that world today
set at the same fictional Hollywood studio as "Fink," Capitol Pictures, and ten years after the events of that story, filmmaking in Hail Caesar is heavenly where Barton Fink followed that writer's descent into hell. the title here refers to Capitol's big-budget biblical epic (subtitled "A Tale of the Christ"). Capitol's head of physical production, Eddie Mannix, himself plays God while trying to rescue the picture's main star (Clooney) who has been kidnapped by communist writers for ransom.
as in other Coen kidnapping stories (Big Lebowski, Fargo), the plot itself is almost incidental to the events swirling around the players. has anyone ever actually gotten away with the ransom money in any of their films? I don't recall but maybe it happened once.
Mannix's attempts to ensure that the Christ depicted in Hail Caesar as non-denominational and acceptable to all faiths, contrasted with the writers' indoctrination of Clooney's character into Marx's theory of capitalism, raise interesting questions about the eternal "commerce v. art" debate, although not on the existential level as in Barton Fink. and the Coens' have a lot of fun playing in the genre sandboxes of the WWII-era studio system -- oaters, chamber dramas, Esther Williams, and the bloated, turgid epics that Hollywood rushed out in reaction to the explosion of television.
not quite top-tier Coens but a fun diversion, especially for writers who want to be part of what's left of that world today
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