Tag: Josh Brolin

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Dune: Part Two

Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya are star-crossed lovers in Dune: Part Two

When I recently rewatched David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune with filmmaker Mars McKay, we agreed that Lynch had omitted one of Frank Herbert’s most important themes. In Lynch’s version Paul Atreides, a nobleman from a decimated great house, is in hiding from his enemies on the desert planet of Aarakis. When he’s rescued by the nomadic Fremen, they discover that he is their prophesied messiah, and he leads them to victory over their Harkonnen oppressors, and in the process, they install him as emperor of the galaxy. It’s a standard Chosen One narrative, like King Arthur or Star Wars. 

But in his 1965 novel, Frank Herbert makes it clear that the whole situation is a setup. Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, an all-female order of space witches who are the power behind the throne on hundreds of worlds. Over the course of centuries, the Bene Gesserit spread a belief in a coming messiah on many worlds, while they secretly manipulated dynasties in order to breed a psychic superbeing called the Kwisatz Haderach. When their demigod is finally born, he will have an army ready to serve him no matter where he goes. 

Paul knows this, and wants no part of it. He has visions of billions of people killing and dying in his name, and tries desperately to avoid his fate. His victorious ascendence to the galactic throne is actually a defeat. 

Denis Villeneuve understands that Paul’s interior conflict is central to the emotional impact of the story. The mounds of burning bodies from Paul’s visions are the most indelible image of Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune, and the creeping dread of jihad hangs over Dune: Part 2 like smoke from the funeral pyres. 

Paul Maud’Dib rallies the Fremen in Dune: Part Two. (Courtesy Warner Brothers)

The first installment ended with Paul and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) joining the Fremen tribe led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem). Part Two begins light years away in the palace of Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), who is starting to think that helping House Harkonnen ambush House Atreides was a mistake. His daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) writes in her journal of rumors that Paul survived the massacre. 

Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Stilgar’s band fights off Harkonnen attacks as they head for the relative safety of the deep desert. Paul’s guerrilla war in the desert — which Lynch’s version all but omits — provides some of the most thrilling sci-fi action in recent memory, even before Paul becomes Muad’Dib by riding a giant sandworm through the desert. 

Bardem’s magnetic performance proves crucial. Stilgar steps in as a jovial father figure to the grieving Paul. But he’s also a Fremen fundamentalist who takes the prophecies seriously, and Lady Jessica makes sure he sees Paul as the “voice from outside” who will lead them to victory and make Dune green again. Chani (Zendaya), the beautiful warrior who takes a shine to Paul, sees the would-be Mahdi for what he is. “You want to control people? Tell them to wait for the messiah to come,” she spits. 

Paul and Chani’s love story is heartrending. They cling to each other as the currents of history threaten to pull Paul away from his humanity. If they can kick the Harkonnen off the planet without calling millions of Fremen religious fundamentalists to jihad, maybe they could make a life together in the aftermath. But when Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) replaces Harkonnen commander “The Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista) with his more competent cousin Feyd (Austin Butler), the Fremen are backed into a corner, and holy war becomes the only way out. 

Sandworms attack in Dune: Part Two. (Courtesy Warner Brothers)

Dune is the product of Herbert’s very 1960s obsessions with religion, desert ecology, and psychedelic mushrooms. Nevertheless, it has only become more relevant over the 60 years since its first publication. One need not look far to find leaders cynically using religion for political gain, or sparking savage wars of extermination by appealing to ancient scripture. The clarity Villeneuve brings to this multilayered story is its own kind of miracle, and he’s able to do it without sacrificing the visceral action blockbuster cinema requires. 

None of this heady stuff would mean much without the human element. From Dave Bautista’s petulant manchild Rabban to Josh Brolin’s crusty warrior Gurney, everyone in the sprawling cast delivers. Rebecca Ferguson is especially creepy as she whips believers into a frenzy while mumbling conversations with her unborn child. 

But Zendaya and Chalamet are the beating heart of Dune: Part Two. It ain’t easy to draw real human emotions out of such fantastical material, but these two movie stars make it look like it is. Like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, they try to carve out a little solace in the midst of war, only to find out the problems of two little people ain’t worth a hill of beans in this crazy galaxy. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Dune

Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) face their fates in Dune.

Science fiction claims to be about tomorrow, but it’s really about today. Predicting the future requires seeing the present clearly; if the artist gets it right, their vision will last. That’s the secret of the success of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune. It’s set about 8,000 years in the future, but underneath all the sandworms and psychic messiahs, the human dynamics still feel spot on. Competing interest groups recognize a chokepoint in society, and battle to control it. The decidedly Arabic intonations of the Fremen, the indigenous population of the desert planet of Arrakis, is no accident. Eight years after Dune’s publication, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, instituted an oil embargo, which severely disrupted the economies of the West, destabilized the colonial world order the great powers had been building for 400 years, and set the stage for the conflicts that have dominated the 21st century. 

In Dune, the equivalent of oil is spice, a psychedelic drug that enhances the psychic abilities of its users (it was the ’60s, after all), allowing specially trained addicts to navigate faster-than-light spaceships, thus enabling the development of a sprawling interstellar empire. Spice can be found on only one planet in the Imperium, so Arrakis (aka Dune) becomes the focus of great-power politics, war, betrayal, and rebellion. 

Harkonnen harvesters deliver the spice.

The political complexity of the text is only one reason why it has long been considered unfilmable. Long passages take place entirely within the minds of the characters. The galaxy lacks intelligent computers or cute robots, because of an ancient jihad. There’s a thousand-year eugenic breeding program by the Bene Gesserit, a cabal of space witches, to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a psychic super-being who will access the genetic memories of the entire human race and impose “benevolent” rule on the galaxy. That’s a lot to explain to a 10-year-old squirming in a theater seat. 

Not that filmmakers haven’t tried. Watch the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune for the story of the first attempt. In 1984, David Lynch got a crack at it, and failed spectacularly — the best way to fail. In 2000, the SyFy Network produced the most successful Dune screen adaptation by spreading out the sprawling story into a miniseries. Now, it’s Denis Villeneuve’s turn in the barrel. 

Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaacson) and mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) await the arrival of the Emperor’s delegation.

Going in, Villeneuve looked like the best person for the job. Arrival is one of the best science fiction films of the 21st century, and Blade Runner 2049 is a mesmerizing, minor classic. To do Dune right requires a big bet and patient hands. At $165 million, this pandemic-delayed epic is much cheaper than the average Pirates of the Caribbean installment. 

Unlike Disney’s Depp-driven wank-fests, every cent is on the screen. This Dune is one of the most beautiful sci-fi films ever made. Villeneuve looks to Lawrence of Arabia for inspiration (David Lean turned down Dune in 1971), and riffs on other cinematic fence-swings like Apocalypse Now and Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps. The production design, from mountain-sized spaceships to the dragonfly-like ornithopters, is immaculate.

Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) goes native in one of Paul’s visions of the future.

None of the actors are just collecting paychecks. Timothée Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, the deeply conflicted revolutionary leader, as the callow youth of Herbert’s novel. He’s mostly along for the ride as galactic events unfold around him, until he embraces the bloody destiny he knows he can’t escape. Rebecca Ferguson gets the juiciest role as Lady Jessica, the concubine who forces the hand of the Bene Gesserit out of love for Duke Leto (a pitch-perfect Oscar Isaacson.) Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa play Paul’s military mentors, while Javier Bardem comes in late as Stilgar, the Fremen leader who will join Muad’Dib’s jihad. Zendaya is Chani, Paul’s future Fremen consort. She features prominently in Dune’s advertising, and will play a vital part in the story’s future, but for now she’s mostly relegated to swishing around like a Ridley Scott perfume ad.

Zendaya as Chani, a desert nomad destined to conquer the galaxy.

Dune is an epic 156 minutes long, but only covers about the first half of the first book. That’s a lot of table-setting, but the story’s complexity needs room to breathe — especially since Villeneuve tells it without the dozen layers of voiceover Lynch required. It’s engrossing enough to sustain attention, except for one thing: Hans Zimmer’s score is awful. I like ambient music as well as the next guy, but Zimmer’s whoopee cushion subwoofer schtick gets old quick. The story would have been better served by a traditional symphonic score — or even the prog rock Toto made for Lynch — to shape the emotional peaks and valleys. 

Music aside, the spectacle is unparalleled, and Herbert’s story still resonates. Two of Villeneuve’s images swirl in my mind: Duke Leto striding down a spaceship ramp to the tune of space bagpipes, confidently leading his family — and the empire — to ruin in the desert; and Paul’s recurring vision of his future, where piles of burning bodies stretch to the horizon. Dune is a different kind of blockbuster, a rare feat of cinematic virtuosity. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Avengers: Endgame

J.K. Rowling was a godsend for the publishing industry. Her seven Harry Potter books, published from 1997 to 2007, shifted more than 500 million units worldwide for Scholastic, and taught a generation to love reading.

But in recent years, a question has arisen: Did Harry Potter really teach a generation to love reading, or did it just teach them to love Harry Potter?

When Warner Bros. came calling to J.K. Rowling in 2001, it would prove to be a fateful moment in film history. Film franchises were nothing new, but movie audiences were not expected to keep track of plots longer than a trilogy. Rowling’s dense plotting and expansive dramatis personae made Star Wars look like a family squabble. Like publishers before them, producers tried to reverse engineer the Potter magic. The only person to crack the problem was Kevin Feige, an associate producer on 2000’s X-Men who was hired to wring maximum value from Marvel Comics.

Robert Downey Jr. (above) faces his fate as Avengers: Endgame closes out the Marvel Decade.

Feige looked at an audience raised on Rowling’s serialized storytelling, and saw that Marvel’s rotating staff of underpaid fabulists had produced ample material to feed the formula. With Marvel’s most popular characters under the control of Sony, he turned to the Avengers to provide the spine of the 22-film story. The Marvel movies are literary adaptations, but they’re not high fantasy. A cool character on the cover is what moves comic book units. So is it with the Marvel films, which always choose character moments over coherent plotting. Crossovers are good cross marketing, which is why She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four, and why the Hulk is the co-star of Thor: Ragnarok.

Like Potter, the Marvel series milked the ending by splitting the finale into two movies. Deathly Hallows put most of its sentimental character beats in part one, then loaded on the action in part two. The final two Avengers attempted the reverse: Infinity War hewed to the model Joss Whedon had laid down, until the good guys lost. Endgame‘s first hour is about dealing with loss. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) throws himself into service. Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) numbly keeps trying to superhero in a world beyond saving. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has hung up his super suit and had a baby with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has made peace with his Hulk-nature and gone green full time. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets drunk. Then, five years after Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) snap heard ’round the universe, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) escapes from the Quantum Realm with an idea. If you had “time travel” in the “How are they going to write their way out of THIS one?” pool, please collect your winnings.

Star Wars taught Generation X to love movies. Since the films were spaced three years apart, kids had to try other genres to find a fix to tide them over, thus expanding their tastes. But the average moviegoer sees four films in a theater annually, and Marvel has been averaging 2.5 movies per year for the last decade. There was no need to try other genres, because Marvel simply subsumed them. You want a paranoid thriller? Here’s Captain America: Civil War. Space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy. Endgame shuffles through genres in its three hour running time. It’s a Steven Soderberg heist film. It disses Back to the Future, then lifts the structure of Back to the Future Part II to create a kind of clip show of the Marvel Decade. And just when you thought we’d escape without a Marvel Third Act, everybody you’ve ever met fights everybody else. Surprise!

The real meat of the Marvel films is not the wham-bam, but the little character moments. Endgame delivers those by splitting its gargantuan cast into unexpected pairs. Hulk finds himself negotiating with The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) in the middle of a raging battle. As the time war escalates and cause and effect starts to go all loosey-goosey, secret acting weapon Karen Gillan as Nebula pairs off against her past self, and Tony Stark makes peace with his dead father.

To say Feige succeeded in his decadal quest to perfect the formula is like saying “the atomic bomb exploded.” It’s true, but it fails to convey the scale. Endgame‘s $350 million opening weekend is the most profitable three days in the 120-year history of the American movie theater industry. Is it actually good? Not as a movie — but it’s not designed to be a movie. It’s a series finale. It’s a last chance to hang out with your super friends. Its bladder-busting length will be much more digestible when consumed on the new Disney+ streaming service.

As the dust clears, Disney stands like Thanos astride Earth-616. They have won, but what kind of world is left behind? The House of Mouse’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox has led to 4,000 layoffs and dozens of projects which can’t be Potter-fied have been cancelled. For all intents and purposes, the theatrical film industry is now Disney and a few minor players. We will soon discover whether Marvel taught a generation to love movies, or just taught a generation to love Marvel.

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Film Features Film/TV

Deadpool 2

Ah yes, the 1990s — the lost golden age of post-Cold War security, moderately rising wages, and good hip-hop. Back in the Clinton era, it was hip not to care. Snark and self-aware meta-humor went together like guitars and heroin. What a great time to be alive, except for the parts that were awful, like the complete lack of wifi hotspots.

I’m sorry. We’re doing ’90s nostalgia now, aren’t we? It’s hard to keep up.

Anyway, Deadpool. Comics in the 1990s were suffering a kind of post traumatic stress disorder fromWatchmen, like a decade-long hangover from one particularly foul bender Alan Moore went on in 1986. The grittier and darker the better, said Rob Liefeld, the artist who set the decade’s zeitgeist at Marvel. Liefeld liked guns, katanas, and bandoleers with lots of pouches and grenades on them. His most famous creation, along with writer Fabian Nicieza, was Deadpool. If Watchmen was a thoughtful critique of the assumptions underlying the superhero myth, Deadpool was raised middle finger. Deadpool is a profane, self-interested mercenary who dispenses ultraviolence on behalf of the highest bidder. His superpower, a Wolverine-like ability to heal wounds instantly, is itself a comment on the consequence-free narratives of the comic medium.

What made Deadpool the quintessential ’90s comic book hero is that he is aware he’s in a superhero comic book. In retrospect, the ironic detachment was a way to both acknowledge that we’ve all seen this stuff before and give ourselves permission to enjoy it anyway.

On screen, Deadpool is the product of an agreement between 20th Century Fox, who own the rights to the X-Men, and Disney, who own the rights to all the rest of Mavel’s creations. Deadpool was a tertiary X-Man, and even led his own spinoff group, X-Force, which was like X-Men, but more X-treme. In a way, Deadpool is the perfect figure to unite the two warring camps of Marvel properties, because he doesn’t take any of this stuff too seriously.

Few actors today tear into their parts with more relish than Ryan Reynolds does with Deadpool. With the origin story out of the way and a producer credit in his contract, Deadpool 2 lets Reynolds take the gloves off and go after the bloated superhero film genre with everything he’s got. He starts with the holy of holies, Wolverine’s death in Logan, and works his way down from there.

Josh Brolin, fresh off his role as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, stars as Cable in Deadpool 2.

This time out, Deadpool’s got a frenemy in the form of Cable (Josh Brolin), another Liefeld creation who sports oh so many small pockets and an extremely large, tricked-out gun. He’s a time-traveling super soldier best described as “Terminator but tortured and brooding.” His mission is to kill Russell (Julian Dennison), a young mutant on the verge of turning evil who will grow up to kill Cable’s family. Brolin seems to be genetically engineered to play the square-headed murder machine, and he provides an effective Nick Nolte to Reynolds’ Eddie Murphy. Dennison, who was incredible in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, holds his own against a more experienced cast. Another welcome newcomer is Domino (Zazie Beetz), whose superpower is luck, which serves as another sly joke at the expense of generations of frustrated comics writers who just needed to wrap their story up in two pages.

Back from Deadpool’s first outing is Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), who has the distinction of being the only comic book character named after a Monster Magnet song, but is left with very little to do in this film except hang out with her new girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna). Faring a little better is Colossus (Stefan Kapicic), who at least gets to have, as Deadpool calls it, “a big CGI fight!”

Successful genre parodies, like Venture Bros., know that in order to have your cake and eat it, too, you have to deliver both good comedy and good action. Deadpool 2‘s seemingly endless parade of fight sequences are constructed from the Marvel template, only with the fight choreographers given free rein to be as bloody and brutal as they want to be. But the picture’s real attraction is Reynolds cracking wise, so after the third or fourth decapitation, it all becomes a tedious blur of slicing katanas and spurting blood. Deadpool 2 is so full of superhero movie in-jokes, one suspects it will be almost incomprehensible in a few years. But for now, this is the franchise we need to deflate all the franchises we probably don’t.

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Avengers: Infinity War

Doctor Who premiered November 22, 1963. It was an immediate hit, and over the years the hokey show about a time-traveling weirdo became a cultural touchstone. By 1983, the production team was at the height of its powers. The lead role was in the hands of the young and charismatic Peter Davidson, and the budgets were bigger than ever. In the post-Star Wars afterglow, the show finally made the jump to America. The BBC decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary with the greatest crossover event in television history: They would bring together all the actors who had ever played the Doctor for one universe-shattering adventure. After months of hype, “The Five Doctors” premiered on November 23, 1983. It was a disaster.

Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), newly minted beardo Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and supersoldier in perpetual distress Bucky Barns (Sebastian Sam) defend Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity Wars.

Getting the giant cast together was a nightmare of bruised egos and diva behavior. The most important actor, Tom Baker, pulled out late in the process, so writer Terrance Dicks had to rewrite around some clips of Baker salvaged from a scrapped episode. The ratings were good, but not significantly better than a normal week’s viewership.

Worst of all, “The Five Doctors” exposed the weaknesses that the show’s fanbase had learned to overlook. There were still great moments to come—in 1984, the series produced “The Caves of Androzani”, now regarded as an all time high—but viewership faltered, and before the decade was out, Doctor Who was cancelled. In the internet comment board fever swamps, this is what’s known as “jumping the shark.”

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) get lost in space.

Picking up where Thor: Ragnarok left off, Avengers: Infinity Wars gets off to a strong start. Spaceships full of refugees from destroyed Asgard are intercepted by Thanos (Josh Brolin), who slaughters them and extracts the Infinity Stone from the Tesseract held by Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) narrowly escapes the destruction and rides the Rainbow Bridge, opened by Heimdal (Idris Elba) to Earth, where he warns Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Tony Stark (Robert Downy, Jr.) of Thanos’ plan to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of immense power that control Mind, Soul, Space, Time, Power, and Reality, and use them to destroy half of all life in the universe.

One thing Infinity War has going for it that other superhero movies have struggled with is a compelling villain. Brolin’s Thanos, until now a barely glimpsed, purple skinned mound of muscle, turns out to be surprisingly complex. He gets some fine scenes with his two adoptive daughters, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gilian, who has emerged as one of the best Marvel actors). Directors Anthony and Joe Russo are at their strongest when they take time to concentrate on pairs of characters, such as the doomed romance between Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), or the science/magic rivalry between Stark and Strange. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets paired off with Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and teenaged Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), which makes for some pleasantly goofy comedy beats. But everything else seems rushed, thin, and worst of all, calculated for maximum fan service, such as when the Guardians of the Galaxy are introduced singing along to The Spinners’ “Rubberband Man”. Our heroes make a stand in Wakanda, but the snap Ryan Coogler brought to Black Panther is missing. The potentially touching reunion of Banner and Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) is completely botched.

Thanos (James Brolin) seeks radical glove improvement. Also, genocide.

What ultimately sinks Infinity War is the unsolvable problem that sank “The Five Doctors”—the need to fit in references to 19 other Marvel movies. This is a film designed for superfans, and it could please many. But there inevitably comes a moment in long, episodic serials when the audience realizes that the catharsis they seek will never come. The demands of capitalism means there can never be a satisfying ending, and each installment of the story is reduced to a commercial for the next one. One way to read the ending of Infinity War is as a bold departure from formula. Another, more accurate way to read the ending is the plot equivalent of the moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie uses his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring to discover that the secret message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”. It’s the moment when all of the superheroes team up to collectively jump the biggest, most expensive shark of all time.

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Film Features Film/TV

Hail, Caesar!

Fewer Communists, more Clooney.

That’s a film critique I never thought I would offer, but here we are. Like all right-thinking Urban Achievers, I am a Coen Brothers fan—a fanatic, even. Who else has been able to create great films in so many different genres? They’ve produced two great film noirs in Miller’s Crossing and The Man Who Wasn’t There, expanded the crime genre with Fargo and the Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men, added to the Western legacy with True Grit, and crafted some of the greatest comedies in film history with Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Basically, if Joel and Ethan Coen make a movie, I’m there, no questions asked, because there’s always going to be something great onscreen. This is true even in the case of misfires like Hail, Caesar!

The strengths of their comedies have always been rooted in crackling wordplay, characterizations which walk the line between the wacky and sympathetic, and a burgeoning sense of the absurdity of life. The premise of Hail, Caesar!, an eventful day in the life of an Eisenhower-era Hollywood fixer named Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) seems like perfect fodder for the brothers. If you’re looking for absurdity, Hollywood presents a target-rich environment. Capitol Pictures, Mannix’s fictional studio, is a circus of stars like DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a squeaky-clean protagonist of water ballet pictures whose image is put at risk when she gets pregnant; Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), the singing cowboy whose almost superhuman roping and wrangling skills are of no use when the studio thrusts him into the role of a big city swell in Laurence Laurentz’s (Ralph Feinnes) latest chamber drama; and Frances McDormand as accident-prone film editor. Best of all is George Clooney as Baird Whitlock, the epically vain actor whose kidnapping from the set of his newest sword-and-sandals flick by a group of communist screenwriters who collectively call themselves The Future provides Hail, Caesar!‘s plot momentum. Clooney, rocking the praetorian haircut like it’s 1998 on the set of ER, is loaded for bear, ready to go O Brother, Where Art Thou? big. And that’s what we all want, right? Critics like me have to pay lip service to subtle naturalism, but there’s nothing like seeing a really great actor vaulting over the top, grabbing scenery to chew. But Clooney’s efforts are largely wasted as he ends up imprisoned by the communists for much of the film while the Coens try to wring humor out of mid-century Marxist rhetoric. The basic joke is sound—the commies claim to have scientifically cracked the code of history, and yet they were unable to predict defeat by the capitalists—but the scenes meander endlessly. Clooney’s manic energy should have been at the heart of the picture, but he’s just the MacGuffin.

Let the kidnapped Clooney chew the scenery.

The Coens are operating in Lebowski mode, so the kidnapping plot is just a contrivance on which to hang the comic digressions and character moments that are the film’s real meat. The Hollywood setting allows them to try on different genres every few minutes, such as Channing Tatum’s gay sailor musical number “No Dames,” but too often it comes off as empty riffing. The Coen’s clockwork timing seems broken.

I personally enjoyed Hail Caesar!, but I cannot recommend it to anyone outside the Coen cult. It is their least funny film since The Ladykillers in 2004, but, to be fair, the last decade has seen the brothers occupied with existential dramas like 2009’s A Serious Man. Roger Deakins’ photography is, of course, first rate, and the production design is off the charts good. In a way, Hail, Cesar! reminds me of a mid-period Woody Allen picture, expertly crafted but lacking a certain energy. And consider this: When The Big Lebowski was released in 1998, it was considered a disappointment after the universally hailed Fargo, but time was good to the Dude, and it is now rightly ranked as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Considering the majesty of the Coen’s True Grit remake and the crackerjack work they did on the screenplay for Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, maybe the days of the gonzo Coen comedy are over, and the brothers should stay serious.