Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Hail, Caesar!

First off, a couple of words about movie theater etiquette.

"Fuck" and "you."

If you don't have enough sense, olfactory or otherwise, not to dunk yourself in a vat of perfume or cologne right before you head to the movie theater, fuck you.  Fuck your thimble-brained lack of the most basic social skills.  Fuck the wolves that raised you for not mauling some smarts into you.  And fuck the movie theater for not using some sort of Smell-o-Matic machine to weed out these walking Bhopals.

It's been happening with Beyonce at the Super Bowl-frightening regularity over the past few months, and I'm fed the fuck up.  I hadn't even made it through the previews at Hail, Caesar! before my eyes started to burn from the Calvin Klein chemical cloud emanating from Ms. Tons o' Fun sitting next to me.  I don't know if she was trying to cover what I can only assume was a Hostess bakery level of yeast stench coming from one of her many folds, but what the cream filling fuck?!

I only wish Hail, Caesar! could have taken my mind off of the eye-watering sniffer assault, but no.  It makes The Ladykillers look like The Big Lebowski.

Hail, Caesar! is an anti-hot dog.  With hot dogs, the shittiest parts of various animals come together to make a tasty whole.  Hail, Caesar! is chock full of tasty bits but ends up a shitacular mess.

A Busby Berkeley by way of Grindr dance number featuring Channing "Po" Tatum and a bunch of salty seamen will get a chuckle out of everyone this side of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Scarlett "Fire" Johansson's "fish ass"-wearing, Esther Williams-inspired aquabat ain't too hard on the eyes, and she's crassly sassy to boot.

The 18th subplot about Commies kidnapping matinee idol Baird Whitlock (George "Son Of Rosemary" Clooney) has potential, and the 19th, featuring a My Fair Lady elocution lesson between a hayseed actor and a sophisticated British director, earns a laugh.

But it's all just cameo chop suey.  If the brothers Coen would have picked one or two storylines and stuck the fuck with them instead of bouncing around like Tigger on a crack binge, Hail, Caesar! might have been Raising Arizona funny. 

Instead, we follow Josh "Anne" Brolin's studio fixer, Eddie Mannix - named after a real life studio fixer at MGM who may or may not have killed his first wife for wanting a divorce and Superman (I.E. George "Not Christopher" Reeves)for hurting his second wife's feelings and, thus, was 100 times more interesting than the Brolin version - as he plods along cleaning up one spoiled star fuckup after another.  Calmly.  Quietly.  Boringly.

Epic fail, Caesar?  Hail, Caesar! is a great, big bunch of Golden Age "meh."

Et tu, Joel and Ethan?

February 7, 2016