Hail, Caesar! - "Would That It Were So Simple."

 

When I started working through the entire Coen filmography, I immediately regretted it. Not because it’s too many movies, some of which I don’t have strong opinions of (though that is also the case), but because the end was going to coincide with screener season. Every year, I think I’m going to stay on top of the nearly two hundred screeners I get sent for the IFJA Awards, and every year I end up in a fugue state, churning through endless awards fodder, unable to allow myself time to watch anything else, much less write about it. It’s a weakness, and I’ll likely never get over it. This is just to say I’m still going to get through all of these movies, just later than I would like, but what else is new for me?

It’s fitting that the first movie I write about after awards exhaustion is Hail, Caesar!, the Coens’ love letter to old Hollywood. This was their excuse to make a snippet of their favorite genres from childhood; a time when there were simply types of movies. Here’s the new Western, and the costume drama, and the song and dance picture, and the Biblical epic, etc. Whereas now I’m watching documentaries about Hamlet being performed within Grand Theft Auto Online and Timothée Chalamet ping pong movies set in the 1950s with music from the 1980s and co-stars like Mr. Wonderful, Abel Ferrara, and the homeless dude with the great voice from a few years ago (for the record, I liked both movies). These were simpler times.

But I didn’t grow up in those times. My nostalgia is all about Ninja Turtles, Indiana Jones, and Darth Vader, not Fred Astaire and Clark Gable. Because of that, I simply enjoy this one and consider it a lesser Coen film. In fact, it was only one of two of their films I didn’t own on physical media until I bought it in anticipation of this article (the other is Scruggs, which I’ll eventually buy during a Criterion sale). I get why some consider this an underrated masterpiece, but it doesn’t hit the same way for me. For instance, I know that the Channing Tatum scene is amazing, but it doesn’t hold a candle to literally any moment from Miller’s Crossing for me. 

Perhaps it’s the same issue I’ve been writing about for the past few movies in their filmography: straight comedy. This is a very silly movie, and I’m particular about Coen silliness. I love all the wacky shit in Raising Arizona, but Scarlett Johansson complaining about a “fish ass” in a New York accent doesn’t do much for me. 

This is all sounding too negative. I do like this movie, and I like it more with each rewatch. Clooney is doing great dumbass work. The Kurgan and the Highlander are in this! Dolph Lundgren has a silent cameo. Brolin is perfect, and that scene with him listening to Clooney’s Communist ramblings as he grows increasingly enraged is hilarious. And Alden Ehrenreich steals the show. His catastrophic first scene in the costume drama with Ralph Fiennes is funny on so many levels.

But like his character says, or can’t say: “Would that it were so simple.” Simply put, this should be one of my favorite Coen Brothers movies, but instead I often forget it exists. As the Coens drift further and further away from their classic collaborations, perhaps I’ll look back on this as their final masterpiece before splitting up. (I know Scruggs came after this, but as I’ll get into next time, that felt less like a movie to me and more like a streaming experiment.) Still, after sifting through the best cinema has to offer this year, it is nice to step back in time to a simpler, sillier time, and Hail, Caesar! is perfect for that.

2025 IFJA Awards

“Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s grim, genre-defying ode to horror through a lens of historical racism and music, emerged as the top winner in the annual awards from the Indiana Film Journalists Association. 

In addition to Best Picture, it also won Best Original Screenplay, Best Ensemble Acting, Best Musical Score, Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

“One Battle After Another” took Runner-Up for Best Film and won five awards in total: Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson, Best Supporting Performance for Benicio del Toro, and Chase Infiniti for both the Breakout of the Year and the Edward Johnson-Ott Hoosier Award.

Timothée Chalamet won Best Lead Performance for “Marty Supreme.” Best Animated Film went to “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and “No Other Choice” won Best Foreign Language Film. “Good Boy” was honored for Original Vision. Will Patton won Best Vocal / Motion-Capture Performance for his narration of “Train Dreams.”

IFJA members issued this statement for the Edward Johnson-Ott Hoosier Award, which goes to a film, filmmaker or performer with strong Indiana ties:

 

“Few young actresses have burst onto the scene with such audacious confidence and soulful grounding as Chase Infiniti. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Infiniti held our rapt attention in ‘One Battle After Another’ even while sharing the screen with some of the most celebrated actors working in film today. She is the first performer to win the Hoosier Award in its 17-year history, and we eagerly await her next steps as an artist.”

“The Tenderness Tour,” directed by Andie Redwine (a previous Hoosier Award winner), was named Best Documentary Film for its poignant yet unconventional portrait of disability activist and IFJA member Richard Propes. The IFJA issued the following statement regarding the film’s win:

“The IFJA held in-depth conversations about whether a documentary about one of its members should be eligible for its awards. While acknowledging the potential perception of bias, the group collectively decided the film merited selection for its exploration of the important topic of medical debt and its depiction of Hoosier locales and people usually left unseen. Richard Propes was the primary subject of an outstanding documentary but did not have a role in its production or creative choices. He abstained from discussing the film in awards deliberation or voting in the documentary category.”

Eight other films were voted Finalists for Best Film. Along with the winner and runner-up, they represent the IFJA’s selection as the Top 10 movies of the year. 

Here is the complete list of winners and runners-up:

Best Picture

Winner: Sinners

Runner-up: One Battle After Another

 

Other Best Film Finalists / Top 10 Films: (listed alphabetically)

Bob Trevino Likes It

Hamnet

The Life of Chuck

Marty Supreme

No Other Choice

Train Dreams

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Weapons

Best Animated Film

Winner: K-Pop Demon Hunters

Runner-up: The Legend of Hei 2

 

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: No Other Choice

Runner-up: Sentimental Value

 

Best Documentary Film

Winner: The Tenderness Tour

Runner-up: Orwell: 2+2=5

 

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”

Runner-up: Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme”

 

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”

Runner-up: Mike Flanagan, “The Life of Chuck”

 

Best Director

Winner: Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”

Runner-up: Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”

 

Best Lead Performance

Winner: Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”

Runner-up: Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”

 

Best Supporting Performance

Winner: Benicio del Toro, “One Battle After Another”

Runner-up: Amy Madigan, “Weapons”

 

Best Vocal / Motion-Capture Performance

Winner: Will Patton, “Train Dreams”

Runner-up: Ebon Moss-Bachrach, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps”

 

Best Ensemble Acting

Winner: Sinners

Runner-up: One Battle After Another

 

Best Musical Score

Winner: Ludwig Göransson, “Sinners”

Runner-up: Jonny Greenwood, “One Battle After Another”

 

Breakout of the Year

Winner: Chase Infiniti (performer), “One Battle After Another”

Runner-up: Miles Caton (performer), “Sinners”

 

Best Cinematography

Winner: Autumn Donald Arkapaw, “Sinners”

Runner-up: Michael Bauman, “One Battle After Another”

 

Best Editing

Winner: Michael P. Shawver, “Sinners”

Runner-up: Andy Jurgensen, “One Battle After Another”

 

Best Stunt / Movement Choreography

Winner: Wade Eastwood (second-unit director / stunt coordinator), “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning”

Runner-up: Brian Machleit (stunt coordinator), “One Battle After Another”

Best Special Effects

Winner: Dennis Berardi, Ayo Burgess and Ivan Busquets (visual effects supervisors) and José Granell (miniatures / models supervisor), “Frankenstein”

Runner-up: Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl and Guido Wolter (visual effects supervisors) and Donnie Dean (special effects coordinator), “Sinners”

 

Original Vision Award

Winner: Good Boy

Runner-up: The Testament of Ann Lee

 

The Edward Johnson-Ott Hoosier Award*

Chase Infiniti, “One Battle After Another”

*As a special honor, no runner-up is named for the Hoosier Award. It honors founding IFJA member and longtime NUVO Newsweekly critic Edward Johnson-Ott.

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About IFJA: Established in 2009 by a dedicated group of Indiana journalists, the Indiana Film Journalists Association endeavors to promote quality film criticism in the Hoosier state and support Indiana’s film industry.

 

For more information, visit http://indianafilmjournalists.com.

Burn After Reading - "League of Morons"

I’ve finally reached the end of the trilogy of Coen Brothers movies that I like to varying degrees but have very little to comment upon with Burn After Reading. When it first came out, I was quite disappointed with this. Sure, the dildo sex chair thing Clooney makes was funny, and that Brad Pitt death scene is amazing, but overall I just didn’t like the pointlessness of it all. And worse, the characters were classic Coen stupid/evil, but they weren’t fun to be around. 

Years later, I enjoy Burn more, but it’s not one I’m interested in watching again any time soon. The characters are still too unlikeable for me, but the pointlessness of it worked this time around. In fact, the final scene with J. K. Simmons basically laying out how all of this was stupid and meaningless was my favorite moment of the entire movie. 

It took me three Coen comedies, but the ending of Burn After Reading made me realize that my issue with these three films isn’t so much that they are comedies; it’s that plot is not important. In my favorite Coen films, there is comedy, but it happens as part of a story. In Intolerable Cruelty, there are so many marriages and divorces that they become meaningless, and the film is more about wacky humor and Clooney discovering love. With The Ladykillers, there is a heist story, but it’s actually mostly happening in the background as the focus is on the idiosyncratic characters. In that film, they all seem so inept you almost forget that the robbery is actually successful. And then there’s Burn After Reading, which is almost a spoof of spy movies in that no one ever seems to precisely know what’s going on, and the plot is just there to show how stupid everyone is in this “league of morons.” 

But in films like Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, and even The Big Lebowski, the story is given more focus (even if it’s convoluted as it is in Crossing and Lebowski), so the characters, dumb or evil or otherwise, are on a mission in which comedic things sometimes happen. It certainly feels like I’m splitting hairs here, but I believe this is why some of their films hit more with me while others fall a little flat. 

Burn After Reading is my favorite of this trilogy of comedies because it acknowledges that the story is largely pointless. And, after years of watching spy movies, I often stop and think during them that none of it matters, and it seems like each side is going through the motions to justify their existence in the intelligence community. So even if Simmons didn’t learn anything by the end of this movie, I did.

Special Features

There isn’t a ton of stuff with this release. But I did enjoy a moment from one of the behind-the-interviews with the Coens. They talk about their actual first film about Washington, a remake of Advise & Consent they made on Super 8 when Joel was 12-13 and Ethan was 10. Ethan says it's “underrated.” By whom?

Mirror Life: Modern Zombies

As a lifelong fan of zombie films (Day of the Dead is my favorite), I have to admit that I’ve become a little tired of the genre lately. Mainly this is due to the flood of zombie material that started as a trickle with films like 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake and became an unbearable flood with The Walking Dead and its countless spinoffs. After taking a bit of a break from most things zombie (though I thoroughly enjoyed 28 Years Later), I was ready to get back into it when I came across Mirror Life: Modern Zombies.

From a typical zombie movie standpoint, Mirror Life should scratch that itch, though its low budget prevents any hardcore gore effects or large-scale zombie hordes. But it does provide a rotating narrative that ticks off every box on the zombie movie checklist: evil lab, check; found footage, check; government exterminations, check; neighbors and loved ones turning on each other, check; zombie-induced paranoia, check, etc. 

There’s a little bit of everything here, and while none of it is a standout of the genre, it does keep things moving quickly and never gets bogged down as some other zombie films can. For instance, when a few survivors of a drug-testing lab come across a doctor, you’d expect the obligatory exposition scene to follow with the doctor explaining what happened and how they never meant for this and blah blah blah. But here, the doctor is bludgeoned to death mid-sentence. It’s as if the movie was saying, “We don’t have time for this. We need to move on to a different character.” 

Another odd and amusing quirk was a moment when an infected neighbor chased a young girl into a woman’s house. He starts to make his way toward the house armed with hedge clippers, and she pulls a gun on him, stopping him. Rather than shoot him, she just tells him, Jedi mind trick style, that this isn’t the girl he’s looking for, and the girl he wants ran the other way. He accepts this and takes off. In any other zombie movie, there’s no dialogue at all, and the neighbor is shot and killed. It was interesting that these rage-infected zombies could be reasoned with. 

These small moments don’t make up for the overall film’s shortcomings, though. The multiple narratives feel more like a device to pad the time than a necessary way to tell the story. If just a couple of these elements were focused on a bit more, then perhaps this would have been a more memorable experience. As it is, Mirror Life is a decent enough zombie movie, but it most likely won’t make a lasting impression in the genre.

Special Features

This has all the mainstays of a good DVD release with a filmmaker commentary, deleted scenes, and outtakes.

Malpertuis

I had never heard of Malpertuis until I had the opportunity to review Radiance’s new release, the first time the film has been made available on blu-ray. I have a lot of cinematic blind spots, and Orson Welles is one of them. I’ve seen the popular films, but I’m ignorant when it comes to releases like this that had been edited and even retitled (The Legend of Doom House in the U.S.) until a director’s cut could restore the proper vision years later. Hoping to fill in a bit of that blind spot, I watched this, mainly looking forward to Welles’s performance. 

Much to my surprise, the film didn’t grab me until Welles’s character, Cassavius, died. Cassavius is the ruler of a world within a world in a decrepit and labyrinthine mansion called Malpertuis. He hopes to trap his young nephew, Jan (Mathieu Carrière), into taking his place at Malpertuis to oversee all his eccentric heirs. After lambasting all of them (a standout scene with Welles truly conveying disdain for everyone in the scene), Cassavius reveals that the only way to get his fortune is for everyone to stay at Malpertuis until only one man and woman are left alive. After his death, the film is able to truly begin. 

This premise intrigued me, but I was also worried. The film is clearly otherworldly, and I feared it would be one of those “mind-bending” films that doesn’t make sense for confusion’s sake. Sure, there are plenty of moments that didn’t make perfect sense to me, but it becomes very clear by the end who all the characters are. But the film still leaves enough ambiguous elements to leave it open to interpretation. 

The look of the film, presented in a new director-approved transfer, is the main selling point. The locations in Belgium are great, and the production design of the titular mansion are amazing. You never really get a feel of the actual size of the mansion, but the endless rooms and hallways and staircases make it seem like a cobbled together dream of a house more than an actual physical location. The camerawork adds to the disorienting design, making the viewer feel like they are there with Jan throughout. 

These elements establish Malpertuis as a fascinating look at what is or isn’t reality, or if it even matters in the end. Welles may be an entry point for the film, but by the end his presence is negligible compared to Jan’s journey. 

Special Features

Fans of this film should be thrilled with this release. All the featurettes and the commentary from a 2005 release are included, as are new interviews and a collectible booklet filled with new writing about the film. The original Cannes cut is also included, though only as a curio. 

I was most interested in the new interview with director Harry Kümel. He’s my favorite kind of elder statesman of cinema: uncaringly honest. He gives his blunt opinion of Welles, in which he claims “everyone was so relieved that they started to drink” when Welles was finished filming. But Kümel still praises the actor and considers him a friend. 

Kümel also casually says the star was not the greatest actor (I thought he was fine). And he goes on a slight tangent about Catherine Deneuve. Deneuve was up for the multiple role part that eventually went to Susan Hampshire (who truly seems like different characters in her roles). But Kümel didn’t cast her because she wasn’t wearing make-up when they first met. He goes on to say he lucked out by not casting her because Luis Buñuel told him that he hated Deneuve so much that he added a scene to Belle du Jour in which mud is thrown on her. I can’t find anything to back this claim up, and Buñuel worked with her again after that film, so who knows? But I still love hearing directors talk like this when I’m so used to typical press junket answers to everything.

The Ladykillers - The Coens Go Gospel

Despite my love of the Coen Brothers, there are a number of their films I’ve been dreading writing about to the point that I almost decided against doing this series. The Ladykillers, along with Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading, make up a trilogy of Coen comedies that I simply don’t have much to write about (yet I’ll still stretch this out to nearly 1,000 somehow). Though I’m still holding out hope for Burn. 

The Ladykillers is unique in their filmography for a few reasons, though. First, it is widely considered their worst film. I don’t like thinking about any of their movies as the “worst” because it makes it sound like a bad movie, and I don’t think they’ve made a bad film. Even with that qualifier, Ladykillers is not my least favorite Coen film. And when we add in the solo efforts, I’m not sure this is even bottom five for me. 

Your enjoyment of this, much like any comedy, depends on what you find funny. If you find Tom Hanks really going for it, speaking verbosely as some kind of sinister Colonel Sanders, then this might be for you. Or maybe you like Marlon Wayans and J. K. Simmons telling each other to fuck themselves multiple times. Or maybe you just like dark comedies. If that’s the case, as it was with me, then you might like this. It’s unlikely to be a favorite, but there’s fun to be had with it. 

Tom Hanks deserves quite a bit of praise because he is truly going for it. His interactions with Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall, carrying the film in her own right solely in her flummoxed reactions to Hanks’s bullshit) are great, and there’s a musicality to all the nonsense he spouts throughout. He even gets one of the great Coen waffle/pancake lines: “We must all have waffles forthwith!” And that’s saying something. It wouldn’t be saying something for any other filmmakers in cinematic history, but it’s something for the Coens. 

Wayans and Simmons worked the most for me, however. Simmons alone is great (“Easiest thing in the world!”), especially anytime his beloved Mountain Water…I mean Mountain Girl is brought up. But when he and Wayans start going after each other, it’s hilarious. They devolve to “fuck you”s so fast I can’t help but laugh. 

Aside from the wacky characters and dark humor, the movie looks great (Roger Deakins). And the Coens were trying something with the use of gospel music in the film (more on that later). So why is this so hated? Partly, it was despised at the time of its release because it’s a remake. I remember many reviews condemning it for being much less funny than the superior British original. I get this mentality, and god knows I’ve bitched about remakes plenty of times throughout the years. But that didn’t matter to me at the time or now. For one thing, I had never seen the original, and even after I watched it soon after seeing this, I didn’t find it all that amazing. I rarely find old comedies truly funny; I just prefer more modern humor. 

Other than the remake aspect, I can understand the humor not working for most people. But the fact that it’s the most hated in their filmography gives it a dubious honor for me personally because this was the first film of theirs I saw in theaters. But it wasn’t the first Coen film I bought a ticket for. As I recalled in my O Brother article, I bought a ticket for that film but snuck into Blow (only to get kicked out). I do like this movie, but I wish I could claim Big Lebowski or something as my first theater experience.

Finally, the Coens seemed to be trying to recapture the magic of the O Brother soundtrack phenomenon with this film. The only special features on the DVD are about the gospel music in the film, and there’s even a mid-credits sequence (a first and only, I believe, for them) featuring a performance at the church. Obviously, nothing about this film took off, so the gospel music fell on deaf ears. 

I’m not a big fan of gospel music, myself, but I am a fan of Bob Dylan, and there is a bit of a connection there. First, Mrs. Munson talks about a young Jewish man with a guitar who visited her church years ago. This could possibly be a reference to Dylan, who famously went gospel for three albums (Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love). That phase, much like this film, was met with disappointment and anger. 

As the years have passed, however, some people, myself included, have come around on Dylan’s gospel era. Perhaps others will eventually do the same with The Ladykillers. Sure, Dylan’s gospel stuff isn’t my favorite, but there are a few songs I enjoy immensely from those albums. Much in the same way, Ladykillers isn’t my favorite Coen film, but there are plenty of elements that make it a fun one. And some could argue The Ladykillers is like Dylan’s gospel era; in other words, his worst (I would argue his worst era is the Great American Songbook era [though I don’t know that it’s technically considered an era]). But if you give it some time and another chance, you might find a few bright spots, like Tom Hanks demanding waffles, or J. K. Simmons telling Marlon Wayans to go fuck himself.