Hail, Caesar!

    This last spring I was lucky enough to sit in for a Q&A with Joel Coen. The Coen Brothers are one of my favorite directors and I reference them often in this blog. So when asked about his next project and Joel described a movie called Hail, Caesar! about George Clooney being abducted by a group of extras, I was thrilled. I finally saw Hail, Ceasar! last weekend on a Valentine's date with my Mom. I was not thrilled.

    So let's get this clear. The movie is not awful. It's not Battleship or some other Hasbro garbage. But is not a good movie for them and is one of my least favorites by them. I like the visuals, the jokes, and the acting. But there were some key story elements that did not happen. For example, there's a plot line that involves a dastardly act George Clooney's character did on his first Hollywood film. The act was revealed at the end of the movie in an offscreen conversation and written out quickly. Additionally a lot of the characters don't have purpose or a desire, other than create work for Josh Brolin's character Eddie Mannix.

                                                            Mannix is the protagonist of this twisty, seemingly meaningless comedy-drama. That description in itself shows how scattered the characters are. Huge stars like Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, and Scarlett Johansson pop in and out of the story with very little to do and loose ends that get tied up by a simple walk and talk with Eddie Mannix in the last five minutes.

The only actor who is given any other meaningful screen time is Alden Ehrenreich who gives a marvelous performance as country good ole boy Hobie Doyle. Hobie is a stud with horses but is brought into a adapted play directed by Ralph Fiennes' Lawrence Lawrence. The scene provides the only true moment of comedy of the whole film with an endearing Hobie and the artist Lawrence. 

  

     Now at the Q&A I learned about Hail, Caesar! before while it was shooting. This could be me only hearing what I wanted to hear but I could have sworn that Joel Coen said that Hail, Caesar! was going to be a musical.

     It fits with the current cut of the movie. There are large musical interludes with Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, and Alden Ehrenreich and music and old Hollywood is a big theme. Additionally the explanation of major off screen plot points through dialogue would make sense if these were originally supposed to be shown in a musical number. Channing Tatum's character is given a full length musical number and then has no dialogue until what seems to be the climactic scene. And this climactic scene has absolutely no context. 

     I think Hail, Caesar! was supposed to be in a musical and somewhere in the production that was cut. What was left was a hodge podge of actors, characters, and story lines tied together by Eddie Mannix and Roger Deakins.

Fargo

It was long overdue for me to watch the Cohen brothers' film, "Fargo".  After a long editing session in the library, I headed back to my room and pulled it up on Netflix.  This 1996 film was billed as a "homespun murder story", but it is so much more than that.  The Academy award winning screenplay written by Joel and Ethan Coen fires on all cylinders.  It can readily be described as a thriller comedy, featuring both very dark and very hilarious moments.  It definitely satirizes and turns a mirror to the Minnesotan lifestyle that the Coen brothers grew up in.  "Fargo" currently has a rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, holds two Oscars (one for the original screenplay and one for lead actress Frances McDormand).   Joel Coen also received the award for best director at the '96 Cannes Film Festival.

This film takes place mainly in Fargo, ND and Brainerd, MN.  It follows the story of Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) as he pays two criminals Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife.  Lundegaard's big plan is to get his very wealthy father in law to pay off Showalter and Grimsrud to get his daughter back.  Then the kidnappers would receive half the ransom, while Lundegaard receives the other half.  Lundegaard is in financial trouble and is in desperate need of the money.  Well as one would imagine, things don't go quite to plan.  As the kidnappers make their escape things are all well and good, until a trooper stops them on the highway in Brainerd, MN for not having plates on their car (a car Lundegaard gave them from his father in law's dealership).  It is at this point that the shit hits the proverbial fan and guns start blazing.  I won't get much further into specifics (spoilers!).  Once the dust has settled, Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) proceeds to investigate the situation.  In this pregnant police chief, we see a lot of the satirizing of Minnesotans that the Coen brothers' script is filled with.  These four actors pull off truly amazing performances, made easy by the beautiful script.  Macy did receive an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.

"Fargo" also pulls a lot of it's power from the beautiful cinematography.  All credit here goes to the great Rodger Deakins.  Every shot in this film is very intentional and well crafted.  Deakins has incredible wide shots, as well as strong close ups/reverse shots.

I could post even more stills from this film, hundreds of stills.  The shot composition is consistently strong, with everything being lined up with such care.  Deakins is also well known for playing with light in a profound way, which we see in all of the above images.  In particular I love the way the light falls on Buscemi and the way car lights play in the dense snow.  The focus pulling that occurs during the heavy snow is incredibly beautiful as well.  Overall I can not recommend this film enough!  Take a look at the trailer (best quality I could find) and then head over to Netflix to watch!! Don't wait for it to be taken off Instant!  

A new way of looking at films

I recently discovered a new tumblr, which is often dangerous to my productivity, but I've found this one particularly interesting as it offers an interesting new way of looking at films.  It is called moviebarcode, and it posts single images, or barcodes, representing the entire course of a movie.  These images are made up of a number of still frames, evenly distributed throughout the movie, which are then stretched upward so that only the main color information remains.  It offers a very nice, birds-eye view of the art direction and overall color tones and moods of a film.  There is also an index so that you can easily look up movies you are interested in.

O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)

For example, this is the barcode from the 2000 film "O Brother, Where Art Thou".  This was the first film to be digitally color graded in order to make an artistic choice.  In this case, much of the footage was tweaked to make the landscapes look drier and more golden, to fit the setting of the Dust Bowl in the midwest.  This is easily apparent in the barcode, which is overwhelmingly gold and beige.  You can also see, right at the very beginning, how the film starts out in black and white, before the saturation is added back in to produce the color.

The Matrix (1999)

Here's another example: The Matrix.  Almost every scene in The Matrix has a distinctive green tint to it, which is easily apparent in this image.

Harry Potter: Complete Series (2001-2011)

This is one of my favorite examples, because it shows some of the applications that these images could have.  This is all eight Harry Potter movies, sequentially, which means we can see some interesting trends.  First of all, we can see that the mood of the series gets progressively darker, until the last installment is almost entirely black.  This visual trend clearly follows the tone of the films and the stories themselves.  It also shows the differences in the styles of the directors; for instance, Chris Columbus filmed the first ones primarily inside, which is shown by all the warm tones at the beginning of the image.  When directing the third installment, Alfonso Cuarón made the conscious decision to shift to a more outdoors, location based film, which is shown in the abrupt transition to blues and greens.

By looking at multiple films at once like this, we can observe patterns, similarities, and differences that are both interesting and useful.  Using these images could be an easy way to examine multiple films by broad categories such as genre or time period, which might expose some of the stereotypes or tropes that are used in different types of filmmaking.

Coen Brothers

     I recently watched No Country For Old Men (2007), directed by the Coen Brothers, for the first time. This movie was on my list of movies to watch so I sat down by myself and enjoyed the film. There is mostly natural sound throughout the movie and no music to accompany the characters. The sounds of wind and the environment reflect the main character's motives and convey a feeling of isolation and loneliness. Javier Bardem plays the 'villian' in the movie and is truly insane and dynamic. After seeing Skyfall (2012) last weekend, I respect Bardem for playing such diverse characters and being able to become the character he is casted as. The movie is now on my list of favorite movies and accompanied by it are many other Coen Brothers movies. Ethan and Joel Coen are two of my favorite directors and I've been making an attempt to watch all of their movies. Thus far, I've seen No Country For Old Men, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. I plan to watch True Grit and Burn After Reading. Why do I like their movies? The Coen brothers direct movies with the most unusual characters and unlikely stories. The cinematography is amazing and the actors featured in the movies are some of my favorite actors (John Goodman, Jeff Bridges, Josh Brolin, Steve Buscemi, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and many more). Below are Coen Brothers trailers for movies I've seen. Watch their movies.

                                                     No Country For Old Men

                                                          The Big Lebowski

                                                 O Brother,Where Art Thou?

                                                              Fargo