George Clooney’s Hail Caesar! Teaser Will Make You ROFL

In an interview with the Daily Beast, the filmmaking duo behind such classic films as The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, and this month’s Hail, Caesar! said that the backlash against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over the lack of diversity among this year’s Oscar nominees, along with boycott pledges from stars such as Will Smith and Spike Lee, ascribes more importance to the awards show than it actually deserves.

And their new barrel-of-monkeys period piece, Hail, Caesar!

Hill’s Joe Silverman, a man who can keep his mouth shut and is employed by the studio from time to time. There are also plenty that will only be fully enjoyed by people who are fans of all Coen Brothers movies. He is beset with problems on all sides: a minor actress taking naughty photos, a singing cowboy whose accent is getting in the way of his attempt to make a drawing-room comedy, a swim-picture star DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), whose out-of-wedlock pregnancy can no longer be concealed by her mermaid outfit.

Actors: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Channing Tatum. The Coen brothers don’t have time for that bothersome thing called seriousness.

For some, scenes such as a tap-dance number performed by Tatum’s Burt Gurney – as a Navy man about to go off to sea with his mates, with whom he’s having a drink in a bar and commiserating about how none of them will see another “dame” for a while – may be worth the price of a ticket.

“It’s still storytelling, so it’s still hard to control”, Ethan says. “It sort of evolved as it went along”. And it’s not the song and dance reminiscent of the days when Fred Astaire graced the floor with his tap dancing or the sword-and-sandals epics like Ben-Hur or Spartacus.

Brolin gets by far the most time, and is solid but nothing special as Mannix.

“Hail, Caesar!” was shot at studios or on location around Los Angeles. He takes the sins of his studio and its stars upon him, listens to their prayers for help, and ultimately renders judgment, forgiveness or retribution. The Bible epic was staged at the Bronson Caves in Griffith Park, and a nightclub sequence was done at the Hollywood Palladium, which opened in 1940 with a Frank Sinatra concert. But then it abruptly stops, as if it runs out of energy. That cinematic odyssey deftly moved the same characters through a series of situations, while “Hail, Caesar!” – though it has a common thread in Mannix – gets lost in its own hustle and bustle. It’s literally all in a day’s work. “Just our perverse thing going on there”.

With the exception of Mannix, who is inspired by the real-life Eddie Mannix, a fixer at Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer during the 1930s through 1960s, all the characters are fictional hybrids of real Golden Age stars. The pair were tasked by MGM to hush up any potential scandal, and in Hollywood lore they supposedly covered up some juicy ones.

“We got so much grief that we chose to sit down and write the script”, says Joel. Clooney, who spends much of the movie in a toga, plays him in a thoroughly winning way. It’s the best scene in the movie, and one you’ll still be humming when you leave the theater. And despite the Coens’ signature brand of quirkiness and a running time under two hours, the film somehow manages to feel sluggish and flat.

“He has very little movie-star vanity and great comic timing”. They saved up and bought a Super 8 camera and remade the films they saw.

Home Movies George Clooney Mugs for “Hail, Caesar!”. He has to rescue starlets from their mishaps (“It’s not really her and she wants to contribute to your pension fund”, he tells some cops in the opening scene), fix the press and make sure the studio’s money-makers turn up on set.