I really, really need to remember to bring my headphones on airplanes. However, the headphones I have are a bit bulky and I now have this tendency to only bring the bare necessities for myself (no more computers on flights, only a phone) so I can carry more things for O. Headphones are far, far low on my list of priorities, and I think this needs to change if I ever want to enjoy a film on a flight again. I don’t watch anything except on flights after all.
The problem with “Hail, Caesar!” is that it had no subtitles, and when there are no subtitles the background noise of the airplane kills my capability of speech recognition. I probably only understood half of the words they were saying and spent a lot of energy and concentration on understanding what was going on, but even so I continued seeing the film because I got really into it. (I remember distinctly that I stopped watching “North by Northwest” 5 minutes into the film when I couldn’t understand what they were saying.) Now, almost half a year later, I must concede that I may not have understood enough, because I have mostly forgotten what happened. (Maybe we should re-watch this one at the PIFF this year, since Pip has also seen the film on another flight.) So blogging this film will be a little different this time because I remember so little of it.
Hail, Caesar!
The aspect I remember best in the show are the random Communist submarine (perhaps because in a film of absurdities, that was the most absurd) and Tilda Swinton’s character(s). It feels like she is in every movie these days and I am so impressed by how versatile she is considering that she, well, has that unusually strange face to start with. “Hail, Caesar!” doesn’t really seem to give her that to work with, even though she appears prominently in the very last scene of the film (as I remember it at least), and fully makes use of that strange face, basically turning it into a caricature. But that is fine, because she was an amusing and very memorable caricature.
Next, it is remarkable that I basically forgot Josh Brolin was the main character in the film. He largely disappears in the sea of the eccentric Hollywoodian characters he is being surrounded by, and it is clear that he is just supposed to give us somebody to relate to, and from whose perspective we can experience the film in a way that makes a little more sense. Speaking of making sense, I am a huge fan of the Coens’ intricate storylines. I think that “Miller’s Crossing” has something like the best plot of all of film history, and “Raising Arizona” only shortly follows. “Hail, Caesar!” goes into a similar direction, but I wasn’t able to enjoy it that much because my brain matter was mostly focused on trying to figure out what they are saying.
Finally, I vividly remember the gay sailormen dance scene. It’s one of those aspects that make the film much fun and gave it its high position in my year end ranking. Most Coen films are more serious even in their humor and the most light-hearted (in my opinion) is actually “True Grit” (which is not a comedy!) I think this is because their humor is so black with tendency to depict the worst in people. (With the exception of “Raising Arizona” maybe.) “Hail, Caesar!” is another one of those mostly light-hearted ones despite having its fill of rather shady characters, and I personally enjoyed that very much. Definitely a re-watchable film, although writing about it made me want to see “Miller’s Crossing” again.