Hacker Cinema
Hail, Caesar!
2016 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
When a Hollywood star mysteriously disappears in the middle of filming, the studio sends their fixer to get him back.
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5 comments on Hacker News
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
The humor seems to come from there being a large body of people (mostly women, evidently?) who don’t realize anyone who’s not, like, a classics professor, thinks about the Roman Empire more than almost-never, and another (evidently mostly men?) who don’t get how someone could think about it less than at least once a week, assuming they think about anything at all.
I’m firmly in the “how do you not?” camp. The mutual confusion between these two groups is the joke, I think.
Another facet may be the implication that all these men must be obsessed with Rome or want a return of the Roman Empire or something, which is also a funny notion, but I don’t think that’s usually the case. There are dozens of other things I think about at least as often, personally, and the common thread is that they have lots of connections to various topics I’m interested in, not some obsession with e.g. Rome.
For my part, Rome is heavily connected to all of philosophy, politics, European, Maghreb, and Near-East history, literature, and film (it’s a common setting or topic, even when not directly the topic, as in the Coen’s Hail Caesar) and since I’m interested in all those things, I mean, yeah, obviously I think about it at least once a day. I also think about various ancient Greek states daily, and Sumer and Ancient Egypt at least once a week, and often much more, I’d guess. Doesn’t mean I’m particularly obsessed with any of them, they’re just strongly connected to a ton of my interests.
I thought the cinematography and set design was fantastic. The rest of the film is disorganized, lacks a coherent angle/point of view, and just kind of meanders along. Some of the acting was also off (Oldman playing a New Yorker but seems to have a slight British accent, etc.)
Overall, it felt like a worse version of Hail Caesar, without the Coen Brothers’ mastery of ‘pointlessness.’
They used to censor language and 'ideas'. You could not attack Christianity, or present civil figures (ie the President, the Flag) in a bad light. Hollywood up to 1970's was very much about projecting morality in the classical sense. (Edit: Cohen Brother's 'Hail Caesar' depicts this hilariously with 1950's Hollywood execs in a funny meeting with various Priests and Rabbis trying to get approval for a big '10 Commandments'-like epic. Hilarity ensues as the various sects begin to argue about God ...)
1970 - 2010 it was mostly just language i.e. this or that word.
We are now back to censoring 'ideas' but it's the other side of the fence. NYT called for banning 'Paw Patrol' (kids cartoon) for its 'normalisation' of the social roles of police, 'COPS' was dropped because of its ostensible 'glorification of police'. Which I can possibly understand in an intellectual sense, but pragmatically it's completely ridiculous. 30 Rock, one of the smartest and best comedies every madd - and it's not even 10 years old - is already getting episodes banned.
My favorite so far is Samuel L. Jackson
Highest rated film: Pulp Fiction (1994) - 9.0 Lowest rated film: Hail Caesar (1994)- 2.9