I just watched two of the Coen's movies that are never really talked about and I always wondered why? These two films are Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and LadyKillers (2004) the remake.
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
So at first this film I wasn't really taken back at how bad people had always said it was, I was actually enjoying it. Then I kept watching and I realized that I was watching a comedy and I wasn't laughing at all. Clooney I have always thought is an interesting actor because I usually in dramatic films are very attached to his acting with a few exceptions, but in the Coen's movies his comedy sometimes makes him overreact facially to everything that is going on in the scene. This bothers me because it reminds me of a cartoon not acting. I didn't think a lot of the scenes needed to be in the film as well, they felt more like "Oh! We have a great gag so let's create a whole scene around it instead of make it work for the actual story" and I wasn't a huge fan of that. The ending is also so cliche and I really thought that the Coen's were above this with their script writing. Overall, I enjoyed myself while watching it and some of it wasn't painful, but it has far too many problems to really consider anywhere close to a good movie.
LadyKillers (2004)
This movie opens with a bunch of different scenes introducing all of us to the characters we are going to get incorporated through this throughout the film. I to be honest found this to be jarring and the only bit that really worked for me was J.K. Simmons, the rest of it was just a lot of really cheesy jokes and physical comedy that doesn't work at all. The movie doesn't really change from this throughout the whole run-time so if your not a fan of the first 20 minutes just stop watching. The thing that I would say is the best part of this film are the moments where J.K. and Wayan's are interacting. I found it to be very funny because I have always enjoyed the levels they can both go and unlike everyone else it isn't just stupid physical comedy. What surprised me about this film was how badly written it is from a story structure, I mean what happened to the Coen's for a second there? How can the person who made this 3 years later make No Country for Old Men? Tom Hank's whole vibe to his role is to just ramble through dialogue acting like he is a genius, but it didn't sell me very much. It's a heist film that doesn't focus too much on the heist and it's kind of just badly done building absolutely no suspense whatsoever. For a Coen fan you might want to check it out, but it really just isn't worth your time as a viewer.
I'm gonna get some **** for this, but how do you put these guys up as some of the greatest directors of all time when they make films that are like this. For me, a director who can be held up in the top 50 of all time is someone who hasn't made a single bad film. The same thing for me kind of goes for Spielberg, but that's a whole different conversation.
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