Ladykillers , the movie - reviewed

[MikeHunt]

THE LADYKILLERS

THE COEN BROTHERS STUMBLE WITH THIS UNFUNNY MESS

The Ladykillers is a horrible movie. When I saw the commercials that featured a hyper Tom Hanks made up to look like some bizarro Colonel Sanders on crack, it just looked bad. And when I saw that Marlon Wayans was in the cast mugging it up, it looked even worse. But after seeing that The Coen Brothers were behind it, the wonderful geniuses who’ve made O Brother Where Art Thou?, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and other films that rank among my favorites, I had faith. They had never let me down before. Until now…

There’s very little that works about this movie. As I suspected, Tom Hanks’ awkward jittery southern gentleman character makes the film damn near unwatchable. His ridiculous appearance serves no functional purpose, he has absolutely nothing funny to say, and his entire performance is best described as “hideously unwatchable.” Not since Bette Midler played the horribly bucktoothed lead witch in Hocus Pocus, was there a more unappealing character to taint the screen.

He’s not even unappealing in a wonderfully sleazy way. Perhaps given to Billy Bob Thornton, the character would have worked well, but in the hands of Hanks, Professor G.H. Dorr is like some bad Saturday Night Live character in an unfunny skit that just wont end.

As an ensemble piece it doesn’t work either. Of his fellow criminal accomplices, only Tzi Ma, as “The General” provides any laughs, and that’s only with some brief one liners and great physical humor.

The casting of Marlon Wayans as Gawain McSam is a fiasco. His performance, the majority of which consists of making bug eyed faces and shouting, “What the fuck are you looking at?”, shows no more range than his role in the Scary Movie parody films. They may as well have put Carrot Top in the part.

The plot is nothing to get excited about either. Professor Dorr rents a room from a kindly, slightly eccentric church-going widow named Irma Hall (played wonderfully by Marva Munson, the only worthwhile performance in the picture), in order to go down in to her root cellar. Would that have been a euphemism for something it may have been interesting, but he merely wants to dig a tunnel with his bumbling friends into the safe room of a neighboring casino boat to steal over a million dollars in cash.

There’s nothing original or clever about this heist. The mediocre Woody Allen film Small Time Crooks used a similar robbery device to much better effect, and the glossy Ocean’s Eleven at least had some fun twists as the job unfolded to add some surprise and intrigue. No such luck here.

Everything about this film feels rushed and empty. My hopes for an outstanding gospel filled soundtrack were dashed as well, as most of the selections served little more purpose than background noise.

I haven’t seen a misstep from a director I loved since Spike Lee made Girl 6.

All the original quirky fun and sharp performances you’d expect from a Coen Brothers film are nowhere to be found in The Ladykillers. As great of an actor that Tom Hanks is, he just doesn’t seem to fit in the Coen universe. Hopefully they’ll pull out Clooney, Turturro, Thornton, Robbins, or Buscemi for the next film to cleanse our palette of this disaster.

retroCRUSH Rating: 1 OUT OF 5 MARTINI GLASSES

-Robert Berry

[email protected]

:rotfl:

Edited March 27, 2004 by Kooperman

[DudeAsInCool]

Can you get the soundtrack info and post it?

[Kooperman]

‘Ladykillers’ is a killer remake

Tom Hanks stars as a Poe-quoting casino robber

Touchstone Pictures

Tom Hanks and Marlon Wayans star in "The Ladykillers."

REVIEW

By John Hartl Film critic MSNBC

Updated: 3:11 p.m. ET March 23, 2004

One of those rare remakes that clicks, “The Ladykillers” is faithful enough to satisfy fans of the 1955 original — and different enough to please moviegoers who know the original’s star, Alec Guinness, only as a supporting “Star Wars” player.

Joel and Ethan Coen, who successfully resurrected the Hollywood screwball comedy with “Intolerable Cruelty” just six months ago, have now revived the spirit of the British Ealing Studios comedies of the 1950s. They’ve handed Tom Hanks the Guinness role, relocated the story from England to a town on the Mississippi River, and substituted gospel songs for classical music.

The result doesn’t look or sound much like the original, but the plot is almost intact, the pacing is similarly precise, and the darkly ironic tone is nearly identical. Even the Coens’ cheerfully grotesque wood-chipper humor, so central to their masterpiece, “Fargo,” turns out to be a reasonable extension of the 1955 film’s bouncy black humor.

Genteel yet sinister, Hanks plays Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III, Ph.D., a Poe-quoting crook who dresses like Col. Sanders and assembles a gang of crooks for a casino robbery. He and his comrades pretend to be musicians, and he uses his nervous giggle and literary pretensions to charm a not-so-little old lady, Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), into renting him a room in her house — and access to her root cellar — so that they can “practice” their instruments.

Instead of the very British collection of crooks in the first “Ladykillers,” the remake features a chain-smoking Buddhist (Tzi Ma), an outrageously temperamental casino worker (Marlon Wayans), perhaps the dumbest dumb jock in film history (Ryan Hurst), and a puffed-up thief named Garth (J.K. Simmons), who is afflicted with various problems, including delusions about his role in the civil-rights movement.

Several of the movie’s most inspired scenes involve confrontations between Goldthwait and Garth, who brings along his clueless squeeze, known only as Mountain Girl (Diane Delano), and insists on compensation when he loses a finger in an accident. Goldthwait attempts to resort to logic to show Garth why neither is a good idea, but mostly he ends up demonstrating, hilariously, how certain forms of persuasion are bound to fail.

Hanks, who uses what sounds like a Martian’s idea of a Southern accent, is functioning near his comedic peak in these moments. He’s just as funny when he and Hall are exploring the tunnel-vision nature of their characters, who thrive in their own worlds but have a tough time making sense to others. At one point, Goldthwait hides under a bed, only to be discovered by the widowed Marva, who has a maternal instinct for coming up with semi-plausible explanations for the inexplicable.

Once again working with cinematographer Roger Deakins, the Coen brothers have created one of their best-looking movies. Particularly striking is the recurring series of overhead shots of garbage barges that move gracefully under a bridge and take on more loads than expected. The result is a sublime running gag that pays witty tribute to the classic movie that inspired this one.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4586982/

[Bombardier]

This movie looks great. I never saw the original, but I'll see this one.

I have never watch a movie with Tom Hanks in it that I didn't enjoy. I don't this one will be any different.

:)

[Kooperman]

THE LADYKILLERS / **1/2 ®

March 26, 2004

Professor G.H. Dorr: Tom Hanks

Marva Munson: Irma P. Hall

Gawain MacSam: Marlon Wayans

Garth Pancake: J.K. Simmons

The General: Tzi Ma

Lump: Ryan Hurst

Mountain Girl: Diane Delano

Touchstone Pictures presents a film written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Based on the 1955 screenplay by William Rose. Running time: 104 minutes. Rated R (for language and sexual references).

BY ROGER EBERT

The genius of Alec Guinness was in his anonymity. He could play a character so ingratiating that he ingratiated himself right into invisibility, and that was the secret of his work in "The Ladykillers," a droll 1955 British comedy that also starred Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom. Now comes a Coen brothers remake with Tom Hanks in the Guinness role, and although Hanks would be the right actor to play a low-key deceiver, the Coens have made his character so bizarre that we get distracted just by looking at him.

Hanks plays Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, who claims to be a professor of Latin and Greek, who dresses like Col. Sanders, and who seems to be channeling Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price. As in the original, he rents a room from a sweet little old lady, and plans to use her home as a base for a criminal scheme. In this case, he and four associates will tunnel from her root cellar into the cash room of a nearby casino named the Bandit Queen. The professor explains to the L.O.L. that the five of them are a classical music ensemble who need a quiet place to practice; they play music on a boom box to cover the sounds of their tunneling.

The other crooks represent the extremes of available casting choices; all of them, like the professor, are over-the-top in a way rarely seen outside Looney Tunes. Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans) is a trash-talking hip-hop janitor at the casino; Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) is a mustachioed explosives expert who asphyxiates a dog in an unfortunate gas mask experiment; the General (Tzi Ma) is a chain-smoker who once apparently specialized in tunnels for the Viet Cong, and Lump (Ryan Hurst) is a dimwitted muscle man who will do the hard labor.

The little old lady is named Marva Munson, and she is played by Irma P. Hall in the one completely successful comic performance in the movie. Yes, she's a caricature, too: A churchgoing widow who doesn't allow smoking in the house, has regular conversations with the portrait of her dead husband, and is not shy about complaining to the sheriff. But her character is exaggerated from a recognizable human base, while the others are comic strip oddities.

Even Marva is sometimes betrayed by the Coens, who give her speeches that betray themselves as too clever by half (protesting a neighbor's loud "hippity-hop" music, she complains that the songs use the N-word "2,000 years after Jesus! Thirty years after Martin Luther King! In the Age of Montel!" If she'd said "Oprah," it might have been her talking, but when she says "Montel," you can feel the Coens' elbow digging in your side. There's also a subplot involving Mrs. Munson's regular donations to Bob Jones University; she is apparently unaware of its antediluvian attitudes about race. There are too many moments where dialogue seems so unmatched to the characters that they seem to be victims of a drive-by ventriloquist.

Now let me say that although the movie never jells, its oddness keeps it from being boring. Tom Hanks provides such an eccentric performance that it's fun just to watch him behaving -- to listen to speeches that coil through endless florid ornamentation. That the purpose of a criminal in such a situation would be to become invisible -- as Guinness, despite his bad teeth, tried to do in the 1955 film -- escapes the Coens. But I am importing unwanted logic into a narrative that manifestly is disinterested in such fineries of specification, as the professor might declare.

There are some big laughs in the movie, some of them involving body disposal and another one as Garth Pancake demonstrates the safe handling of explosives. When Mrs. Munson invites the church ladies over for tea and invites the nice gentlemen in the basement to play something, Hanks offers a poem by Poe as consolation prize, and rises to a peak of mannered sublimity. As the church ladies gaze in speechless astonishment at his performance, I was reminded of a day in the 1960s I was in a working-class pub in a poor neighborhood of Sligo, in the west of Ireland. The TV set over the bar was tuned to "The Galloping Gourmet." The regulars stared at him speechlessly, until finally one said: "Will you look at that fellow!" That's how the ladies feel about Professor G. H. Dorr.

There's a lot of high-spirited gospel music in the movie, which brings the plot to a halt for a concert in Mrs. Munson's church. It's wonderful as music, but not really connected to the movie, unlike the music in the Coens' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" For that matter, the four- and 12-letter dialogue of the Wayans character fits awkwardly into a story where no one else talks that way; his potty mouth also wins the film an otherwise completely unnecessary R rating.

What the movie finally lacks, I think, is modesty. The original "Ladykillers" was one of a group of small, inspired comedies made at the low-rent Ealing Studios near London, where Guinness was the resident genius; his other titles from the period include "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949), "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1950) and "The Man in the White Suit" (1951). These were self-effacing films; much of their humor grew out of the contrast between nefarious schemes and low-key, almost apologetic behavior.

The Coens' "Ladykillers," on the other hand, is always wildly signaling for us to notice it. Not content to be funny, it wants to be FUNNY! Have you ever noticed that the more a comedian wears funny hats, the less funny he is? The old and new "Ladykillers" play like a contest between Buster Keaton and Soupy Sales.

Roger Ebert's review of "Kind Hearts and Coronets" is in the Great Movies series at www.suntimes.com/ebert.

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

[Kooperman]

MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE LADYKILLERS'

A Gang of Impostors vs. One True Lady

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: March 26, 2004

fter many years of clean-shaven, all-American affability, Tom Hanks has lately begun to explore the possibilities of facial hair and regional accents: the harsh New England vowels of "Catch Me if You Can," for example, and also the thin mustache of "Road to Perdition" and the shaggy four-year growth of "Cast Away." In "The Ladykillers," an uneven, prankish caper comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen, he sports a resplendent Old South Vandyke, with orotund diction to match.

Giddy with the joy of playing, at long last, a bona fide villain, Mr. Hanks swans through the role of G. H. Dorr, Ph.D., a supposed professor of classics whose true vocation is crime, with a vaudevillian relish that would be unseemly if it were not contagious. His laugh, issuing through what appears to be prosthetic (and in any case none too clean) teeth, is a stuttering whinny, and his mouth also unleashes a flood of florid Mississippi nonsense.

Hand on heart he reels off lines from Edgar Allan Poe and paeans to the bygone glories of Greece and Rome. To hear Mr. Hanks pronounce the word "cinquecento" — if this were a play you might need an umbrella — is almost worth the price of the ticket.

Since "Miller's Crossing" the Coen brothers have frequently dabbled in an inimitable form of antiquarian pastiche, mining old styles and genres to remake movies that were never made in the first place. "The Ladykillers," which follows last year's underrated neo-screwball "Intolerable Cruelty," is an actual remake, transplanting Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 British farce into the rich topsoil of the American South.

There is, as ever, a strong argument for leaving the original alone — it would be hard for any cast to measure up to one that included Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers — but while this "Ladykillers" is a bit of a throwaway, it does have its moments.

It starts on a high note, with a verbal barrage that is one of the funniest opening scenes since Preston Sturges's "Sullivan's Travels," to which the Coens paid homage in "O Brother Where Art Thou." Marva Munson, a devout African-American widow (played with stereotype-destroying gusto by the amazing Irma P. Hall), arrives at a small-town sheriff's office in high dudgeon, complaining about young people and their "hippety-hop" music, much to the puzzlement of the impatient sheriff (George Wallace).

Soon after, Professor Dorr arrives at the house Mrs. Munson shares with her orange cat and a glowering portrait of her late husband, Othar, inquiring about renting a room. With the help of a raggedy crew of crooks — absurdly masquerading as an amateur early-music ensemble — he plans to dig a tunnel into the vault where proceeds from the local riverboat casino are kept.

The plans, as you might expect, are complicated both by Mrs. Munson's inconvenient presence and by tensions within the gang of would-be master thieves. Pancake, the phlegmatic demolition expert (J. K. Simmons), is perpetually at odds with Gawain (Marlon Wayans), who is full of hippety-hop attitude. Mr. Simmons and Mr. Wayans, irrepressible showboaters, overshadow the two remaining conspirators, a Vietnamese general (Tzi Ma) and a dumb football player (Ryan Hurst), who are pretty much one-joke characters.

The movie itself is one long joke, and there are long stretches where its inventiveness flags and its humor wears thin. It would be hard to think of a more threadbare premise — I will not bore you with a catalog of recent heist pictures; if you have seen any besides "Oceans Eleven" and "Heist" you will be plenty bored already — and the Coens do not seem interested in investing it with new life. Rather, the story is a flimsy frame to be ornamented with diverting bric-a-brac, and the movie as a whole is something of a paradox: a work of elaborate and painstaking craftsmanship that is at the same time a piece of junk.

But one man's junk is another man's collectible, and I am happy to add "The Ladykillers" to my boxed set of Coeniana. Compared with "O Brother" and "The Man Who Wasn't There" it is unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.

The cinematography, by Roger Deakins, is as toothsome as homemade praline, and there are the requisite grisly touches: a severed finger that becomes a cat toy, a spate of sudden fatalities at the end. What keeps the movie going — aside from the rambunctious performances of Ms. Hall and Mr. Hanks — is the Coens' obsessive devotion to the American vernacular.

Few screenwriters take such virtuosic delight in the cacophonous music of American English, and these hyperactive filmmakers seem happiest when they sit still and listen to the various cadences of speech, from Professor Dorr's high-flown erudition to Mrs. Munson's righteousness to Gawain's profane improvisations. You sometimes suspect that the whole enterprise was cooked up to produce nonsensical lines like "I was a positive lemur" and (my personal favorite) "Othar never blowed no shofar."

Perhaps not. But "The Ladykillers," which opens nationwide today, nonetheless swells with sanctified harmonies. As they did for "O Brother," the Coens, aided once again by T Bone Burnett, have assembled a rich soundtrack full of half-forgotten, unforgettable American music, in this case mostly gospel.

The sublime sounds of the Rev. Thomas Dorsey, the Soul Stirrers, Blind Willie Johnson and the Swan Silvertones (whose version of "A Christian's Plea" is sampled in an amazing hip-hop track by the Nappy Roots) are immune to mockery, and they provide a curiously effective counterpoint — and a measure of redemption — for the worldly, and sometimes world-weary, humor the Coens purvey.

"The Ladykillers" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for profanity and violence.

THE LADYKILLERS

Written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; based on "The Ladykillers" by William Rose; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Roderick Jaynes; music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Dennis Gassner; produced by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Tom Jacobson, Barry Sonnenfeld and Barry Josephson; released by Touchstone Pictures. Running time: 104 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Tom Hanks (Prof. G. H. Dorr), Irma P. Hall (Marva Munson), Marlon Wayans (Gawain MacSam), J. K. Simmons (Garth Pancake), Ryan Hurst (Lump), Tzi Ma (the General) and George Wallace (Sheriff Wyner).

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/03/26/movies/26LADY.html?8mu