Посмотрела "Аве, Цезарь!"

[morreth]

Один вопрос - об чем это вообще?
До варианта "о том, какое говно эта студийная система времен "Золотого века Голливуда" я сама додумалась. А вот какие еще варианты?

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[j-reads-comics.livejournal.com]

Очень странно, у меня все работает(.

Ну... тогда вот так:

Halfway through the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There's a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it's a picture of the future. There's another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens' other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves "The Future." The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially-connected to George Reeves's death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. ("Really, it's too much Eddie. You're not that bad.") Mannix--more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text--indeed doesn't seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. "It's hard, Father." And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn't know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Hail, Caesar! is about the coming of the future in literal and figurative terms and how Mannix finds himself at a crossroads between taking a job with Lockheed Martin (the mushroom cloud) or staying in place doing, as he describes, something very difficult but that feels very correct. It suggests that HUAC was a good thing, because those writers were commies in collusion with a foreign state. And that it was a good thing because those writers were opportunistic, capitalist swine looking for their piece. They are guilty of spiritual blight. If Inside Llewyn Davis' closest analogue is Barton Fink, Hail Caesar!'s closest analogue is A Serious Man. They're both stories of coming to terms with the idea that although there is a God, there is no comfort in His existence. They're both stories of men who have given their lives to a belief. Fascinatingly, the Coens imply that God is the movies--divinity is the flicker of image on screen. I like this idea. I'm reminded of the Shroud of Turin hoax, the transfer of image to medium; that interplay of light. Stained glass in cathedrals. I believe that watching film closely approximates the physiological conditions under which Man first learned about his culture and his place in it. The moment of mythology, humanism, self-awareness. That's God, you see. At least it has been for me, in those dark, cavernous tabernacles, the movie houses of my baptismal youth. But awareness comes at a cost.

Parallel to Mannix's story is Baird Whitlock's (George Clooney). Baird is the biggest star in the Hollywood firmament, and he's headlining the spectacular from which the film takes its title. It's one of those Technicolor Bible extravaganzas. Baird is drugged and kidnapped by The Future. He wakes in their midst, arms himself with cucumber finger-sandwiches, and hears for the first time Marxist theories concerning the distribution of wealth. He's guileless. And fascinated. Hail, Caesar! posits that adherents to any faith are ultimately penitents before empty vesicles. A rabbi (Joe Dante regular Robert Picardo) has a beautiful moment where he responds to the question of whether or not Christ is being depicted "accurately" with an accusation that everyone in the room is, if not a moron, at least insane. For The Future, it's a writer's problem. It's a crisis of ego, fuelled by no other ideology than greed.