Some interesting scenes strung together

Rating: 6/10 (10 September 2016)

At the end of watching Hail Caesar, I turned to my girlfriend and said, "that was not a movie."
And yet, it does have much in common with movies. There is a story, kind of. There are characters. There are some entertaining scenes. And yet...
I wasn't actually thinking "this wasn't a movie" while I watched it. There was a basic story involving a studio executive handling various emergencies and secondary stories involving a kidnapped actor and a miscast cowboy. There was an excellent cast (although so many actors that few get much screen time), including a wonderful Tilda Swinton as twin gossip columnists. While it started slow, the movie had entertaining moments, including a fun Busby Berkley-style swim number, an amusing attempt to get the cowboy to deliver a single line correctly, and a first-rate tap/swing number.
But at the end, it just felt like there was nothing there. The movie is built on the very slight scaffold of the executive's decision on whether to move to a different industry, and because you never care about him (he's a classically generic, faceless character), you don't really care what he decides.
Much of the movie is simply scenes from fictional movies, including a Ben Hur variant. I say variant rather than take-off or parody because the attempts seems more to mimic the style of these films than to burlesque them. The result is not quite parody and not quite tribute.
If the Coen Brothers wanted to make a bunch of old-Hollywood style scenes, they would have been better served to simply make their version of an old-Hollywood movie (as they did with Hudsucker Proxy) than to make this odd pastiche.