Star Studded Jumble

Rating: 5/10 (5 February 2016)

I saw "Hail, Caesar!", starring Josh Brolin-Everest, Milk; George Clooney-Tomorrowland, The Men Who Stare at Goats; Alden Ehrenreich- Beautiful Creatures, Stoker; Channing Tatum-The Hateful Eight, The Jump Street movies and Scarlett Johansson-Natasha in the Avenger & Captain America movies, We Bought a Zoo.
This is a Coen Brothers movie. They did 'O Brother, Where Art Thou', 'Internal Cruelty' and 'Burn After Reading'-some I liked and some I didn't. There are several story lines going on here or you could say, a movie within a movie. Josh plays a fixer at a big Hollywood movie company. A fixer fixes problems involving the movie companies' bread & butter, the stars-such as a star getting pregnant or one getting drunk or on pills, etc. Any kind of scandal, Josh smooths things over and keeps people out of the headlines. George is just such an actor-inept and disappearing for days at a time, getting drunk or ending up in a young girls' bed. George is starring in a biblical epic called 'Hail Caesar!' and now, someone goes and kidnaps him. Alden is another actor in a western movie, Channing is in a musical movie and Scarlett is in a water ballet movie. All their story lines are going on simultaneously and some are connected to each other, in varying degrees. There are lots of cameos going on; I remember seeing Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Jonah Hill and Christopher Lambert popping up here and there. But as a whole, the movie was a little jumbled. There were funny parts but it's not really a comedy. I guess I'm not a big fan of the Coen Brothers. For instance, a lot of people I talk to really loved 'O Brother Where Art Thou' and I did not care for it. Oh well, different strokes... It's rated "PG-13" for sexual content-no nudity-and smoking and has a running time of 1 hour & 46 minutes. I would not buy this on DVD. I would not rent it either. If you are a Coen fan, you might enjoy it more than I did. Otherwise, I'd wait until it comes to cable.