Why, Caesar?

Rating: 1/10 (11 February 2016)

If you're like me at all, you'll still be waiting for the film to begin when the closing credits role. On the plus side, you have an awful lot of stars who seem to be having fun. You have a glossy production and some elegantly slangy, period dialogue. What you don't have is pace of any kind, nor momentum, nor any honest idea of what the point is beyond lampooning/paying homage to old Hollywood. The themes, apart from Brolin's character as conflicted by a job offer, are hopelessly obtuse. Is it about communist writers seeking a new society? Swell, but this ignores the reality that many communist-affiliated screenwriters both earned high salaries and had no intention of destroying the system. OK, set that aside. There still remains muddle in a big way, as in lengthy recreations of period movie scenes that do not move the story whatsoever, nor go anywhere else, and defy era. What year is this? The adverts claim it's the 1950s but this is wholly irrational. In what year were Esther Williams-style swimming movies made along with singing cowboy films? MOST egregiously: in no Hollywood musical in which sailors sing and dance about a lack of women does the choreography involve them dry-humping one another. Not that I've seen, anyway. I also wonder in what universe Tatum deserves stardom, just as it is highly bizarre that a communist movie star would, in the midst of his career, leave for Moscow in a submarine. Ehrenbeich is, I admit, truly wonderful as the singing cowboy, but this alone cannot save a self-indulgent mess of a film. Coens, really, now.