So........."The Ladykillers" is often regarded as The Coen Brothers weakest film, and I saw it was on Netflix so I figured I'd let curiosity get the better of me and give it a watch.

And, while I can't say I was bored watching it and found myself enjoying some aspects of it overall, I can't tell wether or not I liked it as a guilty pleasure or even if I liked it at all.

It's a remake/adaptation/whatever you want to call it of a film/novel of the same name following a low life professor and his gang using an old women's house as a means to dig a tunnel towards a local Casino and rob the place blind.

Okay! Good…

Remaking 1955's Ealing Studios comedy of the same name, Joel and Ethan Coen's "The Ladkillers" is little more than an excuse for Tom Hanks, J.K. Simmons and the rest of the cast to mug under false teeth and fake mustaches for 104 minutes. Playing a gang of thieves working to knock off a casino under the guise of a group of musicians, the cast spouts accent-affected dialogue with no heavy pretensions. It is all a lot of fun, but it is forgettable and mostly meaningless.

Moving in as a tenant of Irma P. Hall's Southern gentlewoman, Tom Hanks stars as Professor G.H. Dorr, a man with more up his sleeve that appearances may predict. "The Ladykillers" revolves Dorr and his…

Easy As ABC

"I need unguent" - Steve G Does The Coens

I'm almost as baffled as most other people were.

If nothing else, The Ladykillers, along with Intolerable Cruelty, showed that the Coen brothers were human after all.

What interests me most about The Ladykillers is the way they took a film that really was, actually, ideal for their style and somehow cocked it up. The reason they don't get it right is perhaps because it was perfect for their style - the set-up, characters and outcome are all largely set in stone to the point where they don't actually have to transpose their quirks on it.

Yet having spent most of their career taking scripts and having to…

What does it mean to be a "lesser Coen Brothers film"? Does that mean it lies at the bottom of a DVD pile gathering dust for years, or does it simply mean that if you're in the mood for one of their films it'll come after you've watched The Big Lebowski, Miller's Crossing, Inside Llewyn Davis, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? It's been a few years since my only viewing of The Ladykillers, but following my reintroduction to Fargo after a lengthy spell, I thought I'd give this another go.
The Ladykillers hits for the fences early on. Giving Tom Hanks the room to return to his comic roots he honed so well back in the eighties, that Southern…

It's awkward for the Coens to make a comedy with the kind of stereotypes that you normally see in a Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It's not just simply this unfamiliar domain that hurts the movie, but a general tone that is more silly than their more successful comedies. They are still talented enough to make moments shine, but they are far too few.

It's not necessarily the script or direction that is all that different though. Just looking at the characters and their lines and actions on paper, they may not be very different from The Big Lebowski or Burn After…

While The Ladykillers seems to be the Ealing Comedy that could most easily be updated/ re-made it still seems like it would be rather difficult to do this - especially when it comes to 'Americanising', as some might put it, the feature, something which is most predominantly seen in the final couple of scenes of the film.

While the laughs that run throughout the film seem to be rather lax and not that big when they do arrive the Coen Brothers adaptation of the classic Ealing Comedy is still somewhat decent and in most aspects bearable enough. There just doesn't seem to be the level of charm and wit that the original 50's classic holds.

One of the main problems…

"The exercise would lose all credibility if you show the loser can simply back off."

What the actual fuck was anyone thinking with this? I know I didn't give it the best chance, having watched the original before this, but I really wonder if the Coens understood what made the original so successful. This has more in common with a lowbrow Wayans comedy than anything else the Coens have done. You really only need to examine the introduction of Guinness' Professor Marcus versus Hanks' Professor G.H. Dorr. Guinness is a looming shadow before his reveal as a bizarrely sinister creature whereas Hanks appears as an ordinary shadow with out of place sinister music sting who becomes a crowing peacock. The…