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 very rare that we see huge directors decide to take on a remake of a film that received considerable acclaim when it was first released. Usually, those directors will keep to their own projects, big or small, but it's rare that they decide to do new incarnations of famous films of the same language. However, that's what the Coen brothers did when they decided to make their own version of the English classic "The Ladykillers," which was a huge milestone for the brothers as it was the first film where they shared directing and producing credit, making up for years of uncredited collaborations on those fronts. The original film is a timeless classic that deals with some heavy themes…

The Ladykillers is a modern fable set in the deep south that pits its heroine, the plucky and devout widow Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) against a team of wolves led by Tom Hanks’ Professor Dorr. Like all good fables, the themes are elegantly laid out, if a bit obvious: in this case, a small Mississippi town rids its refuse onto a barge that takes it to an island of trash. As Marva’s preacher tells his congregation, the Lord rids its land of evil, and the river bound journey under the watchful gaze of a medieval gargoyle symbolizes that. The land is good and the river is bad, and it is in fact a river boat casino that attracts the…