2004 Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
An eccentric, if not charming Southern professor and his crew pose as a band in order to rob a casino, all under the nose of his unsuspecting landlord – a sharp old woman.
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…
"You brought yo bitch...to the waffle hut."
The Ladykillers has been deemed by many to be The Coen Brothers' weakest film. And while it isn't there best work, it certainly isn't there worst either. It's funny throughout, Tom Hanks gives one hell of performance here, and I loved where the third act went. But I hated the last two minutes of the movie. A lot.
Definitely worth a look if you liked some of the brothers' previous comedic efforts. It's just odd to think that they followed this one up with No Country for Old Men.
"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…
The Ladykillers is a very strange film, written and directed by the Coen Brothers but featuring characters, dialogue, and plotting that feels as though it would be more at home in a Wes Anderson film, as it plays out almost like a darker, live action version of Fantastic Mister Fox. Never boring, and featuring a truly delightful performance from Tom Hanks, the point of The Ladykillers is still never clear, and lack of focus keeps it from greatness. It is not, however, a scourge on the Coen Brothers career, as some seem to believe, and will likely go down as an interesting footnote in a brilliant oeuvre. Nothing less, nothing more.
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…
This was actually fucking hilarious. Every character is just so fucking great.
قاتلين پيرزن يك فيلم متوسط و سرگرم كننده از برادران كوئن هست. كوئن ها اين فيلم رو از روى فيلمى با همين نام ساخته الكساندر مكندريك ساختن و خب از جهتى براشون گرون تموم شده و اكثر واكنش هاى منفى كه وجود داره بخاطر مقايسه اى هست كه بين اين دو فيلم ميشه. به قول خود كوئن ها ما ستون فقرات رو گرفتيم و بقيه اجزا رو ريختيم دور. اين فيلم هم يك ماجراى دزدى داره توام با سكانس هاى كمدى فراوان كه بيننده رو بارها به خنده واميداره.
فيلم به لحاظ فضاسازى نسبتا خوب عمل كرده و با استفاده از رنگ روشن قالبا كرم خواسته يك جور فضاى سردى بسازه. شايد بشه گفت از جهتى مذهبى ترين فيلم برادران…
There are flashes of the Coen's skill, but overall this falls flat. Tom Hanks is the star as the dandy criminal.
So far off the shockingly dark humour of the original. Hanks feels uncomfortable. All rather un-Coen like.
Easily worth seeing for the performance Tom Hanks gives alone, I enjoyed this much more than most people it seems. Considered by some to be the Cohen's worst movie, I at least find it better than Intolerable Cruelty.
For their 11th film, released in the spring of 2004, the Coen Brothers remade the 1955 British comedy of the same name. Irma P. Hall turns in a wonderful performance as Marva Munson, an elderly, very religious widow in Mississippi. Her house becomes the base of operations for a gang of criminals: mastermind Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph. D (Tom Hanks); inside man Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans); demolitions expert Garth Pancake (J. K. Simmons); tunnel expert "The General" (Tzi Ma); and muscleman Lump Hudson (Ryan Hurst). Their plan is to rob the nearby riverboat casino by tunnelling to it through Mrs. Munson's root cellar. In order to throw off the old woman, they pose as Renaissance musicians. Naturally, things don't go…
I've now seen all the Coen Brothers films. And that's the only real upside of seeing Ladykillers.
Steven Sheehan 1,705 films
Originally a list made prior to Cannes 2014, now updated every mid-April.
This is every Palme d'Or nominee since the…
