2004 Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan 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.
O matador de velhinhas, Lupiči paní domácí, 레이디킬러, El quinteto de la muerte, Ladykillers
"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.
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…
"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…
”Professor, I'm surprised!”
“Well... uh... properly speaking, madam, we are surprised. You are taken aback.”
Besides Crystal Pepsi one of the greatest soda disasters of all-time was when Coke tweaked the formula that people loved and released New Coke. Same ingredients made by the same people, but somehow a bit of the magic was missing.
Ladykillers is the New Coke of the Coen Brothers bottling company.
It’s a rare misfire that’s not awful, but sadly some of the Coen magic is missing.
BONUS POINTS for the Waffle Hut scene in which all of the magic is still very much intact..
”Madam, we must have waffles! We must all have waffles forthwith!”
I was both extremely bored by the film and extremely distracted by Hanks’ bad accent and the uncomfortably broad caricatures of black Southerners. Easily the worst Coen I’ve watched thus far.
Like The Big Lebowski, this is a film where nearly everyone is a caricature. But what makes the caricatures work in Lebowski is that they are actually funny and their interplay ties to larger political and thematic ideas. Here, the caricatures border on stereotypes and even the most generous readings of the film can only go so far as to say that the film's portrayal of race is complicated. There's the angry black criminal who is defined both by a disconnect from his history but also willing to use it to make excuses for his own failures. Then there's the out of touch doddering old Christian who shames the youth in one moment only to be blind to the insidious…
I don’t know what was going inside the coen brothers head but wow was this film. It was even worse than I imagined it would be god I need to go watch Fargo to still remember the coen brothers are good filmmakers
The thing that's really upsetting about this is that, unlike Intolerable Cruelty, it feels like Joel & Ethan Coen are completely wide-awake and invested in what they're doing. The dialect work is elaborate, there's a great deal of complexity in the narrative structure, the actors are all being guided to some very weird places, there's a lot of visual storytelling and rhythmic editing. And it is viciously un-funny. If ever you wanted to use a film to make the old "the Coens hate their characters" charge stick, this would be the one to do it, so the sheer sourness is a big part of it, but also the jokes are tacky, tasteless garbage about big dumb jocks and "black people be…
"You've got to accept your responsibilities, young man, and shoot that old lady."
I loved the original and also love the Coen Brothers so this was a lot of fun, even if it's not as strong as their other work.
Non sarà di certo il film più spiccato, divertente o intelligente che i Coen abbiano prodotto, ma questo strano remake riesce ad avere il suo fascino. Si tratta di una storia che porta tiepide risate, con un tocco molto dark che rende il film una black comedy a tutti gli effetti. I personaggi sono ben caratterizzati e le loro interazioni sono la parte migliore della pellicola, con interpretazioni molto intense e sopra le righe. Si tratta di un'esperienza molto leggera e temporanea, un filler senza troppe pretese della filmografia di questi grandi registi.
There’s something here, but the themes don’t seems quite so rich and fleshed out as other Coens. Still think there’s some interesting themes of sin, spirituality, and greed, but not enough to redeem such a broad setting. I’m certain there’s reasoning behind the use of broad southern caricatures, but it wasn’t clear to me. The last act feels like a Coen brothers movie and hits some of the themes in enough ways to at least leave me thinking.
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