George Clooney as a gladiator; Scarlett Johansson as Esther Williams; Channing Tatum as a tap-dancing sailor. Well, it’s a Coen brothers’ film after all and if it has enough of the wild comic energy of the trailer it should be worth waiting until 26th February, when Hail, Caesar! will be released here.
It’s the Coens’ 17th feature as directors since Blood Simple in 1984, and it sports many of their signature characteristics: the music of Carter Burwell, the cinematography of Roger Deakins, and that rotating cast of featured players, which includes Clooney, Johansson, Josh Brolin, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton.
Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, a fixer at Capital Pictures, an MGM-like Hollywood studio in the mid-50s, whose job it is to avert scandal or bad publicity.
The film focuses on one day in his busy life, when the ageing star of a period epic at Capital is kidnapped by a group called The Future. Mannix is given the task of raising the ransom of $100,000.
Hail, Caesar! has been variously described as a “gonzo mix of The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo” and “Barton Fink meets The Big Lebowski,” which, presumably, means enough Coen to go around.
The story behind the Cold War espionage drama Bridge Of Spies has taken more than 50 years to get to the cinema screen.
Gregory Peck originally intended to play the role of James Donovan, the Brooklyn insurance lawyer, who was given the job of defending the Soviet spy Rudolph Abel, in 1964. Abel’s case grew in importance over several years and ultimately he became part of a spy swop for the American pilot, Gary Powers, who had been shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet airspace.
Peck convinced MGM to finance a script and he sent it to Alec Guinness who agreed to play Abel. But the studio subsequently got cold feet and decided not to go ahead with the movie because of the public tension generated by the case.
Last year Steven Spielberg became familiar with the project when a script was sent to his production company, Dreamworks, under the title St. James Place. He invited the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan to polish it and he began to shoot it in New York and Germany last September and October.
The movie, as you can see from the trailer, is a polished, atmospheric rendering of the story with Spielberg’s regular star Tom Hanks as Donovan, Mark Rylance as Abel, and Amy Ryan, Alan Alda and Sebastian Koch in supporting roles.
Bridge Of Spies, Spielberg’s first directorial assignment since Lincoln, received a standing ovation at last week’s New York Film Festival - we will see it here on 27th November.
David O Russell’s Joy hardly sounds like Oscar material – but it does involve a collection of people who are very familiar with Oscar material: Russell, the director of Silver Linings’ Playbook and American Hustle; two time Academy Award winner Robert De Niro, one-time winner Jennifer Lawrence and former nominee three years running, Bradley Cooper. So they should know what they are doing.
In Joy, Lawrence plays a Long Island mother of three who became one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs by inventing the self-wringing Miracle Mop.
After creating a prototype for the mop, Joy Mangano got family and friends to invest in 100 units. It moved slowly at first – at trade shows and local shops on Long Island – but when she sold 1,000 to the shopping network QVC and she was allowed to go on TV to promote it herself, she started to clean up. Within a short space of time she was selling $10m worth of mops a year.
Joy, which is described as a biographical comedy drama, goes on release in Ireland on 1st January.
Philip Molloy presents The Picture Show every Saturday on Newstalk from 6pm. Listen back to the podcasts here.
