The Ladykillers

Coming Soon

Comedy/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/104mins
Starring: Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Touchstone Pictures

It is no news that Hollywood has lately gone on a binge of remaking old and foreign movies. In many cases the original films were not just fine, but classics of their type and have never begged for a remake, and you have to wonder what more could you add to the sublime 1955 original of the Ladykillers. However, this one comes to us from the Coen brothers of Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and Fargo fame. The Coens are serious film makers — or seriously funny film makers — so we should not be quick to dismiss.
They have kept much of the original plot but have made something quite satisfyingly different from the original.

Alec Guinness’ Marcus is renamed Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D (Tom Hanks) and is pretty much the same kind of overly cerebral criminal mastermind but recast as the ghost of Tennessee Williams and dressed like Colonel Sanders. Dorr and his gang rent space in the home of old biddy Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall) ostensibly for band practice. The crooks are still posing as musicians while they are tunnelling from the old lady’s root cellar into the vaults of a nearby casino. The old lady catches them with the cash from the raid and the game is up. There is only one thing to do and that is to bump off the darling old lady and this is where Dorr’s cunning plan falls apart as Mrs. Munson proves charmed with luck and the gang starts falling apart.

The Coen’s Ladykillers is a gourmet blow out of irony that reaches out from the confines of the plot to become a happily despairing portrait of humanity and that fickle thing called life. The Coens toss out cultural quips with such disarming ease that most of the comedy seems to be happening in the background and the slapstick is almost a distraction to the real fun of the film. In between people blowing themselves up, watch out for the golden calf, Israelites, the island of rubbish and Bob Jones University. And watch out for Hanks’ wonderfully twisted Dorr.

Big Fish

Out Now

Fantasy/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/125mins
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Alison Lohman
Director: Tim Burton
Columbia Pictures

Travelling salesman Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is on his deathbed in his lifelong home, watched over by his devoted wife (Jessica Lange) and the family gather to pay their last respects. Edward’s son (Billy Crudup) arrives from Paris where he lives and works. It is an uneasy meeting. The two don’t get along, or more to the point, young Will Bloom is fed up with his father. You see, Bloom senior is a lugubrious spinner of fantastic tales. He is the Baron Munchausen of Alabama, and young Will is thoroughly fed up with it. He wants to know the real story, find out about his real father, and wants no more of these silly fantasies. He implores his father to tell him the truth of his life before it is too late. The old Bloom agrees but recycles the same old tales at excruciating length.
Will hears for the umpteenth time how his dad parachuted into China to kidnap a pair of singing conjoined twins, met a catfish as big as a shark, consorted with giants, witches and every kind of magical circus character. And I thought being a travelling salesman was a dull and thankless job.

These tales are told through flashback, Ewan McGregor playing the young Edward and Alison Lohman as the young Mrs. Edward, and it is in these flashbacks that director Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood — any film with an Edward in it) does what he is best at: creating a mesmerising world of big imagination.
Big Fish, alas, unlike many of Burton’s other films, lacks the dark edge and tends toward sentimentality. It is, in the end, a very wholesome family flick. That is not a bad thing in itself, but Burton, we feel is spinning his wheels. Having said that, he does show that it is myth that gives meaning to life for many people, and there are poignant suggestions that these myths are a compensation for Bloom’s sense of a wasted life. Burton suggests provocatively that the myth is more real than reality.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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