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The Ladykillers (Full Screen Edition))Rating:
Release Date: 14 September, 2004 Retail Price: $29.99 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $3.00! Cast: |
The Ladykillers (Full Screen Edition)) Reviews
Alec Guinness would be proud
In THE LADYKILLERS, Tom Hanks plays a con man posing as a classics professor planning the heist of a riverboat casino. In order to tunnel into the casino's counting room, he rents a room in the house of a sweet old lady (Irma P. Hall) and uses the root cellar as a staging area.
Hanks, in his first full-on comic role in some time, is a wonder to behold. His performance is a carefully worked out assembly of tics and mannerisms, topped off with a fey Southern drawl. As a criminal, he's preposterous, but this is a Coen brothers movie, so he's right at home. Everything is just a little off kilter here, from the portrait that keeps changing expression to the dog in the gas mask.
The Coens' let down a little in the scenes with Hanks and his crew-- led by JK Simmons as a demolitions expert and an unrestrained Marlon Wayans as the inside man. These scenes are played for low comedy and degenerate into jokes about the female anatomy and irritable bowel syndrome (not at the same time). I could have used more of Hanks and Hall together, her dryness seems to keep his performance anchored and their scenes are definitely the funniest. Hanks' crew is posing as an early music ensemble, and the lack of a scene where they play for Hall's church friends is an opportunity missed. Also with George Wallace as a sheriff.
The soundtrack contains some first-rate gospel music, and I recommend it along with this movie. Although it's not one of their classics, there's more laugh out loud stuff in here than in any Coen film since THE BIG LEBOWSKI.
Very funny remake, It cracked me up
A remake of a 1955 Alec Guinness film, The Ladykillers transfers the action from London to America's rural South. Tom Hanks takes over Guinness' role. And directing duties land in the laps of O Brother Where Art Thou? masterminds Joel and Ethan Coen.
When good Southern church-going widow Marva Munson first lays eyes on Professor Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr III, Ph.D., she's not too sure what she's lookin' at. Besides, she's pretty distracted by the fact that her seemingly dapper-if not a bit dopey-gentleman caller just let her beloved kitty escape through the half-open door. Once the feline is safely back inside (with Dorr's generous assistance), she learns that Dorr wishes to rent a room. She agrees. He gallantly informs her that he plays ancient Renaissance music with a group of colleagues, and requests to use her root cellar for practices. She can't see any harm in that-as long as they're not playing any of that nasty "hippity-hop" music-so the deal is struck.
What follows is part black comedy, part madcap caper and part morality tale. And it's spiced up by exceedingly vibrant characters. Dorr is an eccentric professor-type obsessed with dead languages and the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. He's the mastermind of the heist. Assisting him are Gawain MacSam (a trash-talking ne'er-do-well with a short fuse), Garth Pancake (a bumbling munitions enthusiast), The General (a grimly lethal excavations expert) and Lump (a decidedly dim-witted muscle-man).
"We really like the original movie," says Ethan Coen. "It's a strong story premise. It just has good bones. We ripped out the spine of it, kept that and threw out everything else."
Back in the '40s and '50s, when the Hays Movie Production Code was in place-and the original Ladykillers movie was produced-films were allowed to show criminal behavior only if it was done in such a way as not to make viewers sympathize. Consequences were big back then, as evil men generally reaped what they sowed. The Coen brothers' remake sticks to that ideal, and despite the film's cynically comedic underpinnings, moviegoers leave the theater thinking about what exactly the wages of sin are.
The Hays Code also barred the use of scores of profane and crude words. It's in this realm that the new incarnation of The Ladykillers goes out of control. Had it been released a half-century ago, throngs of outraged moviegoers would have literally ripped its prints from their reels to stop the ruckus. But forget decades-old social standards. Even applying modern artistic sensibilities, I'm left feeling that what I heard while I watched this otherwise masterful movie utterly destroyed its credibility, tore up every layer of its delicate nuance and scribbled haphazardly all over its colorful characterizations.
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