A beautiful description of the professor and his gang.
Photos courtesy of Netflix
This week’s choice is a little bit different, in the sense that its rating is higher than what I usually go for when looking for awful movies: a whopping 55 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But then again, this is the Coen brothers we’re talking about. Even their worst movie is bound to be halfway good. I’ve also thought about watching this for a while, but felt some reservations because of my affections for “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother Where Art Thou.” And I have to say, while I am a little disappointed by “The Ladykillers,” I was pleasantly surprised.
An obnoxiously eccentric southern professor (Tom Hanks) enlists a pose to commit the perfect crime by
She’s a dead ringer for my grandma and I am disturbed.
robbing a casino and vanishing without a trace. The only way it could work is by tunneling through the root cellar of Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall), an old God-fearing woman with little patience for riff raff. When she finds out their scheme, their only option is to kill her. Unfortunately, the powers that be don’t want to make it easy for any of them.
The pose in question is an amalgamation of five completely unrelated but expertly created stereotypes: two of which were so bizarre I had trouble putting my finger on what they were. The professor is basically Colonel Sanders’ evil twin, with an acute obsession with Edgar Alan Poe. He’s basically the English major that never really got with the times. As for Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons, and I must say this is his finest work yet) is an IBS-inflicted khaki enthusiast whose profession never really made sense, but he works with dynamite so he’s somewhat useful. The closest analogy I could come up with it is that middle school theater tech teacher that acts like a jack of all trades but can’t even make toast.
“Hmm yes child, come with me to my van.”
The other three are pretty easy to analyze: a retired and stoic Vietcong tunnel rat (The General played by Tzi Ma), an imbecile football player with too many concussions (Lump played by Ryan Hurst) , and the one black guy with gold chains on his neck and a gun in his belt (Gawain played by Marlon Wayans). Every possibly comedic stereotype from a bad 1980s film is here. All that’s missing is the horny foreign exchange student and army of even hornier nerds.
Someone please give Lump a hug he looks like he really needs one.
The stereotypes are off-putting, but that’s just because they are played so damn beautifully. The Coens really let their sense of humor rip, but still maintained that creepy paranormal undertone that you sort of suspect, but don’t really understand. Like in all their movies, their characters get exactly where they should be and you feel justified by them in the end, even though you don’t fully know what’s going on.
What really didn’t sit right with me was the pacing. It was too quick to be a heist movie. Sure, Hanks’ performance may have made we want to punch his character with a lawnmower, but at least it was well-crafted. The same goes for the other actors. Except for Wayans, for sadly obvious reasons. “The Ladykillers” didn’t feel like a
Amen.
movie. It felt like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Everything falls into place so quickly, and there’s hardly any real tension in the plot until the pose gets their divine punishment in the last 30 minutes.
As short as it feels, everything falls exactly into place and you get a pretty substantial chuckle out of it. While I’m still trying to wrap my head around the possible supernatural forces at work here (there is no way that Mr. Pickles is just a regular cat), I am so far pleased with my ignorance. Is it really the worst Coen brothers movie? Not really, it’s just an experiment that didn’t go as well as we hoped. But hey, it could have been worse.
Yes, that’s a finger. You have to find out the context yourself.
