HAIL, CAESAR! (2016)

Around a hour or so into HAIL, CAESAR! I thought to myself "What the hell is this movie?"  IMDb lists it as a "Comedy, Mystery", but there's nothing worth more than a smile throughout the entire thing and I have no idea what the mystery portion could have be.  Yeah, there's a kidnapping but we know who the kidnappers are right from the beginning!

Whatever.  Set in the early 1950's, HAIL, CAESAR! is the story of a Hollywood studio big wig (Josh Brolin) who spends all of his time taking care of production needs and keeping the various studio stars in line.  One day something big comes up when the main actor (George Clooney) in the studio's most expensive film disappears off the set.  Is he on a bender?  Shacked up with a dame?  Or maybe even kidnapped by Communists?  69'ing in the woods with a mountain lion?  Brolin has to get his star back while at the same time taking care of various other problems (pregnant single actress, miscast actor, a tempting job offer, etc), it's all very...blah.

I love classic Hollywood and I was excited to see a modern day film set back in 1950's Hollywood, but HAIL, CAESAR! is a dud.  It looks nice, but the story was all over the place with no true center or even likeable characters.  I kept waiting and waiting for something to develop, then I realized that the movie is already 3/4's done and it's still just flailing around like a boat lost in a storm.

With so much talent (both in front and behind the camera) I was expecting a delightful throwback mystery-comedy, kinda like the wonderful THE CURSE OF THE JADE SCORPION, but that didn't happen.  Instead HAIL, CAESAR! simply putters along and leaves more questions than it answers.  On the bright side I really enjoyed the performances of Alden Ehrenreich and Veronica Osorio.  They were both great. Also, the lighting was nice.

Is that a white SUV off to the right?

MONDO TRASHO (1969)

This early John Waters' outing finds Mary Vivian Pearce getting her toes sucked in a public park while she dreams about Cinderella.  Afterwards, she's hit by a car driven by Divine.  Divine tosses the unconscious Pearce in her backseat and drives around town.  All kinds of crazy stuff happens including seeing the Virgin Mary in a pig pen, them being committed to an insane asylum and Pearce's feet being amputated and replaced with some kind of chicken feet that when clicked together give her the ability to teleport to different places around town.  The End.

I liked MONDO TRASHO, but at 95 minutes it's way too long.  It would have been much better at just half that time.  Wacky, off-the-wall stories like this are much better told quickly and without giving the audience a chance to think too much about what's going on.  With MONDO TRASHO the viewer has plenty of time to daydream.  Simple scenes go on and on without reason.  Example: the scenes showing Mary Vivian Pearce leaving her residence, waiting on the bus and then riding the bus before arriving at the park take from 2:45 to 7:23.  That's over 4 minutes of literally nothing!  No dialogue, no forward movement.  Nothing.  It's the opening scene of the movie (post-opening credits), so why not just start the film at the park!?  There's many unneeded scenes like this.  That said, I love early John Waters' stuff, so even watching Dreamlanders running around doing nothing is still interesting.

Crude B&W photography, Divine briefly out of drag, slow as molasses pace, crazy story that doesn't make a lick of sense, chickens murdered, a ridiculous amount of songs snipped and spliced together.  Worth a watch for fans of Waters, but most other people would probably be bored to tears. I would love to one day see a proper release with a John Waters audio commentary.