Suburbicon - George Clooney (2017)

You can easily laugh through some dark comedies. George Clooney's "Suburbicon," (based on a screenplay by the Coen Brothers, Clooney, and Grant Heslov) is a comedy in which, the fun and humor are juxtaposed with a backdrop of suffering that isn't funny at all.

Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) is an ordinary man, as far as we can see, whose luck spirals downward to an alarming level of rot. Damon is the box office draw, but the Protagonist, the leading man if you will, is actually Nicky (Noah Jupe), Gardner's son.

Nicky is the single innocent in this story. He's the only character who's not an amoral wretch. At the start of the film, the kid is put through a traumatic experience. The sequence is excessively grim, the kind of content that even the darkest of most dark comedies wouldn't touch.

The boy is woken in the middle of the night and dragged down to the dining room. He is tied down by a couple of brutes. He sees his mother Rose, and aunt Margaret (both played by Julianne Moore) are tied down as well.

After a few minutes of intimidating threats, the brutes chloroform all of them.

When Nicky wakes up, he learns that his mother did not survive the attack. His father and aunt are fairly blasé about the incident.

Aunt Margaret moves in to help Nicky and Gardner get used to living without Rose. There may be something sinister behind that.

Rose's death starts a chain of unfortunate events that could very well toss the family right on its head. Nicky and Gardner are threatened throughout the film by nosey cops, gangsters and a corrupt insurance investigator looking to take the Lodges for everything they've got.

Watching Gardner and his sister-in-law Margaret's lives fall apart is hilarious. "Suburbicon" creates so many characters whose demise we gladly cheer for.

There is a secondary plot is focused on a black family, the Mayers, who move into the neighborhood. Nicky strikes up a friendship with Andy Mayer, the new black kid in town.

But the neighborhood doesn't just object to the family's arrival, it rages. As the Lodge family's safety is on the decline, the Mayers face a hostility from the town that simmers through the story and explodes at just the worst time.

It's wonderful how Clooney manages to slowly transform the normal people we were introduced to at the beginning into the sociopaths they really are. "Suburbicon" mirrors the place where the center of the morality of our country is right now, without sounding too self-righteous.

"Suburbicon" is about "Some very fine people," and how they devolve into monsters most wouldn't have recognized before.

The film is screamingly funny all the way through until the end, but it is decidedly disturbing at the same time. You've been warned.

Hail Caesar - Joel and Ethan Coen (2016)

Okay, a group of communists kidnap a movie star playing a Roman soldier...

Poor Eddie.  His only task is to make sure all the actors at Capitol Pictures stay out of trouble. He has to save them from themselves, from each other, from the press and, in this case, from communist kidnappers.

Capitol Pictures' prestige movie of the year is to be "Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ," a big budget Roman Film and obvious nod to Ben Hur.

One day on the set, the film's lead actor, Baird Whitlock, (George Clooney) is drugged and simply carried out of his trailer.

Success to the communists, they can now demand a handsome ransom from the studio. 

Of course there are debates over whether or not demanding a ransom is too capitalistic. You don't realize "Caesar!" is a comedy until after you're started laughing, which when you're critiquing satire, is a compliment. 

And that's the question: "Do I want to go to all that bother?" But a little bit of that can be forgiven if the story is straight with the audiences and Hail Caesar! is.  So yes, I will watch this film a couple more times over the next year or so, when I'll be able to deconstruct it finer.

In the meantime, if I were you, I'd find a way to pick this up because in the long run, Coen Brothers' films are usually worth it.


It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it's just one of the many messes Josh Brolin's Eddie Mannix, a professional Hollywood "fixer" has to clean up.

As the film goes on, Mannix ushers the studio singing cowboy into his new career as a dramatic actor, side-swipes a pregnancy scandal, sucks up to religious groups and evades two twin gossip columnists, twins, both played by Tilda Swinton.  


On top of these antics, we're also treated to a handful of musical numbers as we follow Mannix around the studio.

Most of the jokes in Caesar! won't be recognized as such.

I myself will have to revisit it a few times if I want to appreciate all of its humor.

I sat here for a while trying to think of the answer to that question and finally, I've come up with my answer: "Yes, it's going to be worth it."  


This better than your typical Coen Brothers film.  Many of their films can be problematic when it comes to condescending to its own characters, and you see some of that here.