Hail, Caesar!

From Golgotha to West Malibu….from Busby Berkeley to Preston Sturges to the near never-ending series of MGM musicals – if you are of a certain age, or are familiar with That’s Entertainment (from 1974), then this is an ideal film for you.

Actually Hail, Caesar begins in the confessional box in a church somewhere. It is 4 in the morning, and Eddie Mannix, played brilliantly by Josh Brolin is feeling the need to get something off his chest. It seems he’s been smoking due to the pressures of his work (running a major Hollywood studio), and he’s promised his wife that he had or would give up smoking.

So begins the Coen Brothers homage (or is it a send-up?) of the old Hollywood , circa early 1950’s, when the studios controlled the actors under the star system. Now Brolin’s Mannix runs Capitol Studios – a thinly disguised MGM – and answers only to an unseen head of the overall corporation who is based in New York or somewhere other than Hollywood.

In truth, this is a zany look at the movies from actual movies being shot – there are westerns, a biblical film (Hail, Caesar), light-hearted drawing-room comedies – many within the huge sound stages, and others on location on studio back-lots. We get to the editing process, the studio campus and commissary, and even the uniformed guard at the studio gate has a speaking role.

We get to watch a director struggling and failing to get an actor to effectively say something like, Would that it twere so simple.

But wait there’s more. There’s a kidnapping, there’s the threat of the Communist scourge, Mannix is doing a film (the film within the film that we are watching called Hail, Caesar – A Tale of the Christ) that requires him to sit down with a priest, a rabbi, a reverend, and a Greek Orthodox cleric and ask them if they’ve done a credible version of Jesus.

Now this scene falls a little short of being howlingly funny, and it is more like a take-off on an old joke – 4 clerics walk into a bar – only it is not a bar but an oak-panel board room of the film studio.

Sicario

Noah Vosen: We are the sharp end of the stick now, Pam…

That was said in the CIA Operational HQ in Manhattan, by Noah Vosen, in the 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum. Vosen was talking to Pamela Landy. And he said more:

No more red tape. No more getting the bad guys caught on our sights, then watching them escape while we wait for somebody in Washington to issue the order.

And that was just the beginning. From there we film goers went on to Zero Dark Thirty, and the a 4th Bourne film. Now we have Sicario. The government follows no rules, and does what it wants to accomplish its goals.

Legal or not. Morally justifiable or not. They don’t really care.

Yes, there are things like Rules of Engagement but these are more operationally based than concerned with legality. And while we all know, or assume that the CIA may not work on US soil, there are ways around that too. As FBI Agent Kate Macer found out in the new film Sicario.

Macer is played by Emily Blunt – and she’s great in a difficult role. Yeah, she has to break down doors and fill people up with lead as a part of her job. She heads up a kidnap recapture unit and she was working in and around Phoenix, AZ. After they busted into a home in the prominent Phoenix suburb of Chandler, and found that this was a home whose walls were lined with more than a few dozen corpses, which was followed by a huge explosion – a drug lab, or a weapons cache, or money safe room had been wired to detonate if the wrong people tried to enter. Macer lost two men from her detail. Al that was left was a huge crater

This was a sobering revelation – the drug trade was more than just about users in the USA. Or US dollars flowing out of the country to drug lords who ran cartels in other countries. In addition to that, now drugs were made, sold, and defended right there in a tony Phoenix burb. Before she can even leave the scene, she meets another government agent Matt Graver, who asks her to accompany him to a meeting at the FBI HQ in Phoenix.

The aftermath is that she’s asked to volunteer for a cross-agency mission, It’s all very hush-hush, but Macer agrees and volunteers. Because she’s told she’ll get a chance at the ‘people really responsible for what went down today’. Before she knows it, she’s driven out to Luke AFB, (wait for the moment when you see the impressive row after row of Apache Attack Helicopters) and shortly thereafter, she’s on a plane with Graver and another shadowy dude called Alejandro. Alejandro doesn’t say much, and before he drops off to sleep, Graver tells Macer that they’re heading to El Paso.

She knows nothing else.