The Ladykillers (or, See, even Tom Hanks can't ruin a Coen Bros. movie)

I am a HUGE fan of the Coen brothers. I love their hyper-real take on the past. Everything slick, perfectly placed and coloured like an aged Pepsi-Co advertisement. I stayed away from The Ladykillers because I assumed, from what the critics had said, that the Coens had continued to stray from their world and into mainstream Glossywood. After being burnt by Intolerable Cruelty that assumption was pretty understandable. Understandable yes, but as it turns out, misplaced. I haven't laughed so loud at a Coen Brothers film since, well, ever.

Yeah, it's a remake and I haven't seen the Alec Guiness/Peter Sellers original but Joel and Ethan have taken the story and shoehorned it into their world perfectly. And what a world it is, crisp, clean and timeless. They always manage to texture their films so completely that time seems irrelevant. The action has been whisked off to the deep south of the U S of A and the gospel churches and old ladies could place it firmly in the forties and yet the Coens have chucked in "home boy" Marlon Wayans, very OTT but very funny in this context, an old Viet Kong General and your average middle American in a safari suit.

From what I can gather, most of the negative press has come from people complaining about how this film is not the original. I am going to hunt out the original but this version has to be its own creature. Sure, it is a little muddled at times and it is a little fluffy but it is a comedy. As much as it pains me to say, Tom Hanks does an excellent job as the lynch pin of the whole enterprise, though his mouth is so crammed full of blustering intellectualism that he is a little hard to take by the end... middle... beginning (depending on your threshold). Irma P. Hall is utterley fantastic as the old lady and easily the best thing in the film (followed closely by Wayans, who gets his best laughs playing off her).

I am sick of dribbling on. Go rent it if you haven't seen it. Don't expect Miller's Crossing and you're sure to love it. Now... where can I find Road to Perdition?