O Brother, Where Art Thou?
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Only Joel and Ethan Coen, the fraternal director and producer team behind art-house hits such as
The Big Lebowski
and
Fargo
and masters of quirky and ultra-stylish genre subversion, would dare nick the plot line of Homer's
Odyssey
for a comic picaresque saga about three cons on the run in 1930s Mississippi. Our wandering hero in this case is one Ulysses Everett McGill, a slick-tongued wise guy with a thing about hair pomade (George Clooney, blithely sending up his own dapper image) who talks his chain-gang buddies (Coen-movie regular John Turturro and newcomer Tim Blake Nelson) into lighting out after some buried loot he claims to know of. En route they come up against a prophetic blind man on a railroad truck, a burly, one-eyed baddie (the ever-magnificent John Goodman), a trio of sexy singing ladies, a blues guitarist who's sold his soul to the devil, a brace of crooked politicos on the stump, a manic-depressive bank robber, and--well, you get the idea. Into this, their most relaxed film yet, the Coens have tossed a beguiling ragbag of inconsequential situations, a wealth of looping, left-field dialogue, and a whole stash of gags both verbal and visual.
O Brother
(the title's lifted from Preston Sturges's classic 1941 comedy
Sullivan's Travels
) is furthermore graced with glowing, burnished photography from Roger Deakins and a masterly soundtrack from T-Bone Burnett that pays loving homage to American '30s folk styles--blues, gospel, bluegrass, jazz, and more. And just to prove that the brothers haven't lost their knack for bad-taste humor, we get a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed like a cross between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley musical.
--Philip Kemp
| uuid: |
B6047351-A554-4199-B2B2-7E5CC0A03C17 |
| upc: |
0786936144758 |
| title: |
O Brother, Where Art Thou? |
| theatricalDate: |
07-06-2000 |
| stars: |
Clooney/Turturro/Blake |
| purchase date: |
07-06-2006 |
| publisher: |
Walt Disney Video |
| published: |
12-06-2001 |
| price: |
$19.99 |
| net Rating: |
4.5 |
| MPAA Rating: |
PG-13 |
| minutes: |
102 |
| last lookup time: |
171440339.274613 |
| genre: |
Buddy Films
Obsessive Quests
Comic Criminals
DTS
Coen Brothers
George Clooney |
| fullTitle: |
O Brother, Where Art Thou? |
| features: |
Closed-captioned
Color
Widescreen
NTSC
DTS |
| currentValue: |
$8.75 |
| created: |
171440335.915542 |
| country: |
us |
| aspect: |
DVD |
| asin: |
B00003CXRM
|
