Universal Studios Home Entertainment has selected June 7 as
the street date for DVD and Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack editions of the Coen Brothers' Hail,
Caesar!, an all-star comedy about a fictionalized Hollywood studio and
the problems associated with getting some of their films made during the early
1950s.
With the likes of George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Channing
Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes as cast members, you
would think that this fun piece about movie-making would be a natural. But for some reason audiences failed to warm
to it as box office receipts just reached the $30 million mark. The ARR works out to 123 days.
Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, a 1950s version of the
current Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber), a Hollywood “fixer,” whose biggest
problem is the abduction of the studio’s star attraction, Baird Whitlock
(Clooney). He’s right in the middle of
shooting an epic and his abductors are demanding $100,000.
He also has to deal with the pregnancy of starlet DeeAnna
Moran (Johansson) and his solution to that problem is actually quite clever
(you have to wonder if such things actually happened back then).
Hail, Caesar! is a genuine throwback film, with nice homage
touches … it’s too bad that brothers Ethan and Joel couldn’t have come up with
a more clever script. The Clooney plot
line goes nowhere, but the bits with Ralph Fiennes (a snobbish director) and Alden
Ehrenreich as a terribly miscast leading man are hysterical.
Bonus features, common to both the DVD and Blu-ray SKUs, are
a quartet of production featurettes — “Directing Hollywood,” “The Stars Align,”
“An Era of Glamour” and “Magic of a Bygone Era: Hail, Caesar!”
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