After many years of clean-shaven, all-American affability, Tom Hanks has lately begun to explore the possibilities of facial hair and regional accents: the harsh New England vowels of Catch Me if You Can, for example, and also the thin mustache of Road to Perdition and the shaggy four-year growth of Cast Away. In The Ladykillers, an uneven, prankish caper comedy by Joel and Ethan Coen, he sports a resplendent Old South Vandyke, with orotund diction to match.
Giddy with the joy of playing, at long last, a bona fide villain, Hanks swans through the role of G. H. Dorr, Ph.D., a supposed professor of classics whose true vocation is crime, with a vaudevillian relish that would be unseemly if it were not contagious. His laugh, issuing through what appears to be prosthetic (and in any case none too clean) teeth, is a stuttering whinny, and his mouth also unleashes a flood of florid Mississippi nonsense.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BVI
Hand on heart he reels off lines from Edgar Allan Poe and paeans to the bygone glories of Greece and Rome. To hear Hanks pronounce the word cinquecento -- if this were a play you might need an umbrella -- is almost worth the price of the ticket.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI
Since Miller's Crossing the Coen brothers have frequently dabbled in an inimitable form of antiquarian pastiche, mining old styles and genres to remake movies that were never made in the first place. The Ladykillers, which follows last year's underrated neo-screwball Intolerable Cruelty, is an actual remake, transplanting Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 British farce into the rich topsoil of the American South.
There is, as ever, a strong argument for leaving the original alone -- it would be hard for any cast to measure up to one that included Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers -- but while this Ladykillers is a bit of a throwaway, it does have its moments.
It starts on a high note, with a verbal barrage that is one of the funniest opening scenes since Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, to which the Coens paid homage in O Brother Where Art Thou. Marva Munson, a devout African-American widow (played with stereotype-destroying gusto by the amazing Irma Hall), arrives at a small-town sheriff's office in high dudgeon, complaining about young people and their "hippety-hop" music, much to the puzzlement of the impatient sheriff (George Wallace).
Soon after, Professor Dorr arrives at the house Munson shares with her orange cat and a glowering portrait of her late husband, Othar, inquiring about renting a room. With the help of a raggedy crew of crooks -- absurdly masquerading as an amateur early-music ensemble -- he plans to dig a tunnel into the vault where proceeds from the local riverboat casino are kept.
The plans, as you might expect, are complicated both by Munson's inconvenient presence and by tensions within the gang of would-be master thieves. Pancake, the phlegmatic demolition expert (J. K. Simmons), is perpetually at odds with Gawain (Marlon Wayans), who is full of hippety-hop attitude. Simmons and Wayans, irrepressible showboaters, overshadow the two remaining conspirators, a Vietnamese general (Tzi Ma) and a dumb football player (Ryan Hurst), who are pretty much one-joke characters.
The movie itself is one long joke, and there are long stretches where its inventiveness flags and its humor wears thin. It would be hard to think of a more threadbare premise -- I will not bore you with a catalog of recent heist pictures; if you have seen any besides Oceans Eleven and Heist you will be plenty bored already -- and the Coens do not seem interested in investing it with new life. Rather, the story is a flimsy frame to be ornamented with diverting bric-a-brac, and the movie as a whole is something of a paradox: a work of elaborate and painstaking craftsmanship that is at the same time a piece of junk.
But one man's junk is another man's collectible, and I am happy to add The Ladykillers to my boxed set of Coeniana. Compared with O Brother and The Man Who Wasn't There it is unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.
The cinematography, by Roger Deakins, is as toothsome as homemade praline, and there are the requisite grisly touches: a severed finger that becomes a cat toy, a spate of sudden fatalities at the end. What keeps the movie going -- aside from the rambunctious performances of Hall and Hanks -- is the Coens' obsessive devotion to the American vernacular.
Few screenwriters take such virtuosic delight in the cacophonous music of American English, and these hyperactive filmmakers seem happiest when they sit still and listen to the various cadences of speech, from Professor Dorr's high-flown erudition to Munson's righteousness to Gawain's profane improvisations. You sometimes suspect that the whole enterprise was cooked up to produce nonsensical lines like "I was a positive lemur" and (my personal favorite) "Othar never blowed no shofar."
Perhaps not. But The Ladykillers nonetheless swells with sanctified harmonies. As they did for O Brother, the Coens, aided once again by T Bone Burnett, have assembled a rich soundtrack full of half-forgotten, unforgettable American music, in this case mostly gospel.
The sublime sounds of the Reverend Thomas Dorsey, the Soul Stirrers, Blind Willie Johnson and the Swan Silvertones (whose version of A Christian's Plea is sampled in an amazing hip-hop track by the Nappy Roots) are immune to mockery, and they provide a curiously effective counterpoint -- and a measure of redemption -- for the worldly, and sometimes world-weary, humor the Coens purvey.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s