Valuable Movies Series Intro & Hail, Caesar!

Here is hopefully the start of another series of blog posts, in an attempt to get me to write on a more regular basis. My focus of these posts will be movies (and sometimes TV shows) because I love visual entertainment. My hope is to take a movie (generally a popular one) and rate it by examining the artistic and moral values found in it. I wrote a couple of posts a while back explaining the necessity for movies with value and the need to spend our time watching good movies (which have high artistic and moral standards). By looking at popular movie and TV selections, I hope to give an accurate rating as to whether we are really spending our time on good entertainment. While my examination of artistic and moral value will be flexible, I will be trying to follow these questions:

"Artistic value can be judged based on the following questions: Does it look good aesthetically, whether it is an animated movie or because of the direction and cinematography? Does the theme say something honest or truthful about the human condition? Does it have a good reason for existing?

Moral value can be evaluated based on these levels: Can this/ should this be seen by families? Is there a sensible reason for it to be made for adults or teens only? If religious, does it present spiritual truths well? Does the movie uphold natural understanding of what is good, true, and beautiful in the world? If there is a focus on a negative subject, does the positive good overcome in the end?"

What will my rating system be? I want to try to be unique enough but I also want to use something that's easy to understand in a visual form. Steven D. Greydanus, perhaps my favorite film critic and creator of the Decent Films movie review website, has multiple levels to his rating system. For the overall grade, he uses the letter grading system. He too grades movies based on Artistic/Entertainment Value and Moral/Spiritual Value and I am sure that is part of where my  rating system and definitions comes from. For the Artistic Value he uses a 5 star rating system and for the Moral Value he uses a +/- number system. My friend Steve Donahue, who also reviews popular movies, uses a 1-10 system, but perhaps that is too big for something like this. 

So, I think I will use a 0-5 system, with 0 being the worst, 5 being the best, and with 2.5 being average as well as the only time I use a .5 in my ratings.

I wanted to do a quick examination to provide an example of this series idea. So I will rate the values of Hail, Caesar!, the latest Coen Brothers release. While not really a popular movie, I did rewatch it recently and the Coen Bros are a popular enough team, so this gives me something to work on.

Artistic Value (Rating: 3) 

Hail, Caesar! is a very sharp, bright movie. All of the colors and textures pop off the screen. There is also a wonderful recreation of 1950s Hollywood. From the costumes, the cars, and especially the dialogue, this place in the past is brought to reality. Hail, Caesar! examines what life in Hollywood was like for the people who created entertaining media and it also provides the Coen Brothers an opportunity to examine their own life in Hollywood today. People gave this movie trouble for feeling disjointed because it features vignettes or scenes of stories that quickly cut back from one focus to another. However, we have to remember that a single day of our lives can be disjointed, broken up into odd little moments that may not directly connect from one event to another, but they tell a full story of our experience for that day.

Multiple genres are represented in this movie, from biblical epics to westerns to musicals. While each presentation is a caricature of the genre, the atmosphere, pacing, and acting style unique to each genre are all brought out well. It's fun to see everything happening on set, whether it is how the actors move and perform dialogue or whether it is all the camera and microphone people rolling around just a few feet away. It's not often for us to see what is happening off screen while cameras are rolling, and again this is all done with proper representation of the time period.

My caveats or critiques of the artistic value of this movie does go back to the different movie genres. While Hail, Caesar! does try to recreate the different look of past movies, they still look brand new. Even when the footage is in black and white or grainy, it still looks too crisp for the time period. Modern technology offers us the opportunity to not just recreate a style like an homage, but also to really create the style again as if we are using the same cameras from 60 years ago. The other detractor for me involves the secretive group known as 'The Future'. These scenes tend to slow down the movie and drag for me. This is probably because there is so much philosophical, high intellectual jargon being thrown around that it's hard to fully comprehend everything. The biggest problem is that 'The Future' is supposed to be the main conflict and also where a lot of the thematic ideas come from but it is the least interesting thing in the movie to me.

Moral Value (Rating: 2.5)

There is a reason for this movie to be rated PG-13, but ultimately that's because the ideas, the setting, and the topics of conversation would really confuse and bore anyone that wasn't at least in high school or college age, and even then those things can still be confusing. The MPAA rated the movie PG-13 for Some Sexual Content, and this movie does involve dialogue that is either specifically sexual or at least an innuendo, or rather there is one extended innuendo in the dancing number. The PG-13 was also given for Smoking, but I've never really considered that a reason to keep a movie away from the kids because a lot of older movies and cartoons featured smoking and I don't think those were heavy factors in current smoking habits. 

This movie acts like all major Hollywood stars during its Golden Age were sexually immoral drunkards and while I don't know enough about the real stars and the real Hollywood back during the 40s and 50s, I doubt that this can fully apply to each big movie star during this time period. Also, there is a brief discussion of theology between different Christian leaders, as well as a Rabbi, in the first quarter of the movie, which provides some humor, but can also cause some confusion for viewers that are not either Christian or Jewish or perhaps just do not have a lot of understanding of both theologies.

The biggest place Moral Value comes in to play is the main character Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin). On the one hand, the man slaps a woman early on in the movie, he purposefully lies or covers the truth multiple times in order to protect the movie studio, the actors, and himself, and even though he says he wants to be a family man, he is hardly at home and we never see him with the kids when they are awake. This is a deceitful man who easily states big lies, even if he does mean well. On the other hand, he is a Catholic man striving for a solid moral life. He is repentant enough to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation two times in about the span of one day, he prays with his rosary when he is in most need, he protects the studio actors and directors from public ridicule and scandal, and he really does know what is going on in his family's life and he genuinely cares enough about the welfare of his family to ask questions when he needs to know something.

The way that the character of Eddie Mannix is written is perhaps what rubs me the wrong way and this is big. He is supposed to be a Catholic, and we're inclined to believe he has more devotion than what we might consider a cafeteria Catholic today, but when a Catholic priest refers to Jesus Christ as 'The Son of God' and Mannix replies 'Not sure I follow, padre', that confuses me. This Catholic man is all too willing to devote himself to a life of lies and deceits in order to fix problems at the studio, even if he does have good intentions. Aside from the confusion with Eddie Mannix and the aforementioned theology discussion,the film's handling of religious topics and imagery actually provides some nice food for thought as well as some laughter when you realize what movies, stories, and scenarios it is referring to.