Apr. 02, 2004 - 8:37 pm
new friends Rick and Bess and I decided to go ahead and see the movie last night instead of waiting until the weekend. i still wonder if i would have liked this movie better if i hadn't seen the original version of the movie a couple of weeks ago. i think it also would have helped if they hadn't used the funnier clips from the movie in the previews that we saw over and over and over. i think this movie just got run into the ground for me before i even stepped foot in the theater, so it wasn't as funny as it might have been had i come to it "fresh."
the story of this version of The Ladykillers is the same on only a very basic level. everything else is different. the basics: a group of 5 criminals comes to stay with an old lady and perform a robbery and they all end up killing each other instead of her. interestingly though, the characters have all been completely rewritten. the old lady is no longer sweet. she's now a somewhat pissed off elderly black lady who is obsessed with the church as well as the painting of her dead husband that hangs over the fire. it's a running joke in the film that the husband's expression in the painting changes in order to give a mood to certain scenes.
we laughed over and over whenever the cat got out of the house. the lady keeps screaming "You let Pickles out!" it was such an out-of-nowhere joke that it made us crack up. and then the asian "General" character was a silent badass so that was very funny as well.
so yeah, there were definitely some good jokes in this movie. i just expected more from the Coen Brothers. they've amazed a lot of us in the past and i didn't really feel that this time through. it was good, but not amazingly good.