O, Brother, Where Art Thou

You know what makes friends a pain in the ass? It's not that they're full of "great ideas" about intervention and trying to get you into "programs" to control your anger or drinking (God, how I love Mrs. Filthy's ability to deny). It's not that they think that just because you threw up on their leather sofas, or broke all their pool cues when they refused to agree with you that Bob Hope is dead, that they need to "save you from yourself." (I know Bob Hope isn't really dead, but it's more fun pretending he is.) Stunts like that don't make friends suck, it just makes me want to avoid them.

What makes friends suck is when your wife leaves with her mother and you get lonely and sad because she didn't leave any of those frozen taquitos with the fake beef inside, and you're a little scared by how it sounds like the wall is whispering your name when the heater comes on, so you call Mark to see if he will go to the movies with you, and he says maybe but he brings up the time you made him see Deuce Bigalow. He's still pissed about it, especially because you borrowed some money and promised to pay him back but never did and didn't return his calls until now because you hoped he had forgotten about that $4.50.

Your friend Mark says maybe he will go as long as you pay him back and he gets to pick the movie. So, your friend Mark chooses the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou, and it's a steaming pile of horseshit. It's proof that even smart people can have retarded babies.

There's an old comedy by Preston Sturges called Sullivan's Travels about a popular Depression-era Hollywood director who wants to stop making comedies and remake Homer's Odyssey as a pretentious movie about human suffering called O Brother, Where Art Thou. In his quest to make it, he learns that what Americans need is comedy, not preachy morals. So, what did the Coens learn from Sullivan's Travels? Not to make a funny comedy, but to retell the Odyssey as O Brother, Where Art Thou. What a fucking stupid idea. What assholes think we want the movie Sturges' was making fun of? The Coens are shooting for comedy and miss worse than an eight-year-old trying to piss into a coffee can from ten feet.

What's the fucking joke? That the Coen Brothers saw Sturges' movie? Only the Mensa-loving fuckers who walk around with "Music is My Bag" tote bags full of books from Daedalus will think the reference by itself is funny. For me, it'd have been a hell of a lot funnier to see that video going around of Julie Andrews getting her hands chopped off in Morocco for shoplifting pantyhose.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou, George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson escape a southern chain gang. Clooney, whose character is named Ulysses just so that even the stupidest among us will get the idea, is the brains of the operation and tells Turturro and Nelson that he knows where there is hidden treasure, but they have to get to it in four days, before the Tennessee Valley Authority floods its location. They encounter various modern versions of the Odyssey's villains, like the Cyclops as eye-patched fatso John Goodman, and the sirens as hot wash women who liquor up the boys and then let them park their ponies in their barns (we see no screwing or nudity). They record a hillbilly song under a phony a name and unknown to them, it becomes a hit. A vaguely sinister lawman trails the boys, and they become unknowing pawns in a gubernatorial campaign between a crotchety good guy and a "reformer" who belongs to the Ku Klux Klan.

Ultimately, Clooney reveals that there is no treasure, he just told the other two that to get them to escape with him. What he's really after is reaching his estranged wife and stopping her from marrying some buck-toothed dipshit.

Remember when the Coens made great movies, like Barton Fink and Miller's Crossing? Hell, Raising Arizona is pretty fucking funny, but this movie is a depressing testament to what happens to people when they start believing people who tell them they're great. That is, they get lazy and easily impressed by themselves. It's exactly why I appreciate the hundreds of you who write me each week to tell me I'm a fucking asshole and to stop picking through their trash.

O Brother tries to tell jokes, but they're either lame and repeated over and over, or have the subtlety of the harelip at the Arvada Tavern looking for a few bucks by sticking her hand through the fly of your jeans.

The characters never rise above cheap "Green Acres" stereotypes, flat, broad and about as original as a collection of "Truly Tasteless Jokes" (Volume Four notwithstanding). Turturro and Nelson are dumb crackers, overacting and staring googly-eyed at their latest predicament like cartoon cats. This is easily the worst Turturro performance I have ever seen. What asses have the Coens had their heads up to think that dumb hicks are hilarious? Didn't they learn anything from "Hee-Haw"? Clooney is equally bad as a big-vocabulary pompous ass with nothing to do but reel off obviously-scripted monologues where the main joke is that he's using big words. Ha ha ha, a thesaurus sure is a funny book.

The secondary characters aren't any better. A kid sells his soul to the devil to play the guitar well. That is supposed to be clever, but it's not without a point or a joke or some reason for existing. The sinister lawman does absolutely nothing but appear a couple of times and wear "sinister" sunglasses. Goodman can't salvage his burly Cyclops character, mostly because his scene, like every other, has no payoff. Same for the sirens or a subplot about a manic-depressive bank robber. They'd be clever setups for jokes, if only there were punchlines, but the Coens are too amused at how fucking clever it was of them to shoehorn their story into the Odyssey format.

Without jokes or characters, you'd hope for a plot. Sorry, O Brother is looser than sloppy seconds with a three-dollar whore. The unlikable characters meander around the story like blind men in a meat freezer, feeling for an exit and occasionally bumping into a slab of story. How can we root for Clooney if we don't even know or care what he wants?

The best thing about the movie is the way it looks. But it would be better as a picture book than a shitty movie that I had to pay full price for. The saving grace for me is that I still haven't paid Mark back, and I'm not going to. I don't need friends anymore.

I hope Mrs. Filthy gets back soon because since she left has been the longest six hours of my life. Two Fingers.