Suppiluliomas

One of the first scenes shows a man sitting in a car watching a house in the distance, rain is falling, a voice from the off says something about the time 5 a.m. and how this is sleeping time for most people but for some it is working hours... With this tribute to the film noir such as "The Naked City" (1948) the mood is set. And so it went on with tributes to pictures and movie genres. Epic films like "Ben Hur", Esther Williams with synchronised swimmers, Western movies, dancing sailors that have Gene Kelly written all over it. It has it all. Someone had already made a reference to Woody Allens "Radio Days". I agree. This has a similar feeling. The Coen Brothers, however, look at it in a satirical, not to say critical way and show the square and bourgeois way of life in the 50s. Illegitimate pregnancy or homosexuality are fatal for a career in the studios, and there is of course a reference to the McCarthy era. It is a great joke, though, that the screenplay writers who had kidnapped the movie star (Clooney) are indeed upright communists. And Clooney, typically cast as the idiot in a Coen picture, ends up studying Marx' "Kapital" with his kidnappers. The comedy in "Hail, Cesar!" is rather subtle, and the actual story is not at all complex and quickly told. Instead there are scenes, such as the aforementioned dancing sailors, that don't drive the plot forward at all. Maybe that's a reason for the mixed reviews. It didn't bother me. I enjoyed "Hail, Cesar!". A lot.

Okay, I admit that I only watched the pilot, but life is too short to watch more of it.

The plot fits on the back side of a bus ticket. It is all about the erotic aspects of a women torn between her 20th century husband and an 18th century Scotsman.

I have absolutely no desire to see the next episode. This is nothing but cheap and boring entertainment, far from being anything interesting, appealing or thought provoking. How does an emancipated woman of 1945 fit into the 18th century? How could she make a profit out of her advanced knowledge of science and technology? The screenplay authors couldn't care less about those questions.

What we are left with is a simple erotic story. I appreciate that this is what part of the audience are looking for, but it certainly doesn't deserve a 9.0 score on the IMDb scale. This is just an insult to the really great achievements of cinematographic art.

I understand that Cousins Northern Irish accent takes some getting used to. However, trashing his work because of the narration is too harsh a judgment. I actually watched the whole thing. Twice. I was fascinated by a documentary that tries the impossible: a history of world cinema. The first two episodes alone deal with the era of silent movies. Try to find something else that goes so much into detail! It requires concentration and attention but I kept watching because I learnt something.

The Story of Film is a very personal take on the subject. Cousins often uses phrases such as "perhaps the greatest film ever made" or "perhaps the most innovative film..." And often such phrases refer to a Japanese or Iranian movie that I have never heard of. I am sure a lot of people would disagree. I don't have a problem with it. In the opening sequence of every episode, he says that he follows the Odyssey of film makers who are not driven by box office success. If you want to see the history of Hollywood Blockbusters, "The Story of Film" is the wrong program. If you want to know what kind of films were made in the 1980s behind the iron curtain in Eastern Europe, now you are in the right theatre.

Leaving all criticism on Cousins narration, possible inaccuracies or highly subjective opinions aside, here is a man talking who has probably more forgotten about movies than most people ever knew about the subject.