Should Have Been Better

As most of the board comments have already covered the issues with this film (too may characters, no plot, boring pace, etc), I won't rehash it.

Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, a "fixer" for a major movie studio in the 1950s whose job seems to be keeping his immature actors out of trouble or covering up the trouble they do get into. His biggest problem is that the star of his big budget, Ben-Hur-ish movie has disappeared. He also has to deal with the unwanted pregnancy of his starlet as well as trying to chaperone along his western star who is going to be in an upscale musical and can't get along with the priggish director. Also, there are twin gossip columnists, played smartly by Tilda Swinton, who keep threatening to break a big story And just to add to the mayhem, a group of Marxist followers have established a Communist think thank nearby.

This movie wasted a ton of potential. I'm assuming the cost to assemble all this talent left no budget for computers to write the script. The characters played by George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum could have been left out. Its a mish mash of scenes that have less to do with each other than an episode of SNL.

However, there is some really smart filmmaking going on. The high points of this movie are the actual making of the films-within-the-film: the Roman movie from which the movie derives its title, the sailor musical that is reminiscent of Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra films, and the witty banter between Ralph Fienne's snooty director and Aldren Ehrenreich's former wild west star. I think if they had stuck to the movie-making tidbits, the constant fires Mannix needed to put out, and the Communist think thank, they could have made a smart, snappy, movie about the movie studios of the 1950s. It was a case of too many chefs spoiling the soup.


My memory foam pillow says it can't remember my face. I can tell its lying.