Preview Reviews: The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers

Opens March 26

With this preview comes a kind of biblical dilemma. On the one hand, it's a Coen brothers movie. You want to give them all benefit of the doubt after handing humanity the gift of The Big Lebowski. That movie alone has bought them about a billion credits without any expiration date.

On the other hand, however...Tom Hanks?

It was one thing for the Coen brothers to make a romantic adult comedy starring Catherine Two-Names-Douglas and George Clooney's chin. I was willing to forgive them becausesee aboveThe Big Lebowski. But there's a clause. The Tom Hanks Clause. And it states, "If the Party shall cast Tom Hanks in his movie, then the other Party may declare force majeur, for Tom Hanks is an evil, wicked, gooey-cheeked demon whose very presence can wreak havoc upon the Sane Man's soul."

Tom Hanks, appearing as a poorly cast Mark Twain-ish huckster, with a bad southern accent and caricatured white southern suit, isn't the only thing about this preview that frightens. It also features an angry, fat black woman who yells at Hanks and his multi-ethnic crew of wacky rip-off artists. So now you have the whole That's My Mama thing to deal with too.

In fact, judging by the preview, the Coen brothers are offering up a cross between Ocean's ElevenI challenge anyone to explain to me why that was worth 90 minutes of my timeand That's My Mama.

Many folks may like this formula. When they showed this preview in the multiplex, I sank into my seat clutching my heart while at least three single, fat, middle-aged men guffawed approvingly, creating a kind of THX stereo effect, as each was seated several rows apart from the other. This disconnect, between my own terror at seeing Hanks and a fat black lady making sitcom slapstick on a giant screen, and the unemployed middle-aged men guffawing in different corners of the matinee, is the kind of thing that can require a Thorazine shot to recover from.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to cry foul here. I'm not going to see this movie, not in a million years, if only to preserve the good memory of the "old" Coen brothers. If you don't have a Tom Hanks clause in your contract with life, I suggest you get one before The Ladykillers is released. Otherwise, you might be fooled, just like the poor lonely saps in my matinee were.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 Opens April 16

I once found Uma Thurman beautiful. Like when she bared her fun-bags in Dangerous Liaisons. Or even as the Cleopatra-clipped coke-ho in Pulp Fiction, when her fun-bags got a full dose of adrenaline and started flopping all over Eric Stoltz's floor, a scene that had my eyeballs spinning like slot machine dials.

But watching the preview to Kill Bill: Volume 2, I can't help but groan aloud, as Ash does to the Sheila-zombie in Army of Darkness, "Honey, you got reeeal ugly."

The preview shows Uma in the same kind of cheap retro car-scene movie set in which Tarantino shot Travolta after he popped Stoltz's choco in Pulp Fiction. Like Travolta, Uma's driving a convertible, set before an obviously fake background. But unlike Travolta, it's no fun looking at Uma. There's no bizarre comedy to her decay. It's just depressing.

It was kind of funny and interesting looking at an over-the-hill Travolta talking (and popping) smack with his potbelly bulging throughout Pulp Fiction. It was a little less interesting watching all those endless close-ups of a lumpy, over-the-hill Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, particularly those last five minutes as she drove away from the crime.

Tarantino seems to think he's hit on something really big with these close-ups of over-the-hill actors and actresses driving around in cars. And I think he had most people fooled, especially with Jackie Brown, when critics were talking about how he'd "matured."

But now reality is setting in. Tarantino lost something big between Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1his talent. To put it plainly, he's not funny anymore. Nor is he interesting. He's become the Dennis Miller of indie film, painful to watch but impossible to get rid of.

Which means that the real washed-up star who should be driving that tongue-in-cheek fake car is Tarantino. Maybe he knows it; maybe that's why he keeps desperately trying to throw us off of his scent by putting one washed-up patsy after another in front of our eyes, to divert us from the fact that he's turned into someone who not only has resorted to ripping himself off, but ripping himself off badly.

The preview is simple. It shows an age-worn Uma Thurman, looking more like the eye-patched curtain freak from Twin Peaks than the fun-bag flasher we all knew and loved, snarling as unconvincingly as a soccer mom, "I roared and I rampaged. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna kill Bill."

What she should really do is kill Quentin.