O Brother Where Art Thou

I just caught the last twenty minutes of this on television for the first time in probably five years, and I'd forgotten what an enjoyable and compulsively re watchable film it is. The music is infectious, the performances quirky without being annoying (I particularly enjoy the Clooney character's efforts to speak in an intellectually elevated matter but never quite being able to pull it off), and it really just has the right mix of comic energy and fable elements to keep you smiling (even in those moments when Baby Face Nelson is dancing his way to the electric chair, or the main characters crashing of a KKK rally).

The film reinforces two points for me as well:

1) This has been said before by others more articulate than me, but its readily apparent that George Clooney is a great character actor trapped in a leading mans body (the same thing could be said for Alec Baldwin to a lesser extent). He has consistently chosen projects that aren't the most commerically viable (Solaris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night and Good Luck, Three Kings) but apparently keep him interested, but you wouldn't necessarily place him in at first inspection. Really could you see Tom Cruise in a quasi musical set in the deep south and loosely based on Homer's The Odyssey?

2) The Coen brothers are at heart screwballs, and I mean that as a complement. This is actually a difficult film to pull off, and their ability to maintain a consistently engaging lighthearted tone (hows that for mixing adjectives) in a story that isn't the most linear, and actually contains a fair amount of dark elements (the aforementioned execution walk and lynch mob, as well as the Devil chasing our heroes throughout the film and almost executing them before they are saved by a divine flood, oh and spoiler alert) is impressive. In fact as much as I enjoy the majority of their work (No Country for Old Men bein gthe exception) I think their comedies hold up the best, but even their more serious work contains a certain manic undercurrent that has you smiling even in plots where absolute carnage is going on (see Fargo for a prime example of this).

Anyway check the film out if you haven't seen it before, and I need to go and rewatch the whole thing.