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O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
MPAA Rating
PG-13
Theatrical Release Date
May 19, 2000
Genre(s)
  • Crime
  • Comic Action
  • George Clooney
  • Buddy Films
  • Obsessive Quests
  • Comic Criminals
  • Coen Brothers
  • DTS
Rating (Stars)
0 Star 1 Star 2 Star 3 Star Half Star
Description
Only Joel and Ethan Coen, the fraternal director and producer team behind art-house hits such as The Big Lebowski and Fargo and masters of quirky and ultra-stylish genre subversion, would dare nick the plot line of Homer's Odyssey for a comic picaresque saga about three cons on the run in 1930s Mississippi. Our wandering hero in this case is one Ulysses Everett McGill, a slick-tongued wise guy with a thing about hair pomade (George Clooney, blithely sending up his own dapper image) who talks his chain-gang buddies (Coen-movie regular John Turturro and newcomer Tim Blake Nelson) into lighting out after some buried loot he claims to know of. En route they come up against a prophetic blind man on a railroad truck, a burly, one-eyed baddie (the ever-magnificent John Goodman), a trio of sexy singing ladies, a blues guitarist who's sold his soul to the devil, a brace of crooked politicos on the stump, a manic-depressive bank robber, and--well, you get the idea. Into this, their most relaxed film yet, the Coens have tossed a beguiling ragbag of inconsequential situations, a wealth of looping, left-field dialogue, and a whole stash of gags both verbal and visual. O Brother (the title's lifted from Preston Sturges's classic 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels) is furthermore graced with glowing, burnished photography from Roger Deakins and a masterly soundtrack from T-Bone Burnett that pays loving homage to American '30s folk styles--blues, gospel, bluegrass, jazz, and more. And just to prove that the brothers haven't lost their knack for bad-taste humor, we get a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed like a cross between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley musical. --Philip Kemp
Director
Joel Coen
Stars
  • Michael Badalucco
  • George Clooney
  • Frank Collison
  • Charles Durning
  • Wayne Duvall
Running Time
103 minutes
Original Price
$19.99
Current Value
$8.36
DVD Features
  • Closed-captioned
  • Color
  • DVD-Video
  • Widescreen
  • NTSC
  • 2.35:1
  • DTS