Title: Who's watching this?
Product review: The audience for the 1955 Ealing Studios film of the same name must be just a few sentimental cinephiles like yours truly. A remake, therefore, has to do something to help the story march with the times, if it is to be a profitable product in a shabby age. This film, however - the second Coen Bros turkey in a row - exhibits some of the worst qualities of the cinematic art in our time: a self-referential irony that constantly rips the narrative fabric to shreds; overdrawn characters who are more like cartoons than like people; a smug and self-congratulatory visual slickness; and a relentless tendency to suppose that tiresome repetition of the "f" word represents something like humor, when it just doesn't fit into this tale at all. What happened to the Coens who made "Fargo"? What a sorry sell-out.
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