Land of Milk and Honey

Naturally, nothing about the film’s moral lesson is specific to Israel. On the contrary, characters like James have become a staple of modern filmmaking, be it the honorable Nigerian doctor caught up in an organs scam in Dirty Pretty Things, the sweet Latino gigolo in Star Maps, or the good-hearted small-town kids in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s earlier classics Boys From Fengkuei and Dust in the Wind. All these decent souls taste the poison apple of modernity and know that the folks back home — like James’ fellow villagers in Africa — won’t understand that our present-day Jerusalems are far less holy than they used to be.

MILLENNIUM MAMBO | Directed by HOU HSIAO-HSIEN Written by CHU T’IEN-WEN | Produced by CHU and ERIC HEUMANN | Released by Palm Pictures At Laemmle Fairfax Cinema

JAMES’ JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM | Directed by RA’ANAN ALEXANDROWICZ | Written by ALEXANDROWICZ and SAMI DUENIAS | Produced by AMIR HAREL | Released by Zeitgeist Films | At Music Hall, Encino Town Center, One Colorado

How Not To Kill a Lady

In this golden era of the leaden remake, Joel and Ethan Coen have always promised something brighter. Rather than merely copy old movies, they’ve taken them as the starting point for jokey, fractured riffs on the idea of noir, romantic comedy or Capra corn. Until now. Their misshapen new movie, The Ladykillers, is based on the 1955 Ealing Studios classic about London thieves, led by scary Alec Guinness, who use a clueless old woman’s house as a base of operations for a robbery. Such a wicked storyline seems right up the brothers’ alley, and at first you may think they’re pulling it off. They neatly transpose the action to the South and turn the old woman into a devout African-American church lady (Irma P. Hall). Better still, they unleash Tom Hanks, a terrific comic actor who — after playing the Noble American for the past few years — relishes

the chance to ham it up. Sporting goofy fake teeth, he plays the bearded, white-suited Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D., a mountebank who speaks with amusingly old-fashioned grandiloquence, punctuating his words with a rapid, air-sucking laugh. He’s surrounded by a band of crooked brothers, including a muscle-bound dolt (Ryan Hurst), a brutally efficient Asian with a Hitler mustache (Tzi Ma) and a sassy black dude who can’t stop saying “motherfucker” (Marlon Wayans). (Having demonstrated their mastery of insensitively portraying Jews, the Coens have moved on, heroically, to African-Americans.)

It’s the disease of Hollywood remakes that they nearly always lose sight of what made the original good in the first place. Where Alexander Mackendrick’s film offered a delicately diabolical blend of the ordinary and the brutal — it was a character comedy about a hilariously thwarted attempt to kill a frail old woman — the new Ladykillers bludgeons you with cartoonish gags about stupid football players, irritable-bowel syndrome and (for the second Coen film in a row) somebody accidentally shooting himself in the head. For all their considerable talent, the Coens have almost always had trouble telling stories, and here they cram the whole biddy-bashing premise into the last few minutes, where it lacks all menace and brio. Is it possible that these aficionados of black comedy don’t realize that The Ladykillers is supposed to be one?

—J.P.

THE LADYKILLERS | Directed by ETHAN and JOEL COEN | Written by the COENS from a screenplay and original story by William Rose | Produced by the COENS, TOM JACOBSON, BARRY JOSEPHSON and BARRY SONNENFELD | Released by Buena Vista Pictures | Citywide