I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in having gotten a little burned out on Kanye West right around the time of The Life Of Pablo‘s release.  Because despite going back and listening to his entire discography and being reminded that Kanye is undoubtedly the most essential pop artist of the 21st century so far, the ridiculousness of Kanye the man persisted.  In the build up to The Life Of Pablo, he made so many bizarre comments on Twitter that it was hard to even decide which ones to be baffled by.  And sure, I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a part of me that finds Kanye’s public persona to be refreshing in comparison to the bland masses of media-friendly celebrities that permeate our current entertainment landscape.  But at a certain point, there’s only so much of Kanye’s insanity that one can handle.  So I think shortly after Kanye’s dumb theoretical company chart and the emergence of the phrase “emoticon auto correct”, I’d had enough of Kanye, to the point where it took a while for me to have much will to listen to The Life Of Pablo, which was supposed to be the center of all his recent ranting and raving in the first place.

But of course, this frustrating juxtaposition between Kanye the artist and Kanye the person is what makes him Kanye.  And this recent display of Kanye’s inability to concentrate on any one project (he kind of comes of as a kid with severe ADHD these days) seems to have spilled over a bit into this newest album.  It’s a grab bag of sounds for sure, with songs like “Ultralight Beam” and “Low Lights” evoking a more gospel-sounding, spiritual side, while other tracks in the album’s first half are a bit more tossed off.  2013’s Yeezus was an album that felt more like a collection of sounds than a collection of actual songs, and that experimental approach to song-construction seeps it’s way in to The Life Of Pablo, while traces of Yeezus‘s eerier-sounds keep a lot of this album’s more heartfelt moments from ever feeling saccharine.

It’s a little hard to read what the general reaction has been so far for The Life Of Pablo, since the critical consensus has veered between mildly pleasing and the usual adoration that awaits a new Kanye West album.  While there’s also the fact that the public doesn’t have an easy way of listening to it since it’s still only on fucking Tidal.  But my first impressions of this album thus far have been that it’s a good Kanye album, but it’s the first one in a while (or maybe ever) that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to reinvent the wheel.  A lot of it feels like it’s invoking stuff that was already done on Yeezus and 808’s & Heartbreak, but considering it contains more than its share of stand-out tracks (like “Real Friends” and “30 Hours”), it’s still a very good album, if not necessarily a “great Kanye West album”.  But then again, Kanye has recently mentioned that he’s not even done messing around with The Life Of Pablo, so maybe an even better version of it remains to be seen.

Favorite Tracks: “Ultralight Beam”, “Real Friends”, “30 Hours”

It’s no secret that the Coen Brothers’ movies have always owed something to the golden age of Hollywood, as film noir and screwball comedies have always had an integral influence on the Coens’ cannon.  Granted, these influences usually never take hold of a picture and control the tone of it, but it’s more that elements of these genres are used for perpetuating the Coens’ consistently cynical worldview.  The Coens’ latest Hail, Caesar!, sees them reigning in their bleak tendencies a bit (or at least compared to recent efforts like Inside Llewyn Davis or A Serious Man), and in the process more or less have some fun with a lot of the different genres from Hollywood’s golden era.  And yet, even though this is technically a “fun” Coen Brothers movie, it still manage to work in plenty of themes relating to politics, religion, show business, and the whole meaning of it all.

Hail, Caesar! takes place over what is basically a day-in-the-life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a guy who works for the fictional movie studio Capitol Pictures, and whose job it is to take care of any problems pertaining to the studio’s movie stars and their needy movie star problems.  Mannix has a bit of a pickle on his hand when one of the studio’s biggest stars, Baird Whitlock (played by George Clooney), goes missing.  We then see that Whitlock has been captured by a bunch of communists hoping to brainwash him, while also demanding a $100,000 ransom from the studio, though if you’ve seen any Coen brothers’ movie, you can probably guess that the money ends up being a bit of a mcguffin.  Then as Mannix scrambles to get his star back, we see him dealing with a slew of other problems on different movie sets, which presents plenty of opportunities for what I would call very extended cameos from the likes of Scarlett Johannson, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum, Ralph Feinnes and plenty others.

First of all, it’s just a lot of fun to see some of the brightest stars of today inhabit a world in which movie stars were meant to be larger than life, and were almost these beloved objects for audiences to project their hopes and dreams and fears onto, but all for the sake of their own entertainment.  Clearly, times have changed, and there are only a handful of working actors that are legitimate “movie stars”, or at least are movie stars in the way that they were in the ’50s.  Brolin, Clooney, Johannson, and dare I say it, Tatum are among the few movie actors that have that old-fashioned star quality.  So I have to imagine that’s something the Coens were setting out to play around with in Hail, Caesar!, since everybody gets at least one scenery-chewing sequence that maybe doesn’t always have that much to do with the plot, but usually manages to evoke the thrills of good old-fashioned American filmmaking.

Still, Hail, Caesar! is a bit more than just a rosey tribute to old Hollywood, as it tackles the wave of communism that ran through the film industry during the ’50s, much of which was organized by (surprise) disgruntled screenwriters that were pushed aside by the studio system.  The scenes where Clooney is having conversations about economics and an individual’s place in society felt a bit more like something out of one of the Coens’ more existential pictures.  But I suppose that’s ok, since a lot of the scenes in this movie feel like scenes from another movie, since a lot of them are literally scenes from other movies (i.e. the films within this film).  Which perhaps doesn’t make for the most cohesive story, but I think the movie works since there are enough really good stand-alone scenes, including a particularly memorable one that revolves around the phrase “would that it were so simple?”

Even though I did enjoy this movie, this is one of those films were I do have to question if I (and most critics) would have responded to it a little more if we weren’t so aware of the directors’ oeuvre and the expectations of it being one of their films.  Like would I think this is a really awesome movie if it didn’t have the Coens’ names attached to it?  I don’t know.  Maybe, maybe not.  All I know, is that Hail, Caesar! can’t help but attract the phrase “Coens light”, since it doesn’t quite have the gravity of their best work, but is still an inherently interesting film because the Coens are just one of those artists whom it’s always a joy to watch paint.