intolerable cruelty (2003)
			director:  joel coen george clooney, catherine zeta-jones cedric the entertainer, geoffrey rush billy bob thornton unfashionable observations rating: B+				The Coen brothers’ latest movie follows in the footsteps of O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  Intolerable Cruelty is a quirky movie about quirky characters that tickles your funny bone in the most casual way.  The movie isn’t funny because it sets out to be funny.  The movie is funny because its characters are funny people to begin with. Intolerable Cruelty tells the story of Miles Massey, an egomaniacal Beverly Hills divorce lawyer (George Clooney) who frames the gold-digging Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in order to get his client released from his marriage to Marylin without a settlement.  When Miles falls in love with Marylin during the divorce proceedings, Marylin seizes her opportunity to get revenge on the slick and all-too confident Miles Massey. George Clooney has now established himself as a respectable comic actor with the help of the Coen brothers.  Clooney is famous for having a suave, cool demeanor in most of his films.  However, when he teams up with the Coen brothers, we find him naturally at ease with characters like Miles Massey, wherein the slickness that we’re used to seeing from Clooney is also accompanied by tongue-in-cheek peculiarities.  For example, Massey is singularly obsessed with his teeth, which he constantly wipes and stares at in the mirror in an almost nonchalant way.  The effect of such quirkiness is pure, innocent fun.  And that’s rare these days. While Intolerable Cruelty is not a groundbreaking film by any means (not even for the Coen brothers), it is a highly entertaining movie with a good script and inspired acting by Clooney in particular.  When you throw the beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones and even Cedric the Entertainer into the mix, what more could one ask for? I’d give Joel Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty a B+.
	Unfashionable Observations © 2003