(9.18) This week’s Movie on the Block is the 2000 Coen Brothers’ nod to Homer “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” starring George Clooney (The Facts of Life, Roseanne). A.O. Scott liked the movie (and the now famous soundtrack).
It doesn’t take a classics scholar to notice that the wily brothers have taken a few liberties with their source. Their hero, played with toothy glee by George Clooney, is a hyper-articulate escaped convict named Ulysses Everett McGill, who wanders the dusty byways of Depression-era Mississippi with a pair of dimwitted companions, searching for wealth, his wife and his favorite hair treatment, a gooey pomade called Dapper Dan.
Scott goes on to note that the movie “is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has a good deal less violence, obscenity and sex than Homer’s ”Odyssey,” and not nearly as much as the average American folk song.” Running time 106 minutes.
Free, dusk, Thursday, September 18, Grant’s Block, 260 Westminster Street at Union (directions)