Stars: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, John Goodman, Charles Durning, Holly Hunter, Michael Badalucco, Wayne Duvall, Stephen Root, Ed Gale

Director: Joel Coen

Summary: Set in the Deep South during the Depression of the 1920's, this story is loosely based on Homer's The Odyssey. Whilst working on a chain gang, three convicts escape in order to recover the loot from a recent bank robbery, buried at the home of one of the gang. Along the way they have many adventures and strange characters to deal with...

Joel and Ethan Coen transport Homer's ODYSSEY to the depression-era South in the silly, fun comedy O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU

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Only Joel and Ethan Coen, masters of quirky and ultra-stylish genre subversion, would dare nick the plotline of Homer's Odysseyfor O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their comic picaresque saga about three cons on the run in 1930s Mississippi. Our wandering hero in this case is one Ulysses Everett McGill, a slick-tongued wise guy with a thing for hair pomade (George Clooney, blithely sending up his own dapper image) who talks his chain-gang buddies (Coen-movie regular John Turturro and newcomer Tim Blake Nelson) to light out after some buried loot he claims to know of. En route they come up against a prophetic blind man on a railroad truck, a burly one-eyed baddie (the ever-magnificent John Goodman), a trio of sexy singing ladies, a blues guitarist who's sold his soul to the devil, a brace of crooked politicos on the stump, a manic-depressive bank robber, and--well, you get the idea. Into this, their most relaxed film yet, the Coens have tossed a beguiling ragbag of inconsequential situations, a wealth of looping, left-field dialogue and a whole stash of gags both verbal and visual. O Brother(the title's lifted from Preston Sturges' classic 1941 comedy Sullivan's Travels) is furthermore graced with glowing, burnished photography from Roger Deakins and a masterly soundtrack from T-Bone Burnett that pays loving homage to American 30s folk-styles: blues, gospel, bluegrass, jazz and more. And just to prove that the brothers haven't lost their knack for bad-taste humour, we get a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed like something between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley musical. --Philip Kemp

On the DVD:This two-disc set duplicates the original single-disc release of the film which included a handful of cast and crew interviews, and adds an additional disc with more interviews, two brief behind-the-scenes featurettes about the production design and the post-production digital colouring of the film, a couple of storyboard-to-scene comparisons and a music video of "Man of Constant Sorrow". There's also a 16-minute documentary to promote the companion Down from the Mountainconcert. Frankly there's not a lot here to justify spreading it across two discs: a more pleasing not to say generous offering would have been to cram all these extras onto Disc 1 and give us Down from the Mountainas the second disc. --Mark Walker

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen, 16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Cast And Crew Interviews, Soggy Bottom Boys I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow Music Video, Painting With Pixels, Production Featurette, Storyboard To Scene Comparison, The Making Of Down From The Mountain Live Convert, Original Trailer, TV Spots
Subtitles:	English
Year:	2000
Release Date:	November 5, 2001
Runtime:	103 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	M P 014 D S
Keywords:	Special, Brother, Art, Comedy, Two, General, Edition, Wide, Screen, Where, O, Discs, Thou
Genre:	Comedy