Drive Away Dolls * * * ½

What's in it?  It's a review from Phil.  Holy crap!

Well, you know, The Coen Brothers.... legends! 

After years of giving us truly great films - sometimes masterpieces - they stopped working together.  Joel Cohen got pretty serious and did Macbeth,  - arguably the best Macbeth ever committed to the screen.

Ethan Coen has been quiet.  But he and his partner/wife had this script in the bottom drawer.  Apparently they first wrote it about thirty years ago, but the brothers never got round to making it.  Now Ethan and his wife, Tricia Cooke have brought it to life. It was originally called Drive Away Dykes, which is a much cheekier (and more appropriate)  name, but the studios were having none of that. 

It's good, but not as good as one normally expects from a film with the Coen stamp on it.  Set in the nineties, it's a rolicking lesbian road trip.  

The very pretty and highly promiscuous Jamie busts up with her rather butch girlfriend and gets kicked out of the apartment. Her girlfriend says Jamie has slept around twenty times too often.  Jamie is played by Margaret Qualley who does a fine turn with a lot of swagger and a Texan accent.

Jamie decides to go to Tallahassee with her bookish reserved friend Marian, who is also a Lesbian, but kind of shy.

I should mention that in an earlier establishing scene we have witnessed a couple of hard men taking care of someone in a back alley with a corkscrew and a hacksaw in order to acquire a briefcase.

The particular briefcase, and another package, are now in a car that was inadvertently given to Jamie and Marian to drive to Tallahassee.  They are using one of those car-shifting services.

Even though they are supposed to deliver the car within twenty four hours, when Jamie learns that  Marian hasn't had sex for a long long time she makes it her mission to get her road buddy laid! 

Ignoring their schedule they frequent lesbian bars and even hook up with an all girl soccer team. The soccer team are really into playing off the field, especially with each other.  There is a lot of lesbian sex in this movie.

The hard men need to get the briefcase back, and the girls have no idea it's on board their vehicle.  But about half way through the movie they discover the briefcase and its contents, and the contents of the other package .... and Boy.....!

In keeping with Coen movies the pursuing hard men are very funny caricatures, showing a mixture of nastiness, incompetence and amiability.

I read somewhere it cost thirty million to make this, but you wouldn't' think so to look at it (unless Matt Damon got all the money for his amusing cameo).  It looks like it was made for thirty bucks, but that's part of its charm, as are the end titles where the film cheekily reclaim its original name.