"Remember that you are the smartest man in the room." That's reportedly the note Joel and Ethan Coen gave George Clooney to unlock his performance as Everett — and it's the key to this whole movie.

This week on Reel Chums, we revisit Joel and Ethan Coen's Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? — required viewing before we head to theaters for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Danny's watched this one more than ten times; Marcel's love for it goes all the way back to reading an abridged Odyssey as a kid and realizing this movie had been an adaptation the whole time.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The First Fully Digital Color Grade: How Roger Deakins muted the greens and pushed the burnt oranges and yellows to build this dusty, Depression-era Mississippi world — and why that choice makes him the "godfather" of digital color grading.
• Everett vs. Odysseus: How the Coens subvert the source material by making their "hero" vain, selfish and convinced he's the smartest man in the room, instead of the genuine leader Odysseus is.
• Three Stooges, Not a Crew: Why Pete and Delmar function less like Odysseus's loyal sailors and more like comic relief constantly derailing the plan.
• The Coens as Writer-Director-Editors: Why having one team control the script, the shoot, and the edit is the secret to this movie's insane pacing at just 100 minutes.
• "Tell, Not Show": The screenplay's trick of skipping the connective tissue between scenes — and why it keeps the movie feeling episodic instead of overstuffed.
• The Soundtrack as a Character: T-Bone Burnett's gospel, bluegrass and folk revival, and why "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" still slaps 25 years later.
• The KKK Rally as the Underworld: Reading the film's most surreal sequence as this story's version of the Odyssey's land of the dead — and the first time our heroes act selflessly.

Next episode: We stay in adaptation mode and head to Akira Kurosawa's 1985 epic Ran — one of Christopher Nolan's own stated influences for The Odyssey.