Coen Brothers Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Honey Don’t! (2025)

August 26, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans
written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke
directed by Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke have a mission, and that mission is apparently to make affected, arch neo-noir “comedies” showcasing angry cunnilingus and the sense of humour that, in tiny doses, gave Ethan’s collaborations with his brother Joel a soupçon of bitterness. Without what seems to be Joel’s humanism to leaven what appears to be Ethan’s misanthropy, the residue left at the bottom of this cup is bitter to the point of repugnant. Flying solo, Ethan comes across as the kind of kid who inflates a toad to pop it with a slingshot for yuks. In some ways, Honey Don’t! is a definitive film for our era of nihilism, this generation of people becoming dead inside. It’s an endurance challenge, our Freddy Got Fingered, a sociopath by any other name. Remember that scene in Fargo where the wife tries to run away from her captors with her hands tied behind her back and her head covered by a hood? How she stumbles around in a confused circle before tripping and falling, causing kidnapper Steve Buscemi to laugh uproariously? Imagine an entire movie that is just that. Cruel. Mean. Tying-tin-cans-to-a-dog’s-tail mean. It’s aggressively nasty in a way I find punishing, and it’s scary because I suspect Coen and Cooke have enrichment on their minds. I think they’re doing this to force the “normies” to put some respect on alternative lifestyles. I think they’re doing it because they think the way to do that is to push our noses into our own sick.

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

December 24, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Drama, Esoterica, Shakespeare, Theatrical, Thriller, War

***½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Bertie Carvel, Brendan Gleeson
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw The Tragedy of Macbeth is a middle-aged lament of the childless, a haunted interpretation of Shakespeare that underscores my belief that the Coen Brothers–in this case, just Joel–are/is among our finest literary critics. Their O Brother, Where Art Thou? unpacks The Odyssey as a collection of regional tales and songs; their adaptations of No Country for Old Men and True Grit demonstrate a deep understanding of not merely the specific works being adapted, but Cormac McCarthy’s and Charles Portis’s entire bodies of work as well. The Big Lebowski, needless to say, is a brilliant and essential take on Chandler’s The Big Sleep. That their planned adaptation of James Dickey’s To the White Sea with Brad Pitt hasn’t happened yet and doesn’t look like it ever will is a genuine tragedy. (The relative failure of their Ladykillers remake suggests this skill may be limited to the transmutation between mediums.) For his solo debut, Joel Coen has taken a German Expressionistic approach, leaning heavily into long shadows and aestheticism that feels like mourning. The film falls somewhere between the mysticism of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Orson Welles’s incantatory 1948 Macbeth, though it’s less wild and windswept than either, reminding in this way of how steeped in superstition and the supernatural was Shakespeare–and how raw, even stripped down, the Scottish Play seems in comparison to the Bard’s other histories.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

November 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Streaming, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw The Coen Brothers’ one-shot revival-in-spirit of DC’s “Weird Western Tales,” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs features six narratively-unrelated Old West challenges to genre mythology that are so practically effortless, so technically perfect, that the typical Coen payload of misanthropy and, yes, nihilism lands as particularly caustic. Binding each episode in this, a short-story anthology from our most literary filmmakers, is a conversation about how the American myth of self-actualization is indelibly stained by westward expansion, self-justified by the amoral equivocations of Manifest Destiny. It’s about the lie of American exceptionalism, riffing on and shading stock hero archetypes like the gunfighter, the outlaw, the travelling troubadour, the prospector, the settlers of course, and the bounty hunter. The presentation is all a bit too much: it’s too handsome (Inside Llewyn Davis cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel returns to the fold), too exquisitely choreographed, too…tricky? The moment the brothers frame a POV shot from the inside of a guitar, complete with suddenly-muffled singing and strumming, you realize the movie is maybe having some fun at your expense–that it is maybe, in fact, an asshole. “Misanthrope?” asks Buster (Tim Blake Nelson), reading his crimes off a wanted poster, “I don’t hate my fellow man!” Dressed all in “white duds and pleasant demeanour,” Buster may not be a misanthrope, but he’s definitely an asshole, as well as a psychopath. It’s an efficient, devastating dissection of the Gene Autry/Roy Rogers subgenre of western, in which cherub-faced, potato-bloated cowpokes settle land and cattle disputes, woo big-eyed women, and punctuate their acts of questionable heroism with a nice, wholesome tune. Howard Hawks had something to say about this in his brilliant, subversive Rio Bravo. Now the Coens are having a go.

TIFF ’17: Suburbicon + Bodied

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Satire, Thriller, TIFF

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens’ and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s. Trouble is, the best parts aren’t that great and the worst parts…yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn’t just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie’s pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-user wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them’s blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin’ Cousins.) One night, while Jupe’s Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge’s system can’t handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can’t figure out why his father won’t positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers’ casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they’re always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

Hail, Caesar! (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 5, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson

Hailcaesar1

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much, Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Hail, Caesar! (2015)

February 6, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/****
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Hallways/Corridors/Aisles in Coen Brothers Movies: A Retrospective [UPDATED]

February 4, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Coen Brothers

Blood Simple (1985)
DP Barry Sonnenfeld

Bridge of Spies (2015)

October 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Drama, Espionage, Spielberg

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda
screenplay by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Steven Spielberg is the great Hollywood pastry tube. He’s packed to the brim with sugary, awards-season sweetness, and he extrudes little nuggets of prestige with the greased regularity of a lifelong prune-eater. In his latest bit of machine-tooled calculation, Bridge of Spies, he makes the unintentional statement during his patented unforgivable epilogue that the American public is a disgusting, moronic, animalistic mob ruled by prejudices and the media (which is the foundation of a different, good movie on the subject of Bridge of Spies)–ironic, because it’s those very deficiencies in critical discernment, moral certitude, and sophistication that Spielberg has made a cottage career of taking advantage of. If it’s true that all films manipulate but we only complain when they do it poorly (and it’s more true than not), then let me complain that Spielberg is an absolute visual savant–proof of it in the first ten, wordless minutes of Bridge of Spies (compare it to the wordless section of Amistad)–and an absolute pandering whore in his inability to deliver an ambiguous ending. He’s said as much. He’s the only living director who could turn out a masterpiece from a Philip K. Dick short story and ruin it with a sunshine double-happiness lollipop of a ridiculous Hollywood ending. But have no fear: Bridge of Spies never threatens to be a masterpiece for even a moment. It’s no Munich or Saving Private Ryan–more like The Terminal. Bridge of Spies is decrepit, highly-polished garbage from almost the beginning, with no relief from its elderly ministrations all the way through to the end.

Unbroken (2014)

December 24, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Coen Brothers, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, War

*/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson
directed by Angelina Jolie

by Walter Chaw I genuinely believe that Angelina Jolie means well. She's like the distaff Sean Penn. Unlike Sean Penn, she probably shouldn't direct more movies. Jolie does her research by going to the places she makes movies about. She cares. She adopts children from those places. She takes embarrassing publicity photos with her subjects, sometimes, that indicate not malicious self-promotion, but rather an unaffected, Costner-esque surprise and wonder. She's growing in her morality before our very eyes, and it's great, but her second time up to the plate, Unbroken, is naive and simpering. The only thing remotely interesting about it is that its subject, Olympic athlete and WWII POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O'Connell), after getting tortured by the Japanese for a while, decided post-war to embrace Billy Graham and forgive his torturers. That bit, the interesting bit, is left to a few lengthy end-title cards. It's sort of like reading the Old Testament and calling it good and, um, wanting to post the Ten Commandments in schools instead of the Sermon on the Mount. Never mind.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

December 8, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don’t think much of me at all. What’s often read as disdain for their characters I’ve read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it’s just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre–and, in their adaptations, of authors–but the entire function as well. They don’t just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers’ entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it’s a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey–or, at least, to the character of Odysseus–in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it’s populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps’ blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi’s (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.

Crimewave (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

May 19, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Sam Raimi, Scream/Shout! Factory

*½/**** Image B- Sound C+ Extras A
starring Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi’s sophomore picture Crimewave is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed of a singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants very badly to be a feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros. cartoon (one of the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is Joe Dante’s segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and thrown together by misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed badger spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max Ernst gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It’s deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur signatures in double time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar artifact of a film that should have ended careers instead getting “lost” by a bumfuddled, betrayed studio for long enough to allow Evil Dead II and Blood Simple the opportunity to cement reputations before this one could bury them.

The Big Lebowski (1998) – [Limited Edition] Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2011****/****, 1990s, 2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Sports, UK

****/**** Image C+ Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw I think that once the book closes on the Coen Brothers, they’ll be seen as the premier interpreters of our time: the best literary critics; the Mark Twains. I used to believe they were simply genre tourists on this mission to do one for every genre, but it becomes apparent with each new No Country for Old Men and True Grit unlocking each vintage Miller’s Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy that they were interpreting genres long before they took on specific pieces as a whole. Coming full circle from the wry noir of Blood Simple and Fargo and presenting itself eventually as of a piece with a later Coen noir, The Man Who Wasn’t There (just as A Serious Man is a companion piece to Barton Fink), The Big Lebowski serves as the transition point in that process while also moving the brothers from broad genre takedowns to a very specific kind of literary adaptation. That they would follow it up with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their take on The Odyssey, speaks to a mission statement of sorts: like it, The Big Lebowski is a distillation of a classic piece of literature (Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) that completely understands its simultaneous responsibility to its own medium and to its source material. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

True Grit (2010)

December 22, 2010****/****, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Spielberg, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw In exactly the same way they distilled the essence of Cormac McCarthy into an overwhelming, oppressive, animal nihilism in No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen have distilled the folksy Americana of Charles Portis into their adaptation of his True Grit. That gift for translation is what made The Odyssey into their collection of regional songs and stories O Brother, Where Art Thou?, what made their Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink (the two films, along with O Brother, that True Grit most resembles) so sure in their genre approximations. More than mimics, the Coens’ genius is as interpreters and scholars, able to understand the thrust of not Preston Sturges, but of a Preston Sturges character–of not one book but, miraculously, a body of work. And though True Grit is as literal and faithful an adaptation of the novel as one could hope for, the brilliance of it is that it’s captured the immersive feeling of Portis’s prose. More than an adaptation, True Grit is an explanation of Portis’s work through the agency of an entirely different medium. It suggests that the Coens are like Tarantino’s monologue explaining Superman at the end of Kill Bill, Vol. 2: there is in their Fargos and Raising Arizonas sardonic commentary on genre and spectatorship. The big secret is that they are, in their own way, as detached and alien as cultural critics as Cronenberg is as an anthropologist.

Blood Simple (Director’s Cut) (1985/2000) – Blu-ray Disc

August 28, 20101980s, 2000s, 2010, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Crime, Thriller

Blood Simple.
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras F
starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmett Walsh
screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw For all the entirely justified bile levelled at George Lucas’s art-hating, self-abnegating decisions to redux his movies into oblivion while stashing the originals in dead formats and special features, there’s been no commensurate disdain levied against the Coen Brothers for their desecration of their directorial debut, Blood Simple. Only long out-of-print VHS and LaserDisc editions offer access to the version of the film, compromised though it is, that most of us grew up with–the one that uses Neil Diamond instead of a Four Tops standard; the one that has Carter Burwell’s brilliant score cue up a few seconds earlier as Abby (Frances McDormand) and her new lover Ray (John Getz) go to the house Abby shares with husband Marty (Dan Hedaya) to gather her things; the one that allows Meurice (Samm-Art Williams) an extra line as he’s explaining to a hillbilly patron of the bar where he and Ray work (for Marty) why they’ll be listening to Diamond’s cover of The Monkees‘ “I’m a Believer” on the jukebox. I understand that the song was a substitution because initially they couldn’t secure the rights to “The Same Old Song” for home video; what I don’t understand is the further elision of an additional three minutes and the lack of any option to watch Blood Simple in that more complete form.

A Serious Man (2009); The Invention of Lying (2009); Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

October 7, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Esoterica, France, Romance, Satire, Theatrical, UK

A SERIOUS MAN
***½/****
starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

THE INVENTION OF LYING
*½/****
starring Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Tina Fey
written and directed by Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
**½/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Ian Pugh The appropriate, even inevitable capper to a loose nihilist trilogy following No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man is so utterly dark and dire that it almost plays like self-reflexive parody–an adaptation of Barton Fink's "beautiful" wrestling script, perhaps, or an honest-to-gosh realization of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Preston Sturges imagined once upon a time. Even the title is sarcastic. This is a scenario whereby life-altering misfortunes fall with ridiculous timing and precision; the dismal tides and the coming storms are now damningly literal, such that it's nearly impossible to take it with any semblance of seriousness. In making time during the game to explain Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, our hapless Job, physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), offers, if you haven't surmised, a fairly concise metaphor for everything that happens in this film. Why are the Coens being so on-the-nose about themes they've lately approached with a legitimately intimidating brilliance? Maybe it's because their mordant philosophy has amassed unprecedented critical and commercial acceptance over their last two pictures. Maybe the idea that anyone could actually commiserate with them strikes the Coens as so terrifying that the time has come to cast such notions aside in the most punishing way possible.¹ For now, anyway.

Fargo (1996) – DVD|[Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 3, 20091990s, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Vincent Suarez, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

***½/****
DVD – Image B Sound A-
SE DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Harve Presnell
screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
directed by Joel Coen

by Vincent Suarez The critics’ knock against the Coen brothers has always admonished the filmmakers for seemingly valuing style over substance–their flamboyant camerawork frequently seemed the raison d’être for rather loosely-plotted films like Raising Arizona. It’s fitting, then, that Fargo, their most celebrated work (but not their best–that distinction belongs to the severely underrated Miller’s Crossing), champions the virtues of simplicity at nearly every level. Not only is Fargo the Coens’ most straightforwardly-told film, lacking their typical stylistic flourishes, but its cautionary tale highlights the dangers of permitting life to become more complicated than necessary. Indeed, had the title not already been assigned to their debut film, Fargo would have been more aptly christened Blood Simple.

American Gangster (2007); I’m Not There (2007); No Country for Old Men (2007) + No Country for Old Men [’08 BD + 2-Disc Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

April 15, 2009****/****, 2000s, 2007, 2009, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Coen Brothers, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, Gangster, Germany, Music, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

AMERICAN GANGSTER
***/****
starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding, Jr.
screenplay by Steven Zaillian
directed by Ridley Scott

I’M NOT THERE
***½/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere
screenplay by Todd Haynes & Oren Moverman
directed by Todd Haynes

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
****/****
’08 BD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
CE – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Consider the moment when an overly enthusiastic police search results in the demolition of a replica dresser commissioned by Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) for the Carolina plantation he’s bought to house his extended family. In one canny instant, there’s the suggestion that nothing ever changes: the things we lose in time we will always lose. The image Ridley Scott provides for us as he moves the Lucas clan into their new digs is loaded and dangerous, with a group of African-Americans walking up the lush green lawn of an antebellum plantation–usurpers of a corrupt American Dream that, American Gangster posits, is still corrupt and in essentially the same way. True, there’s a cartoon bogey in a New York cop (Josh Brolin) erected as the straw man for all of New York’s Finest who’s profiting off French Connection junk (gasp, he shoots a dog, and probably also smokes)–but the real villainy in the picture is the idea that the path to true status and achievement in the United States is on the backs of not just others, but entire groups of others.

Bad Santa (2003) [The Unrated Version and Director’s Cut] – Blu-ray Disc

November 27, 20072000s, 2007, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Germany

Badder Santa (The Unrated Version)
*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B
Bad Santa (Director’s Cut)
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, John Ritter
screenplay by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Terry Zwigoff

by Walter Chaw With a premise and producing credit for the Coen Brothers and direction by Ghost World‘s Terry Zwigoff, the film with the best pedigree of the season is Bad Santa, making its failure particularly depressing. Its tale of ace safecracker and dangerous drunk Willie (Billy Bob Thornton), brought on board an annual mall Santa scam by criminal mastermind Marcus (Tony Cox), isn’t all that inventive upon closer scrutiny, with Zwigoff’s interest in the peculiarities of loneliness exhibiting themselves this time as caustic to no end and displeasingly bitter. Worse, there are two shots in the film that appear to be direct cribs of Coen Brothers shots–the first a crash zoom into an alarm clock, the second a collapse by Willie identical to a shot of Frances McDormand falling into bed in Blood Simple; what alarms isn’t the instinct to borrow from innovative filmmakers, but rather the feeling of desperation that flashy camera movements in an otherwise statically shot film indicates.

The Ladykillers (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 9, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Irma P. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw There's a great line in the Coen Brothers' The Ladykillers: The General (Tzi Ma), asked for his Buddhist perspective on a caper gone awry, offers, "Be as leaf floating down river. Kill old lady." Still, it's a poor blueprint for a film, as the picture locates its narrative rhythm in a desultory, listless noodle that ends right when it threatens to begin. With Tom Hanks playing the Alec Guinness role of affected cad with larceny–eventually murder–on his mind, The Ladykillers feels like an inside joke. (A slapstick gag featured prominently in the previews, for instance, sees Hanks plucking bills from the air in what has become the defining image of his career, from Forrest Gump's feather inanity to Hanratty's dollar bill futility in Catch Me If You Can.) Returning in a way to more familiar ground after the screwball shrine of Intolerable Cruelty, it's nice to see the Coens, credited as co-directors for the first time in their twenty-year collaboration, tackling another caper noir, but it feels more than a little stale this time around, contrived in the way that genius starts to feel when inspiration flags.

Overrated/Underrated: Thirteen (2003) + Intolerable Cruelty (2003) [Widescreen] – DVDs

February 2, 20042000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Teen

by Bill Chambers

OVERRATED
THIRTEEN
*½/**** Image B+, Sound A, Extras B-
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Holly Hunter, Nikki Reed, Jeremy Sisto
screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke & Nikki Reed
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

I wrote my first script at around the age that 16-year-old Nikki Reed was when she collaborated with her father's ex-girlfriend Catherine Hardwicke on the screenplay for Thirteen. In an attempt to shape a thesis about the almost-unwatchable film made from this memoir of Reed's pubescence, I browsed that script (something I haven't done in over a decade) looking for examples of didacticism; by page three, a character has died from smoking, with cigarettes themselves characterized outside passages of dialogue as "cancer sticks." This was of course written in tandem with my own misadventures in smoking, but do as I say, not as I do. (Call it Harmony Korine Syndrome.) Teenagers make exceptionally bad screenwriters because all teens are Catholic, in a sense–every rebellious action has an equal and opposite guilty reaction. Manifested in confessional writing, that hypocrisy can be deliriously egotistical.