POLL: Best Coen Brother's Movie

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TheMightyCelestial's Avatar
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05-24-08
Still haven't seen Lebowski or Hudsucker,
but for now,
these are my fave:


5. Blood Simple
Simply because this is the beginning of all things Coen. And in the manner of all things Coen, no more explanation is needed from this point on. And yet again, as in all things Coen, this may be b'cuz of either some personal artistic liberty or maybe just b'cuz I really don't have anything to say.
Just like all things Coen, it's probably just best to leave you guessing.




4. O Brother Where Art Thou?
By far, the second funniest film in the sublimely funny hick movie genre. Unfortunately, there are only two movies that make up this genre, so far (the #1 movie in this list being the other one. Oh, and that's a list spoiler alert). However, that takes nothing away from the fact that this film wuz bonafide.




3. The Man Who Wasn't There
The ironic thing about this movie is
that the man in question was there.
I know, cuz I saw this movie.
And don't worry, I'm not giving anything away by saying that.
Let me also add that, as far as the rating for this movie goes,
Billy Bob's performance is great, as usual,
James Gando is cool, as usual
& Scarlett Jo is simply gorgeous, as usual.
Over-all, a top notch quality pic from the Bros. Coen.
As usual.




2. Fargo
When blood has been shed in the small town of Brainerd, Minnesota, there's only one person you should be calling: Marge Gunderson.
A police chief & expectant mother who, when there's a crime to investigate or a hotel buffet that's reasonably priced, she'll make sure to be there in a jif.
That is, if, well, y'know.... her car doesn't need a jump or somethin'.




1. Raising Arizona
Babynapping (as in kidnapping, not baby napping) at it's finest. By far, my favorite Nick Cage performance. And also by far, the funniest movie in the whole of the sublimely funny hick movie genre. (Which, BTW, is a genre that I really don't how to clearly define. Which is why I like to categorize Coen Bros. film in it.)

Last edited by TheMightyCelestial; 05-09-11 at 08:28 PM.



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Poking Smot time!!
05-24-08


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07-10-08
At Pike's invitation, I'm adding these comments from another thread:

Oh, Brother, of course, was based on the “Odyssey,” so it was very much like a myth, full of strange people and occurances. However, the governor seeking election in the movie was named for a real Texas governor, W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a songwriter who parlayed a radio program sponsored by a flour company and featuring the “Light-Crust Doughboys” country band into a successful gubernatorial election in 1938. Moreover, in the movie, Pappy’s career paralleled that of Jimmie Davis who wrote the most recorded country song ever, “You Are My Sunshine,” in 1940 and was then elected governor of Louisiana in 1943 primarily on the popularity of that song. People who know anything about country music could also spot the reference to Mother Maybelle in that 3-piece country band on the flat-bed truck singing some of the Carter Family's early hits.

From the very start, I liked Blood Simple, which I think is their best, most down-to-earth, and most interesting film noir crime film. Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh really brought that movie to life. There has never been a hitman like Walsh in film, although being older and fatter, he’s something like the no-name “operative” in several of Dashiell Hammett's short stories.

Liked Miller’s Crossing, too; one of my all-time favorites, which also reminded me of Dashiell Hammett’s tales of crime and police corruption, although the corruption part was a little more blatantly over the top than the official corruption in real life or Hammett’s books.

Liked Fargo, with all of the Scandinavian accents and frustrated plans. That was a little more realistic than Crossing, although the original criminal action it was based on a really foolish plan in the movie for getting money that went terribly wrong.

The Man Who Wasn't There was an incredible character study and an ironic treasure, although I still have to look up the title to remember what the film was about. It just didn’t click with me like the others.

Raising Arizona was a funny screwball comedy. The Hudsucker Proxy played out like a strange dream; Barton Fink, another favorite, was like an entertaining nightmare; and the extremely well-done The Big Lebowski was like an LSD trip. All were wonderfully funny.

I loved their contribution to Paris, je t'aime—probably the most interesting segment of that film. But Intolerable Cruelty never really engaged me, and The Ladykillers remake doesn’t compare with the original British film of that same name. The last two and Man Who Wasn’t There are probably the only Coen films I don’t care to sit through again. No Country was better than those and also better in some ways than Hudsucker and Arizona but not nearly as good as Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, or Fargowhere the viewer knows something about the people being killed and cares who lives and who dies. I liked O, Brother better, too. The music soundtrack contributed a lot to that film, just as no soundtrack was a great contribution to No Country.



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One Ornery Sumbitch
09-01-08
From today's New York Times...



Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men
By BRUCE HEADLAM
Published: August 29, 2008

"SOMETHING just went horribly wrong," he said.

The sound of hysterical laughter is heard.

That line of dialogue and the stage direction that follows could have plausibly been found in many of the thirteen major movies created by the Coen brothers: black comedies like Blood Simple, Barton Fink or Fargo where invariably something does go horribly wrong.

Here, however, the speaker is Joel Coen, and the laughter is provided by Ethan, his younger brother (by three years). They were responding to the question of whether their big night at the Academy Awards last February — four Oscars for No Country for Old Men, including best picture — changed the brothers' outlook on the film industry, or their place in it, or in any way represented an apotheosis of their twenty-four-year career as darlings of art-house cinema.

Apparently not. According to the Coens, who spoke by phone from their hometown, Minneapolis, where they are currently shooting their next movie, the Oscars were barely an interruption. "It was very amusing to us," Ethan said. "Went right into the 'Life is strange' file," Joel said.

The Coens' "Life is strange" file must be overflowing by now. For more than two decades they have made popular movies — some loved by critics, some loathed — by following a simple formula: Typically, a slightly down-on-his luck protagonist driven by a single motivating belief ("The Dude abides", "I’m a writer") gets involved in a low-level criminal plot involving kidnapping or extortion, setting off a chain reaction of complications and reversals. And more often than not, somebody gets shot in the face.



Their steady progress as filmmakers contradicts the prescribed path for independent (or at least independent-minded) directors in Hollywood: Make a few small-budget movies, maybe in a genre like film noir, then climb the Hollywood pay scale until, like Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan, you're given the big-budget summer extravaganza.

What keeps filmmakers on this path — other than money — is the ability to make the kind of films they want. The Coens have been able to navigate their way all along, without once setting foot on a Batman soundstage. "We've never navigated anything," Ethan said. "We've been lucky."

It's not luck, however, that the two have been working in lockstep their whole Hollywood careers.

Sometimes Ethan, fifty, is credited as the producer, and sometimes Joel, fifty-three, as director. But in reality both conceive the film, write the screenplay and direct, and edit under the joint pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. You think your family is close? These guys finish each other's movies.

That may work wonderfully on the set, where actors call them the Two-Headed Director. In an interview, however, the Coens are tough sledding. Like many close brothers they have developed an almost impregnable wall of in-jokes and verbal shorthand broken up by inexplicable fits of laughter, shared references and large inaudible patches when they speak over each other in a race to the next punch line.

Their new movie, Burn After Reading, is set in Washington D.C., or rather in the gray area between the old file-and-dagger Washington of Allen Dulles and the creeping suburbs that surround it. Frances McDormand, Joel's wife, plays Linda Litzke, a literally wide-eyed employee of Hardbodies Fitness gym, whose signature line, "I'm trying to reinvent myself," underscores her belief that four expensive plastic surgeries will help her meet a better class of man on internet dating sites.

Through a series of strained coincidences (if plots had their own Hollywood guild, Burn After Reading wouldn't qualify for a union card), Linda receives a computer disk containing a draft of a memoir written by Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), an angry alcoholic relic of the C.I.A. whose wife (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with a federal marshal and aging Lothario (George Clooney). Linda decides to trade the memoir for cash, aided by a dimwitted personal trainer played by Brad Pitt, showing again that he's a great character actor in a leading man's body.

With its coldly satirical tone, stylized dialogue and broadly drawn characters, Burn will feel like familiar territory for longtime fans, a return to Coen Country for Odd Men. Is Burn a deliberate return to form, a step away from being Very Important Oscar-Winning Filmmakers? "It was nothing like that," Ethan said. "To tell you the truth, we started writing down actors we wanted to work with."

One was Richard Jenkins, who has appeared in three Coen films, starting with The Man Who Wasn't There in 2001.

"They're incredibly consistent, absolutely the same," said Mr. Jenkins, who has also worked with Hollywood’s other best-known brother team, Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Those filmmakers have more defined roles, he said, but the Coens are almost interchangeable on the set when working with the actors. "I can't imagine them not being together making a movie. I can't think of one without the other."

The Two-Headed Director is one way to think about the Coens. Another — to borrow a concept from the horror movies they grew up on — is that they share the same brain, one cut crosswise. Ethan, whose first reaction to almost any question is to reject the premise out of hand with "No, that’s not it" or "I don't remember," occupies the lower half, and Joel, who tends to pause, then provide a slightly more politic answer, occupies the other.

Together the Coens, like any divided brain, have little capacity for abstraction or intellectualism, and they resist delving into the philosophy or the processes underpinning their films. Analyzing their work, Joel says, "is just not something that interests us." Profiles of the pair frequently mention that Ethan wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on Wittgenstein — the sort of biographical detail film-studies types love — but, when asked, Ethan said he "can't honestly remember" what he wrote.

The sons of academics, they were raised in a heavily Jewish section in Minneapolis. But asking the Coens how growing up there affected their movies is like asking J .R. R. Tolkien how much time he spent in Middle-Earth before writing The Hobbit.

Their next film, which they're working on now, is based on their childhood, but beyond that, they give no answers to how their city, its social structure or the dialect they heard as relative outsiders affected their work. "Scandinavian. That about sums it up," Joel said.

They will cop to this: They watched a lot of television. Now in their mid-50s, they're part of the last generation of filmmakers with a serendipitous relationship to old Hollywood, before VHS and infomercials, when being a cinephile meant watching whatever was on the late show.

"There wasn't HBO or movies on demand. There wasn't a lot of choice," Joel said, adding that they watched "a lot of Hercules movies" and that they and Mr. Clooney have wanted to do a Hercules movie for years. "The local affiliate had the entire Joseph E. Levine catalog," Ethan said. "A lot of horror, but he also owned Fellini's movies, so occasionally, 8 ½ would be mixed in. All dubbed." "Badly dubbed," Joel agreed. "Marcello sounded like Hugh Grant. Very stuttery."



In their teens they began to make their own movies on Super 8 millimeter, starting with a short film, "Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go". 'It didn’t have a strong narrative," Joel said. "It was really based on the fact that Ethan had a striking resemblance to Kissinger," establishing a Coen brothers theme early: the desperate character looking for some kind of payoff.

After college — Princeton for Ethan, New York University for Joel — they had various jobs film editing before making Blood Simple in 1984. Since then they've moved with deliberateness of an airport novelist, putting out a film at least once every two years. Even No Country, an adaptation, was sold on the basis of their script. "The alchemy was already there on the page," said Daniel Battsek, the chief executive of Miramax, which co-produced the film. "The only question of whether it would still be there on screen."

One explanation for their longevity is money — the lack of it. All told, the Coens have spent an estimated $340-million, the cost of a couple of summer blockbusters.

"They control their own destiny," said Eric Fellner, co-chairman of the British production company Working Title, which has been involved in five Coen brothers films, including Burn After Reading. "I've talked to them many times about doing something bigger, something smaller, something more commercial. It's very hard to find anything that interests them."

Joel said: "To be quite honest our movies have never broken any records in terms of box office. We've never operated at that level. We've never threatened the bottom line of any company that finances us. So they're happy to finance us, because the stakes are so low. Even our Hercules movie would not be terribly expensive" (The sound of laughter is again heard).

Coen brothers films may be cheap, but they're not small. Long before No Country they built large frames for their films, then filled in their themes of morality, violence and the failure of communication using everyday vernacular, like the gangster slang of Miller's Crossing or the flat Minnesota accents of Fargo. With apologies to Ethan's Princeton thesis adviser, that part is very Wittgenstein.

The opening scenes of Burn After Reading, inside C.I.A. headquarters, make it appear that the Coens are flirting with another genre, in this case the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View. Then the film takes a sharp twist into a gray zone without any apparent moral order — or at least the kind embodied in No Country for Old Men by Carla Jean Moss or in Fargo in the final speech given by Marge, the policewoman played by Ms. McDormand.

"No character offers that kind of perspective" in Burn, Ethan says. Even Cox's old superiors at the C.I.A. (played by J. K. Simmons and David Rasche), who the brothers wanted to function "like a Greek chorus," seem bewildered by events and — like many real C.I.A. agents, one suspects — just close the file rather than dwell on how things could go so wrong.

The Coens are big Hitchcock fans, and Burn After Reading has a MacGuffin (the device to move the plot along), in this case Cox's memoir. What's striking is that this MacGuffin, unlike the suitcase in No Country, is worthless. "Why in God's name would they think that’s worth anything?" the analyst's wife says in the film. Ethan said the choice was deliberate: "We liked that idea. There's nothing at the center."

It's maybe the oddest turn, as if the audience watching The Maltese Falcon for the first time knew that the bird was a fake all along. But a final attempt to draw out the Coens about the meaning of Burn After Reading ends the interview to the evident relief of both brothers, who suddenly relax and seem ready to talk.

"Hey," Joel said, his voice brightening, "didn’t Karl Popper go after Wittgenstein with a poker?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/movies/31head.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=coen%20brothers&st=cse&oref=slogin
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09-01-08
Right Now, I'm Gonna Say NCFOM. I Need To Watch And Re-Watch Some Of Their Older Ones Before I Make My Final Decision Though, But I Still Think It Will Be NCFOM.



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09-01-08
I have only seen Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. My personal favorite of those is O Brother, Where Art Thou?. All three of those, however, are on my top 25 list.

Their best, most well-crafted film, however? Probably No Country for Old Men. But it's still anyone's guess. All of their films seem to be very unique - not only from their other films, but also from other films in general - and each are very well-crafted. And each of their films have a different, unique style and feeling, which amazes me.



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One Ornery Sumbitch
09-01-08
Originally Posted by Swan
I have only seen Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. My personal favorite is O Brother. All three of those, however, are on my top 25 list.

It won't be difficult to catch up with the rest of their filmography. Including Burn After Reading there are only ten others. Since O Brother is your favorite, I recommend Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski as your next Coens. Happy renting!



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09-01-08
Originally Posted by Holden Pike

It won't be difficult to catch up with the rest of their filmography. Including Burn After Reading there are only ten others. Since O Brother is your favorite, I recommend Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski as your next Coens. Happy renting!
Awesome. I'm going to be watching The Big Lebowski very soon, and I'll check out Raising Arizona after that (that seems to be getting the most praise in this thread). Thanks for the recommendations!



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One Ornery Sumbitch
09-12-08

BURN AFTER READING

After the triumph of No Country for Old Men (critically, commercially, awards-wise) Joel & Ethan return to an original script that would seem to fall more naturally in line with their stylized and wonderfully convoluted dark comedies such as The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona. Unfortunately it feels like they've gone to the same well once too often here. There are, of course, plenty of good moments and the actors look to be having a ball. Of the five central characters, played by George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, only Swinton is left with too little to do. The other four get to fill their performances with both teeny nuance and over-the-top silliness, often in the same scene. Clooney and Pitt prove once again that they are top-notch comedians who just happen to be trapped in the bodies of classically handsome leading men, Malkovich is wonderful playing rage, condescension and frustration dealing with all the idiots he finds swirling around him, and McDormand expertly treads the line between a character who is both annoying and sympathetic while stripping any vanity away for the sake of a laugh. If only the story gave them all something more interesting to do.

This tale of infidelity, lies, secrets, blackmail and incompetence with a MacGuffin of a fired CIA Analyst's memoir never kicks into another gear. For a movie that includes a hefty dose of spy thriller milieu, there is an almost complete lack of narrative complexity or surprise. From the pair of filmmakers who brought us intricately constructed centerpiece sequences like the assassination attempt on Leo in Miller's Crossing, the flight of the Huggies in Raising Arizona, the Busby Berkeley on acid dream sequence of The Big Lebowski and the birth of the hula hoop fad in The Hudsucker Proxy there is a noticeable absence of style and ambition here. I'm not implying that every movie the Coen Bros. make need follow a formula or go down a checklist, but without those trademark flourishes in Burn what's left is so...pedestrian. All despite some very amusing work by the cast. To me it felt like the Coens are trying to play with and against audience expectation of both the genre and their filmography, but a minimalist approach to the outrageous material didn't come off this time. Though perhaps the biggest laugh for me came at the final scene, which abruptly ends in a way that seems to say 'fu*k you' to the criticism and whining about No Country's anti-climactic and/or offscreen endings for characters. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, I just kept wishing there was more there there. With the cast and premise under the guideance of Ethan and Joel it was like watching an expert driver take a top-of-the-line Ferrari around the block at thirty-five miles an hour while waiting ninety minutes for them to peel out and show what they can do.

Of course a subpar Coen outing is still more enjoyable to me than 95% of what's out there in the multiplex at any given time, but in comparison to their own very high standard of excellence Burn After Reading doesn't measure up often enough. It feels like an early draft of what might have turned into another one of their great movies given another layer or two. I laughed throughout, I'm glad I saw it, I will of course own it when it hits DVD and watch it multiple times - I'm sure...but it's still disappointing, at least for a Coen Brothers flick.

GRADE: B



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You're a Genius all the time
09-15-08
I rewatched The Hudsucker Proxy recently and, naturally, it's a great flick. Probably the most underrated on the Coens' resume. And the biggest thing that struck me about it was just how flippin gorgeous it is. The Coens are obviously very well respected among the critical community, but something I feel they don't get enough credit for is how visually jaw-dropping their films are. I don't know if I should give Roger Deakins the kudos here, but I think the Coens deserve the lion's share. Maybe that's why I'm kind of indifferent towards Fargo: It looks so ordinary after the triple whammy of Miller's, Fink and Hudsucker. Fargo is a major let-down after those three eye feasts.

How in the heck has Deakins not gotten an Oscar for his work with the Coens?!








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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
09-15-08
Wow! Fargo is ordinary because it's shot in the snow? Actually, Fargo was shot to resemble a Black and White film. That might change your opinion of its ordinariness, but maybe not. It's flippin' cold up there! Even if there were gorgeous colors, you couldn't see them if they weren't "Christmas trees". I actually thought that the cinematography, based on the locations and climate, was textbook. HA! Love ya, Swede.
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You're a Genius all the time
09-15-08
Fargo's certainly a nice movie to look at and all, but I don't think it comes anywhere close to the quality of those other three flicks. It has nothing to do with the vibrancy of the backdrops - The Coens orignally wanted to shoot Hudsucker in black and white and, if they had gotten their way, I'm still pretty sure I'd prefer the 30's newsroom style of Hudsucker to the barren Fargo.

But, yeah, would it really have hurt to have thrown a Christmas tree or two in there?



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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
09-16-08
The Hudsucher Proxy was apparently meant to be lighter, as I believe you've already recognized. It's a COLOR screwball comedy. They just don't want to repeat themselves. Fargo, even if it's a Black Comedy (B & W) is meant to be an inverse film noir, a color (not really... ) film noir. Now, Chinatown already perfected the color film noir flick, so why repeat something which is already perfect?



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09-11-11
Originally Posted by Yoda
I voted for "Raising Arizona", and any who voted for anything other than that or "Fargo" is a traitor.

Nope. Have to say O' Brother Where Art Thou was their best work. No other film they made matched the dialogue, music, mood, and overall freshness. Its bonafide!


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