OFF THE SHELF – Issue # 27: THE COEN BROTHERS COLLECTION
I first saw the films of The Coen Brothers when I was but a teenager in high school. Well, that was the first time I saw one in it’s entirety. I was eleven when I caught one of the films for the first time. Regardless though, I never liked them. I never got them. I wasn’t some “movie snob” from an early age and right up until probably the age of eighteen, I still couldn’t understand what the fascination in all the movie magazines was with these guys.
But you grow up and your tastes mature with you, I suppose. You stop thinking that Thundercats is “the best TV show ever created” and you start to realise that girls aren’t “disgusting” after all and that kissing them is actually kind of cool, but kissing them whilst fondling their boobs is even better! I digress. Along the way, you put aside your Chuck Norris VHS collection and you start to realise that there’s some genuinely fantastic, inventive and consistently superb cinema out there… and a lot of it belongs to Joel and Ethan Coen.
In adulthood, you come to acknowledge that these guys are an unstoppable, unique filmmaking force to be reckoned with (both write, Ethan produces and Joel directs – until the tale end of the 90s when both took on writing, producing and directing duties equally!). Every film they make is a genuine treat, often superior to their last. In fact, with eleven films to their name so far (and allegedly a trio of others on the way within the next twelve months – starting with No Country For Old Men later this year!), they have only faltered once.
A good friend of mine once said, regarding the Coen’s and their movies, that he could never quite work out whether they make “smart movies for stupid people or stupid movies for smart people”. He shook his head deridingly when I replied that they make masterpieces for whoever wants to find them. They just don’t ram them down people’s face. Disagree? Well let me back it up; remember just “discovering” the likes of Fargo or Big Lebowski for the first time? Compare that with all the pomp and circumstance for something like Miramax’s god-awful Cold Mountain where we were told it was a “masterpiece” before it had even been edited and it turned out to be nothing but a turkey!
Reviewing their collection, from Barton Fink to Raising Arizona, is going to be nothing but a nigh-on lovefest and I make no apologies for that. But then again, when we’re discussing films like the titles that follow, how can you express anything less than total adoration huh?
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Issue #27 of Off The Shelf – The Coen Brothers Collection:
Barton Fink
I know people, some I used to consider friends of mine, who outright hate this film. They think it’s one of the worst films the Coen Brothers have ever made. I think when you take a film as uniquely photographed and visualised as this, as crisply written and as superbly acted as this and then compare it to the Coen’s remake of The Ladykillers, you should be really re-considering your opinion. This, for me, is one of the Coen’s best films but then as each mini-review goes on you’re going to be reading that from me over and over again because, until The Ladykillers, these guys never dropped the ball. Every release seemed to better the last for me. They could have come out and made an outright satire of Hollywood but instead they delve back into a particular era that interests them the most and base it around something they could personally identify with: The film is about a 1940s writer being pushed in a direction he is not entirely comfortable with (writing a “wrestling” movie) on his first journey into the Hollywood studio system and suffering writers block as a result. The screenplay is based on the Coen Brothers pushing themselves in a direction they weren’t entirely comfortable with (writing a “gangster” fable that would eventually become the sublime Miller’s Crossing) and suffering writers block along the way. They wrote the adventures of Mr Fink during the dry periods of getting Miller’s Crossing together and cinema fans across the world, well those with great taste anyway, are all the more thankful that writers block exists as a result.
The Big Lebowski
My best friend, Kirk, is obsessed with this film. Maybe “obsessed” is too strong a word perhaps? He drinks ‘White Russians’ and quotes from the film at any given opportunity. Either way, there are far worse films to be “obsessed” about then this cult masterpiece huh? Going back to the year of it’s release… You make a good old-fashioned murder mystery that the masses, and the Academy, seem to enjoy. You get your first real taste of “mainstream” success after years of being dismissed as “cult filmmakers” so how the hell do you follow it up? Well the norm is to go make some big budget, glossy, empty tripe for the likes of Joel Silver or Jerry Bruckheimer. The Coen Brothers followed up their Oscar-winning Fargo with this: the story of an old stoner and his bowling buddies who get caught up in a kidnapping, an extortion attempt, embezzlement and mistaken identity – with acid-soaked dreams of Saddam Hussein running a bowling alley, with severed toes sent in the mail and with rugs “that really tie the room together” getting pissed on. The first time I saw this I was like “What the fuck is this?” I came out of it and said to a friend “I laughed and I think I enjoyed it but I don’t know what the hell it is!” My friend replied “Is John Turturro in it?” I said “Yes!” He said “Well it must be good then!” The second time I saw it when it was released on VHS, I just totally got it. What’s to get? Nothing! That’s the hook! This is a film, you put on, sit back and give yourself completely over to and it takes you on this ridiculous ride with no hidden, deeper meanings, no morals to learn, no cute punchlines to the gags… just profoundly hilarious and bizarre in equal measures for 112 minutes! Style-wish, this is probably the most visually-inventive the Coen’s have ever been! Jeff Bridges should have won an Oscar for this – then again, Jeff Bridges should have won an Oscar for every single role he’s done.Blood Simple
I was sixteen, going on seventeen when I first saw this film. I had an English teacher called Mr Houlsby who sang the virtues of the Coen Brother’s films at every available opportunity. He was this kind of cool, subversive guy who really kind of embraced my love of film and would slip me video tapes of the likes of The Battle of Algiers after classes and then ask me what I thought after class the following day. He kept trying to get me to watch this. As I say though, I was sixteen, nearly seventeen, and my head was trapped around the brilliance of Michael Bay’s The Rock and John McTiernan’s return to the Die Hard franchise… “with a vengeance”! One day Mr Houlsby started talking to me about this film where a guy reaches around a wall, opens up a window to put his hand through and this distraught woman on the other side slams a knife into it, pinning his hand to the wall with him stuck on the other side. He then started telling me about how the guy then has to shoot away the wall to free his hand and each shot sends a shard of light into the darkened room and how beautifully composed the scene is. I thought it sounded kind of cool so I borrowed the tape, watched it and found the film slow and boring. Four years later I caught the same film on TV and thought it was totally and utterly sublime. Further proving my theory that the Coen Brother’s films are the type that you grow into.Fargo
One of the best films I’ve ever seen and undoubtedly one of the best films the Coen Brothers have ever done. This really is fresh, original and incredibly assured filmmaking at it’s very highest. Joel and Ethan Coen have written a screenplay so unarguably pitch-perfect that it is understandable why some film schools study it and why William Goldman thinks it should be studied by High School students as work of literary art! The film itself is directed superbly and offers up a fantastic portfolio of rich characters – from the iconic Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), a small-town, heavily pregnant police chief, Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy, who concluded his audition for the role with the now famous statement of “I don’t mean to be pushy but I’m not leaving until I get the role. If I have to kill your pets, I’ll do it!”) the used-car-salesman under pressure, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi), the mouthy yet thoroughly incompetent criminal, and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), his hulking yet silent accomplice. Its understandable why within two years of its release, the AFI raced to include it within its Top 100 Films of All Time. Every single person on the planet should own this film!The Hudsucker Proxy
I know there’s absolute die hard fans of this film out there and, don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the film but I don’t see the fascination with it the way a lot of people do. I think Tim Robbins is great in it, I think Paul Newman is nothing short of superb and it took me a long, long time to come to like the work Jennifer Jason Leigh does in the role, and I really like the look and feel of the film. I even love a lot of the off-kilter dialogue written by The Coen Brothers and Sam Raimi… but I don’t know, I can’t explain it, every time I watch this film the ending (with Robbins getting halted mid-plummet for a “life lesson”) just clunks for me and I think “I don’t get it!” It just smacks of a move towards pretentiousness in my opinion. Maybe I’m missing something, I don’t know. I keep thinking it’ll all come together for me the next time I watch it, but then I watch it again and, sure enough, the ending clunks straight to the ground for me. It’s still a cracking modern take on the screwball comedies of the thirties and forties though, I can’t deny that!Intolerable Cruelty
The Coen Brother’s first real deliberate mainstream movie, and their first working from an adaptation of someone else’s (namely Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone) screenplay. It was critically well-received but a lot of die hard Coen fans turn their nose up at it and refer to it as the “sell-out” movie that, had they not made this, they never would have had the “confidence” to take on that disastrous big-budget Ladykillers remake that saw them get their first ever critical “shoeing” after decades in the business. That’s some goddamn convoluted thinking right there, if you ask me! Personally, I dig the hell out of this film. I think Catherine Zeta Jones is the only weak link in the entire film. Just imagine what the film could have been like with the weight of real talent like Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman in the role? Asides from her, this is the Coen bringing old-school screwball romantic comedy to the modern cinema going masses. George Clooney is great fun, with superb backing from the likes of Cedric The Entertainer, Billy Bob Thornton, Geoffrey Rush, Edward Herrman and Richard Jenkins. This is a really good, funny date movie. Yeah, so it doesn’t look like your average Coen Brothers film but, when it’s this entertaining, so what? Give it a go and by the time you see Clooney’s Miles Massey in court for the first time or by the time Weezy the Hitman mistakes his gun for an inhaler, you’ll definitely know you’re watching a Coen Brothers movie!The Ladykillers
I own this out of a sense of completion and it’s not that it’s actually an awful film that makes it such a pain to watch, more that it is such an absolute unmitigated waste of talent and opportunity. Tom Hanks – if you give yourself over – is actually a real delight in the film, playing a fully etched cartoon villain but that’s about where the recommendable qualities start and end. If ever there positively HAD to be a remake of the wonderful Alec Guinness original Ealing movie, then you’d imagine there couldn’t be a director (or directors!) better suited than Joel and Ethan Coen. They really dropped the ball on this one! And the thing that hurts the most is that it’s so hard to identify how elements that should work don’t, they just – quite simply – don’t! J.K Simmons is normally a reliable foil; here he flounders! The idea of Tzi Ma as a silent, psychopathic ‘mastermind’ called The General should work; it doesn’t! The gothic, Georgia setting should be a really visual delight; it isn’t! And thinking that you can stack your comedy on the shoulders of someone like Marlon Wayans is a decision that sends your already-teetering-on-the-edge-of-the-rails-movie right off the tracks and plummeting to the ground. It’s a one-hundred-minute Coen Brothers movie that plays like it is actually twice that long! A car crash of a missed opportunity! Think about what they could have done with Tom Hanks cast alongside Billy Bob Thornton, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman in a grimy Boston setting? *sigh*The Man Who Wasn’t There
If you haven’t seen or heard of this then let me tell you nothing more than that it is a tale of passion, crime and punishment set in the summer of 1949. Then let’s leave it at that. Now I urge you to go now and rent, buy or steal a copy whilst I leave you with the plaudits it oh-so-definitely deserved from the mainstream critics: “Near Perfect” says The Sunday Express. “Genius” says Hello Magazine. “A Great Movie” says The Times. “The Coen Brothers are back and as brilliant as ever! Four Stars!” says Empire. “A Brilliant Piece of Filmmaking – Great Stuff!” says Jonathan Ross. “A Masterpiece” says The Guardian. “Extraordinary” says The Observer. You get the point? Unarguably up there with Fargo as one of the Coen Brother’s strongest pieces of cinema and most definitely the best thing that Billy Bob Thornton has ever done! It should have swept the motherfucking board at the Oscars. It didn’t! And that’s why American sucks and the war in Iraq is an illegal and unjust one
Miller’s Crossing
The first time I saw Miller’s Crossing I was eleven years old or thereabouts. I was allowed to go into the city centre for the first time on my own in order to get my mother a birthday present. I was being bullied at school at the time and, as I remember it, I got off the Metro and walked up out of the station, only to be confronted by the five or six lads from school who were making my life a misery. I ran from them, ducked through the first available open door I could find – which turned out to be the fire exit of a local art house cinema – and snuck down inside. Within minutes I realised I was in a cinema screening room and the film playing was this one. I settled down and decided to stay till the end because there was no way the bullies would wait and wait, not knowing exactly where I had gone. I came out of seeing this, aged eleven, thinking it was the biggest pile of crap I had ever seen. I was bored senseless by it and didn’t have a clue what the thing was about. Within seven years I would be writing an essay for my Film Studies A-Level on ‘cinematic symbolism’, using this superb film as an example and going on to be graded an ‘A’ for my trouble. This isn’t a film for an eleven year olds mind. Nor is it a film fit for the tastes of your average Tom, Dick or Harry. This is a film conceived and produced by men who adore the finer elements of the film noir/gangster genre for men who adore the finer elements of the film noir/gangster genre. A stunningly shot piece of cinema that brims with shocking violence and black humour!O Brother Where Art Thou
Putting their own spin on Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, this is a sensational show of great imagination on the part of the Coen Brothers as they take escaped convicts Everett Ulysses McGill (George Clooney), Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (John Turturro) off on an adventure in search of buried treasure, throwing them in amongst the Klu Klux Klan, old-flames and musical-stardom as The Soggy-Bottomed-Boys. Shot through with a sepia-toned glint, the film is much more than just a “carrier” for its acclaimed soundtrack and is in fact a genuinely hilarious, fast-paced blaze of hilarity that shows The Coen Brothers up to be the most inventive and unique of filmmakers on the scene at the moment. Well worth a look!Raising Arizona
The Coen Brothers do away with all notions of struggling with that “difficult second movie” by following up Blood Simple with this – a zany, bullet-paced, live action “cartoon” starring (a seriously never-bettered) Nicolas Cage, a fantastic Holly Hunter and a cracking double act from John Goodman and William Forsythe. It’s 90 minutes of pure comedic joy from start to finish and too easily forgotten and dismissed as the Coen’s continue to deliver nigh-on-classic after nigh-on classic. They went back, sort of, to this sort of “style” in some ways with The Ladykillers but couldn’t replicate the sheer genius of this screwball road movie about baby theft. The opening pre-credits sequence (one of the longest in cinema history, allegedly) is one of the most laugh-filled, confident and just unarguably sublime you will ever see in this genre. Best of all though, for a film released twenty – yes, twenty, believe it or not – years ago, it hasn’t dated an inch and still plays absolutely pitch perfectly!
And that’s your lot! Who’d have thunk we could have knocked out an issue this short, to-the-point yet still as respectful as required huh? It’s probably all down hill from here once again I suppose! Next week… The Asian Cinema Collection!
6 Responses to “OFF THE SHELF – Issue # 27: THE COEN BROTHERS COLLECTION”
I thought I would disagree with you on this issue’s contents as I’m a die-hard Coen Brothers fan, who also covets The Big Lebowski, but you’re spot on and clearly a fan yourself. Nice work.
I think their best film is either Miller’s Crossing or The Man Who Wasn’t There (both films are perfect but perhaps Billy Bob Thornton’s dead-pan delivery edges ahead of Gabriel Byrne’s likable turn as Tom?).
I cannot wait for No Country For Old Men.
It’s going to be awesome isn’t it? My only worry is in case it’ll take an age to get a UK release. Sometimes they can be notoriously sniffy about us seeing a Coen movie with any degree of urgency. Other times we get the movie before the Yanks! I just want to see it so badly! All in all, it’s turning into quite a brilliant year for cinema in my humble opinion. I could do my Top 20 of the year quite easily and we’re just over half way through the year! The Coen’s would undoubtedly be on it!
You’re right, it is turning out to be an awesome year for films. Even small films I haven’t had chance to see are holding my interest like Taxidermia, Legacy, The Serpent, Tell No-One… should be nice coming across them over the next couple of months.
But, yeah, seems funny we had a few fall outs about summer movies when the Autumn and January and February 08 are looking so strong for films! I mean, Lions for Lambs, Eastern Promises, No Country For Old Men, Be Kind Rewind… it’s looking good.
Clearly, the Coens will walk away with it though. I think this film will fall somewhere between Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing and Fargo in tone, and that’s what’s exciting me.
Just when you think you can walk away from Hollywood they pull you back in… lol
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