The Coen Brothers have had a pretty damn good year. Hopefully it's gonna get better. I'm sure you've seen the previews for Burn After Reading coming out next week. I am a huge Coen fan. I own exactly fifteen DVD's. I just never saw the point in buying a movie that I was only going to watch once. But of those fifteen, elevin of them are Coen brothers films. (The other four are Christopher Guest films.) I love them all. The indie Blood Simple, the endlessly quotable Raising Arizona, the artsy Barton Fink, the frightening / hilarious Fargo, the tragically overlooked Man Who Wasn't There, the brutal No Country For Old Men. I even liked Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers, even though they both seemed a little sloppy.Joel and Ethan Coen have created twelve feature length movies (Intolerable Cruelty is the one I'm missing). Burn After Reading makes thirteen. Every one of these films needs to be seen by you and everyone you know. I am taking it upon myself to see that they are. So over the next week or so, I going to include one entry for every one of the Coen Brothers movies. These will mostly be clips of the movies. I could talk about them, tell you how funny, beautiful, insightful and amazing they are, but Joel and Ethan do a better job selling themselves than I ever could. I was originally going to do one big post, but if i blast you with a thousand clips, you'll only watch two of them and move on.
To start things off, here's the trailer and a few clips from the upcoming "Burn After Reading". Hopefully this is another "Big Lebowski" (shut the f*ck up, Donny) and not another "Ladykillers"(again, not a terrible movie but it is their weakest one). Based on these clips, I am quite hopeful.
Trailer
The first time I saw this on the internet, I wasn't terribly impressed. But the Coen brand is strong enough in my mind to work through any lingering doubt.
Brad Pitt
You know, I keep waiting to get sick of Brad Pitt but I never do. He's in two or three movies a year, he's in a high profile, tabloid infested, celebrity marriage. And he surrounds himself with his ultra attractive, smug counterparts and pushes a preachy, short sighted agenda to us common, red forearmed simple folk. Really, how is he any different than Ben Affleck, whom I despise? If I were a man of integrity, I would hate him. But I don't. In fact, I'm quite fond of him. Brad is just too damn charming.
George Clooney
It must be noted that the Coens took a huge chance by casting George Clooney in O, Brother Where Art Thou. Clooney was still washing off the stink of Batman and Robin when they cast him in 1999. I remember being a little pissed off when I heard about it. But George made me a believer. That effectively launched his legitimate film career and finally got him out from the ER shadow. And even though I find him pretentious, I have really enjoyed just about every movie he has made in the last five or so years. That and his dad was a news broadcaster on the crappiest news in Salt Lake during the 90's. "Nick Clooney, Fox 13 News!"
John Malkovich
It's always nice to get a good shout out to us Mormons. It's refreshing to hear a reference that does not include polygamy. This is John Malkovich's first run with the Coens. Long overdue.
Francis McDormand
Francis McDormand starred in the Coen's first film, Blood Simple in 1984. She married Joel Coen later that year. Since then she has been in about every other movie of theirs. She won an Oscar with Fargo. Funny, intense, bitchy, desperate, seductive, she pulls it all off perfectly.
So stay tuned. I'll probably do two films at a time. Be sure to watch the clips, get a feel for what the moive is and then adjust your Netflix cue accordingly. Or let me know. I'm happy to lend mine out. If you start now, you can have them all under your belt by the time Burn After Reading opens.
1 comment:
i'm glad you can find the time to blog while you're sick or whatever, but definitely not at work. of course i myself should be working instead of reading this. but this isn't a morality contest, folks! if it was, i win.
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