Word: coen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Coen brothers have lost their balance. After hitting their structural peak with the haunting and humanistic Fargo and their creative peak with the gutbustingly sublime The Big Lebowski, they took a sharp downward turn in their next film, last year’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? Lapsing into The Hudsucker Proxy mode, the duo labored on O Brother under the impression that thematic depth and high production values could redeem a film which would otherwise be dismissed as light, predictable entertainment...
...splendid actor, does it perfectly as Ed Crane, a taciturn small-town barber, circa 1949. Everyone cheats on him--his wife, his business partner, his teen lover, his hotshot lawyer. By the movie's end, he is facing his final comeuppance, deadpan sangfroid still miraculously intact. The ever astonishing Coen brothers say their film was inspired by the spirit of James M. Cain's novels about ill-fated dopes. But the Coens transcend Cain. If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking--hilarious yet hypnotic--one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never...
...lower Earth--in the roiling depths of California film noir--there are plots every bit as dark and complex as those in the season's fantasy films. Just look into the barely beating heart of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), the barber of Santa Rosa, in Joel and Ethan Coen's tragicomic cardiograph The Man Who Wasn't There. He's got a cheating wife (Frances McDormand), a conniving friend (James Gandolfini), a dead-end job and the depressive sense that "life has dealt me some bum cards. Or maybe I didn't play them right." But the Coens...
Like another bountiful fall offering, David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., the Coen film serves up a lovely, lurid brew of greed, murder and twisted identities. It's a smart essay on the overwhelming human need to love someone who's bad news. Thornton's fabulously dour performance--a prime display of postmortem acting--reminds us that fall is the time when things...
...Lynch and Coen pictures would make a fine set of bookends for your hardboiled fiction shelf. Both are set in the prime film-noir territory of sunny, sepulchral California: Los Angeles, home of Philip Marlowe (among other truth seekers) and moviemakers (among other chronic liars) for Mulholland Dr.; Santa Rosa (scene of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt) for the toxic scent of small-town failure in The Man Who Wasn't There. Both films serve up a lovely, lurid brew of greed, murder and twisted identities. But the Coen movie, with Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand locked...