Word: coens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there's a knock on Joel and Ethan Coen, the writer-director brothers who otherwise have enjoyed a quarter-century of critical acclaim, it's that they betray a condescension, almost a contempt, for the people they've created. From the lover-killers in the Coens' first feature, Blood Simple, to the babynappers in Raising Arizona and a raft of Minnesotans in Fargo, all manner of desperately striving oafs populate the Coen gallery of film art. The brothers have been very smart about their characters' being very stupid...
...continents, TIFF is seen as the launching pad for films that have eyes on the Academy Awards. So do the movies' largest luminaries. Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton will be there in aid of Burn After Reading, a quirky spy caper from Joel and Ethan Coen, who nabbed the top Oscar with No Country for Old Men. George Clooney, another of the film's stars, may not be in Toronto, but he was all over the place last year with Michael Clayton. Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Colin Farrell, Scarlett Johansson, Edward Norton, Renee Zellweger, Natalie Portman...
...This is a man practiced in deceit," says one character of another in Burn After Reading. "It's almost his job." Deceit is very much the job of the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen. It's as if, after winning two fat Oscars (best picture and director) for their fairly straightforward adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, the brothers needed to reassert their old capricious cunning, their weasily larkishness, their independence from easy acclaim. "Just because you agree with the Academy that we made the best film of 2007," they seem to be warning...
...Film Festival, and will play the Toronto Film Festival later this week - they take George Clooney and Brad Pitt, those modern icons of sex and savoir-faire, drop them in the world of Washington, D.C., espionage, then keep ratcheting down their emotional IQs. They turn Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen off-screen) into a mad-man loser with a severe self-image problem. The characters' lives get more desperate as the camera style retains its affectless sheen...
...that cult hit from the Coen Brothers, Turturro had a small, but memorable part as Jesus Quintana, the Latino bowler, who in perhaps the movie's most iconic scene stares down The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Lebowski's sloppy hero. "You said it man," Jesus barks at one point, trying to intimidate The Dude, "Nobody f---s with the Jesus." It is a line of dialogue still repeated today by giggling college students in their dorms - or waiting in line outside midnight screenings - and it seemed to play a factor in the naming of You Don't Mess with the Zohan...