Word: coens
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...BLAKE NELSON O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? For a smart guy like Tim Blake Nelson (a classics major from Brown who is also a screenwriter and director), playing dim-witted Delmar in the Coen brothers' sly and shaggy saga of redemption on the run posed certain problems. None was more daunting than authentically conveying Delmar's belief that one of his fellow escapees from a 1930s Mississippi chain gang had been turned into a toad by backwoods sirens...
...Nelson didn't want to patronize Delmar or turn him into a farcical fool. One day actress Frances McDormand (director Joel Coen's wife) observed that Nelson looked just like his one-year-old son. It was the revelation Nelson required. Instead of thinking "in all those pejoratives" such as "dumb" or "stupid," he began perceiving Delmar as "innocent of knowledge, seeing the world without context...
STARRING: George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, John Goodman DIRECTOR: Joel Coen OPENS...
While tout Hollywood purloins comic books for its scenarios, Joel and Ethan Coen raid noble antiquity: not just Homer's fabulous travelogue in verse but Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (for the movie's title) and MGM's The Wizard of Oz (for a delirious production number starring the Ku Klux Klan). Toss in enough gorgeous blue-grass music to make the movie's CD a must-have, and you get prime, picaresque entertainment. It celebrates the chicanery of the human spirit, the love of raillery and rodomontade...
...three maidens washing their laundry in a stream. These, and the name of the bombastic schemer Clooney plays - Everett Ulysses McGill - should be sufficient clues to identify the film's source: "based on The Odyssey by Homer." While tout Hollywood purloins comic books for its scenarios, Joel and Ethan Coen raid noble antiquity: not just Homer's fabulous travelog in verse but Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" (for the movie's title) and MGM's "The Wizard of Oz" (for a delirious production number starring the Ku Klux Klan). Toss in enough gorgeous bluegrass music to make the movie...