From My Collection: Miller's Crossing

The extent to which I thoroughly enjoy and absolutely love Miller’s Crossing can hardly be put into words. It is by far my favorite Coen brothers film even if I don’t think it their greatest achievement. But I get a thrill every time I watch it, and that’s about ten or a dozen times over a period of nearly twenty years. I think Miller’s Crossing arrived on my radar at a particularly impressionable time in my development as a cinephile. It was pre-Fargo and so prior to the Coens being almost household names. I was also just very recently enamored with Quentin Tarantino, although had yet to discover Sam Raimi. I don’t even think I knew about the Coens as filmmakers yet. Raising Arizona had played on TV and I’d seen it, but I had no idea who was responsible. There was no IMDb in my world yet.

Folk musicians totally miss the point of Inside Llewyn Davis

Not sure why I should be surprised that folk musicians are disappointed in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis. Their work expresses an often bleak worldview with protagonists who are, more often than not, deeply flawed idiots. The brothers themselves have even referred to their three films starring George Clooney as the Clooney Idiot Trilogy. But people are usually turned off by dark, bleak, or superficially nihilistic tales, so why would folk musicians be any different? They are, by definition, musicians for "the people," after all.

The problem with the criticisms coming from the contemporary folk music scene is that they seem to want the Coens to have made a movie they didn't actually set out to make. They want Inside Llewyn Davis to be a historical representation of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 60s. They wanted something they could walk away from feeling self-congratulatory about. It seems many have also been under the impression that the Coens were trying to make a Dave Van Ronk biopic when, in fact, Van Ronk's memoir served only as a jumping off point - an entry into that world from which they could draw some inspiration and detail. Instead, what the folkies got was a sepia-toned melancholic portrait of a character. That's right - a character - a work of fiction!

Llewyn Davis is a self-important louse. He's not the most likable of characters, even by Coen brothers standards, but he's not supposed to be representative of any particular historical figure. Nor is the film meant to educate the American public on what happened in that tiny enclave of Manhattan fifty years ago. They rather purposefully left out any reference to politics and civil unrest that was going on around that time specifically because the focus is on Llewyn. The setting and the musical tradition is background paint that helps inform. But look at any Coen brothers film, especially the truly stylized period pieces such as O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There, and Miller's Crossing and tell me you think those were intended to be historical films. They all take place in a darkly romantic fantasy vision of Depression-era southern dust bowl, WWII period Los Angeles, post-war American suburbia, and a Prohibition-era gangster-run noir city.

Inside Llewyn Davis Movie Review

The Coen brothers love failures. They love characters who just hopelessly fail at what they do. Any great literary character has to have some flaw. Flaws make us human. The Greeks understood that. The most memorable Coen Brothers protagonists are defined by flaws and made human by the occasional glimmer of having it together. Mostly their heroes are lucky to get out alive. Their latest creation, Llewyn Davis, embodies elements we’ve seen before in their films. He’s going through a Job-like test a la Larry Gopnik. He’s Tom Regan without the wits and strokes of luck. He’s Jeff Lebowski without a bed of his own. He’s Everett McGill without a plan. He’s Barton Fink without the success. He’s all of this, but still entirely original.

From My Collection: The Hudsucker Proxy Movie Review

Full disclosure: I’m an almost shameless lover of the Coen brothers. There’s hardly a film they’ve made that I don’t like and with one exception, I own every one of their films on DVD. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to the things that don’t work and the films that fail in some very important aspects. With that said, The Hudsucker Proxy was always a film I liked for its quirky Coen-ness, but clearly I wasn’t crazy about it because it took me fourteen years after I got my first DVD player (and nineteen years after the film was released) to purchase a copy.

25 Years Ago This Month: Raising Arizona Movie Review

The Coen brothers’ sophomore effort, Raising Arizona, was a far lighter follow-up to their dark noir tale Blood Simple. It’s a comedy in the style of Looney Tunes, with zany expressions, lots of screaming, and physical comedy. But then there are dark and sinister elements which make it a cartoon comedy for adults and maybe older kids. This is the first Coen brothers film I ever had any exposure to when it used to play on cable when I was a kid. I had no appreciation for the finer things at the time so I only took it at face value as an absurd comedy. Little did I know that eventually the filmmaking duo (Joel and Ethan co-write and direct, although in their earlier films Joel was the credited director and Ethan the producer) would become my absolute favorite filmmakers. And looking at Raising Arizona now, I can clearly see their usual themes and styles emerging. In fact they were still developing their own style at the time, but there are shots that they continually come back to and every one of their films contains at least one scene with “that Coen brothers feeling.”

25 Years Ago This Month: March 1987

The Iran-Contra Scandal occupied much of the White House's time. Rebels moved into Nicaragua armed with American aid. The U.S. and the Soviet Union continued talks on the spread of nuclear missiles. U2 released The Joshua Tree. Disney CEO Michael Eisner reached a deal with French PM Jacques Chirac to purchase land for the construction of Euro-Disney and AZT was approved by the FDA for use in AIDS treatment.

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1986

It turns out April 1986 was a rather uneventful month at the cinema in the United States. The two biggest box office money earners were basically flops. First was Ridley Scott's Legend starring a pre-Top Gun Tom Cruise.

The second was the low-budget creature feature Critters starring Dee Wallace and a teenage Scott Grimes.




If we ignore a forgotten film from 1974 and a nearly forgotten horror flick called The Hand, Oliver Stone's first important directorial feature was released this month. Salvador stars James Woods as a journalist who travels to El Salvador to document the 1980 civil war and becomes entangled with both the guerrillas and the right-wing military.

True Grit Movie Review: Jeff Bridges Dons the Eye Patch for an Iconic Role

Proverbs 28:1 tells us “The wicked flee where none pursueth.” So it is with the coward Tom Chaney, the wanted outlaw in Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s True Grit. Their title card at the beginning of the film leaves out the second part of that proverb: “But the righteous are bold as a lion.” So it is with Mattie Ross, the 14 year old girl who hires Marshal Rooster Cogburn to take her on an expedition into Indian country to capture the man who shot and killed her father. Although Mattie seeks out Cogburn because she heard he’s a man with “true grit,” the story reveals that in fact she is the one with that attribute.

Those Wacky and Weird Coen Brothers

If you like the Coen Brothers (and I love the Coen Brothers) here's a wonderfully edited YouTube video cutting together clips from their first 12 features (the video was made before Burn After Reading and A Serious Man).