Salon.com > Coen Brothers http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 13:20:45 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Pop Torn: This week in cultural ambivalence http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/pop_torn_fergie_60_minutes_teeth_tattoos/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/pop_torn_fergie_60_minutes_teeth_tattoos/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/08/13/pop_torn_fergie_60_minutes_teeth_tattoos Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and I have to make sure that I have no idea what is going on with those Republican debates. Is Michele Bachmann winning? Is that why her scary face was on Newsweek? Oh man, what a world, what a world. Oh, and London burned down too! Come on, Earth, get it together!

If you've had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we've culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren't here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they'll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/13/pop_torn_fergie_60_minutes_teeth_tattoos/feed/ 2 Readers respond: Cinema’s best unexpected villains http://www.salon.com/2011/04/14/readers_responses_slideshow_greatest_villains/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/14/readers_responses_slideshow_greatest_villains/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/04/14/readers_responses_slideshow_greatest_villains Who knew that evildoers could be so polarizing? Last week, I put together a list of nine actors whose turns as sinister villains caught audiences off-guard, like Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker in "The Dark Knight" and Henry Fonda in "Once Upon a Time in the West." Far from being a definitive collection, I asked for readers to leave their favorite crooked performance from a Hollywood hero in the comments section. And boy did you.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/14/readers_responses_slideshow_greatest_villains/feed/ 26 The Oscars’ black hole of boredom http://www.salon.com/2011/02/28/oscars_ohehir/ http://www.salon.com/2011/02/28/oscars_ohehir/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2011/02/28/oscars_ohehir Oscar has fallen, and he can't get up. Now, if you get that reference, you're probably: A) too old to belong to the demographic that was supposedly being hunted by the producers of Sunday night's dreary and confused telecast, and B) too young to have written most of the shtick. Presented with one of the most varied and interesting lists of nominated films in recent memory -- many of which had actually been seen by large numbers of paying humans -- the academy managed to screw up its messaging totally and create a soul-sucking black hole of boredom.

One way of explaining what happened last night is that the Oscar producers tried to tack young and hip, just as academy voters tried to tack mass and mainstream, correcting for several years of more audacious indie-style winners like "The Hurt Locker," "Slumdog Millionaire" and "No Country for Old Men." The result was a great big middle-of-the-road splat, presided over by a monumentally uncomfortable pair of stars, the miffed-looking James Franco and the perky-like-a-little-coffeepot Anne Hathaway.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/02/28/oscars_ohehir/feed/ 64 “A Somewhat Gentle Man”: Hilarious darkness from the frozen north http://www.salon.com/2011/01/14/somewhat_gentle_man/ http://www.salon.com/2011/01/14/somewhat_gentle_man/#comments Fri, 14 Jan 2011 01:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/01/13/somewhat_gentle_man When Ulrik, a ponytailed, weatherbeaten Norwegian convict played by Stellan Skarsgård, is about to be released from the prison that's been his home for the last 12 years, a guard rushes up to him at the last minute with a bottle of something good and a few words of wisdom. "When you leave this place, keep going forward," the guard tells him. "Don't look back." Then the gate slides open, and Ulrik looks out at freedom: the flat, white, unrelieved winter landscape of Norway. We don't know anything about his life in prison, but was it really as bad as all that?

That's just the first of numerous sight gags in Hans Petter Moland's film "A Somewhat Gentle Man," which I truly and honestly believe is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. If you suspect that says more about me than about the film, you might be right. I'm exactly the sort of evil bastard who finds disproportionate delight in a Scandinavian black comedy that suggests both the Coen brothers' "Fargo" and the grim fables of Finnish minimalist Aki Kaurismäki. Still, maybe you're the kind of person who grooves to the dark humor of the northlands yourself, and I'm more than happy to defend "A Somewhat Gentle Man" as a pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/01/14/somewhat_gentle_man/feed/ 10 A “Biutiful” chat with Javier Bardem http://www.salon.com/2010/12/30/bardem_2/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/30/bardem_2/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/12/29/bardem Javier Bardem gestures meaningfully out the window at the frozen New York streets and says, "I saw the wolf." Whether this is an unfamiliar Spanish idiom or simply a metaphor that appeals to him I am not sure, but I think it translates as "I have a cold."

My meeting with Bardem, in a hotel cafe overlooking Rockefeller Center, begins at noon, but the 41-year-old star of "Eat, Pray, Love," "No Country for Old Men" and "Before Night Falls" arrives looking rumpled and unshaven (not that that's unusual in itself) and doesn't even try to pretend it's not breakfast time. While publicists, assistants and waiters orbit around him, bringing cappuccinos and a basket of rolls -- and trying to discover whether the hotel will permit him to sneak a cigarette -- he apologizes for running late and chats with me a little about childbirth and fatherhood. He and partner Penélope Cruz are expecting their first child in February, and have avoided learning its sex so far. "We're old-fashioned in that sense," he says. "We want to be surprised." When I mention that my twins were born by Caesarean section, he asks whether I stayed to watch. (I tell him that I did, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/30/bardem_2/feed/ 10 “True Grit”: A ferocious heroine in a classic western http://www.salon.com/2010/12/22/true_grit_2/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/22/true_grit_2/#comments Wed, 22 Dec 2010 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/12/21/true_grit Some people are expressing amazement that Joel and Ethan Coen would set out to make a classic western in the first place, and then that they'd accomplish it. All I can say is that those folks haven't been paying attention. In a recent New York Times article, David Carr described the Coens' richly entertaining new "True Grit" -- which they insist is an adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, not a remake of the 1969 John Wayne film -- as a surprising, family-friendly departure from the brothers' "dark comedies and twisted genre spoofs" and their "murderers' row of cinematic sociopaths." What that means in English, I think, is that the level of violence and cussing in "True Grit" is a lot lower than in "Blood Simple" or "No Country for Old Men," the Coens' previous excursions into the American West.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/22/true_grit_2/feed/ 28 “True Grit”: How does the original stack up? http://www.salon.com/2010/12/20/true_grit_original_open2010/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/20/true_grit_original_open2010/#comments Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/12/20/true_grit_original_open2010 Despite the Coen brothers' claim that they have only vague memories of the 1969 version of "True Grit," there isn't a scene in the trailer for their upcoming remake that doesn't conjure its counterpart from the initial film. The plucky Mattie Ross still plummets into that snake pit, although Hailee Steinfeld (born in 1996) is a much younger Mattie in today's version than Kim Darby, who was a 22-year-old mother when the original was made. That iconic scene of the one-eyed reprobate Marshall Rooster Cogburn riding into a line of bandits with guns blazing is also structurally unchanged. The most noticeable difference between old and new takes is that Jeff Bridges' duded-up 21st century Cogburn opts for two pistols instead of John Wayne's odd pairing of a revolver in one hand and Winchester in the other. The clip where Cogburn is grilled by a haughty defense attorney shows an even stronger resemblance between the two films. Both the Duke and the Dude say, "shot or killed" with a similar cadence.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/20/true_grit_original_open2010/feed/ 29 Early Oscar odds: “Inception” vs. “Social Network” http://www.salon.com/2010/10/21/oscar_preview/ http://www.salon.com/2010/10/21/oscar_preview/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/10/21/oscar_preview Question: Is it too unbearably early to begin thinking about the annual winter circus that is Oscar season? Answer: Never! Or at least not after the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, the unofficial starting gun of award-mania, have gotten us started.

Let me save your comment-typin' fingers a workout and stipulate the following: No, the Oscars are no indication of quality, historically speaking; yes, the best films of the year (whether by my standards or yours) are often overlooked; and yes, covering movies by focusing overmuch on the Oscar race resembles the horse-race coverage of American politics and signifies the downfall of journalism in particular and civilization in general. But you want to know about it anyway, so let's move on. (Check out my Movie List for an utterly subjective and totally non-market-driven ranking of the year's best and worst movies.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/10/21/oscar_preview/feed/ 15 “A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop”: “Blood Simple,” Hunan-style http://www.salon.com/2010/09/03/woman_gun_noodle/ http://www.salon.com/2010/09/03/woman_gun_noodle/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:31:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/09/03/woman_gun_noodle There may be no way to get you interested in Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou's "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" without making it sound like a minor and weird imitation of something else, rather than the ingenious if artificial creation it actually is. So let's get it over with: Zhang, an operatic visual stylist who has directed "Hero" and "Raise the Red Lantern" and numerous other international art-house hits in a career that reaches back to the '80s, has now made an oddly faithful remake of "Blood Simple," the American indie hit that marked Joel and Ethan Coen's 1984 debut.

But whatever you think that sounds like, "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop" probably isn't anything like that. Zhang has taken the basic botched-murder plot of "Blood Simple," along with its grotesque slapstick elements, and translated it from one kind of movie -- and one kind of world -- into another. Instead of the classic American film noir universe, full of dumb people doing bad things (and vice versa), we're in the highly stylized 19th-century universe of Chinese genre films, with elaborate costumes, a self-evidently phony setting and archetypal characters out of Beijing opera -- the wicked older husband, the scheming wife, the young coward, the funny-looking buffoon.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/09/03/woman_gun_noodle/feed/ 14 “The Square”: Coen-style sunbaked Aussie noir http://www.salon.com/2010/04/10/square/ http://www.salon.com/2010/04/10/square/#comments Sat, 10 Apr 2010 00:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/09/square Was it Tolstoy who observed that every film noir is fundamentally the same, but the stupid white people in them are stupid in their own way? Perhaps not. But first-time Australian director Nash Edgerton — a Hollywood stunt coordinator by day — seems to have absorbed the lesson. Edgerton proves an adept student of the B-movie tradition with his grimy sunbaked crime thriller "The Square," which on one level is so well-rehearsed it seems almost like biblical worship of the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple," and on another is spring-loaded with surprises.

The last couple of years have offered numerous examples of foreign filmmakers taking on the traditions of American crime cinema and making them their own — I hereby direct you to two outstanding German-language examples, in "Jerichow" and "Revanche." Both of those, and "The Square" too, work from the basic "Postman Always Rings Twice"/"Double Indemnity" model, wherein a decent or at least ordinary guy is led further and further into some dastardly and idiotic criminal scheme by ... well, you know exactly by what. By a well-turned ankle, by a skirt, by a hot tamale. By some damn faithless tomato or other, that's what.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/04/10/square/feed/ 6 The perfect double bill: “A Serious Man” and “Parents” http://www.salon.com/2010/02/09/double_bill_4/ http://www.salon.com/2010/02/09/double_bill_4/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/02/09/double_bill In their 25-year career, Joel and Ethan Coen have taken the expression "leaving the audience cold" as a mission statement, not as criticism. They've consistently put American life, past and present, in the wrong and distorted end of their creative telescope, and usually found the results wanting. Consummate craftsmen, the Coens can be a hit-or-miss proposition. When they hit, they hit hard; when they miss, well, they are still worth watching.

Which brings us to this week's DVD release of "A Serious Man," the latest exercise in Coen Gothic, this time set in a Minneapolis suburb in 1967's so-called Summer of Love.

There is a Dickensian quality to the best of the Coens' films, where every character is just shy of caricature, but somehow their conviction and commitment makes it work. Every director's film needs its "non-submersible" units, in the words of another sublime craftsman, Stanley Kubrick, and the Coens can always be counted on to serve those units up, with relish, on the side.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/02/09/double_bill_4/feed/ 5 Directors of the decade: No. 3: The Coen brothers http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/seitz_coens/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/seitz_coens/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2009/12/28/seitz_coens Looking back over Joel and Ethan Coen's run of work this decade — an output that produced such hits, conversation pieces and headscratchers as "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "The Man Who Wasn't There," "The Ladykillers," "Intolerable Cruelty," "No Country for Old Men," "Burn After Reading" and "A Serious Man" — I'm struck not just by its diversity, ambition and sense of craft but by its sincere engagement with the most basic and important struggles in life.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/29/seitz_coens/feed/ 16 Andrew O’Hehir’s best movies of 2009 http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/aoh_2009/ http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/aoh_2009/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2009/12/27/aoh_2009 All I have to say about 2009 in film is that I'm sure they'll find movies to give those 10 best-picture Oscar nominations to, but it won't be any of the ones on my list. That's not a shocking development, but in this year of global recession, the distance between the massive pop-Hollywood spectacles and the little-noticed obscurities way out on the cultural margins seems to have widened into a yawning abyss.

Actually, though, this has been a pretty good year for the independent-film sector, at least in economic terms. I know, that goes against both perceptions and the headline news: the implosion of Miramax and the pseudo-indie, mid-budget bombs churned out by mini-major studios like Fox Searchlight (e.g., "Amelia" and "Whip It"). But it's true anyway.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/12/28/aoh_2009/feed/ 21 Goys, God, dentistry and “A Serious Man” http://www.salon.com/2009/10/01/coens/ http://www.salon.com/2009/10/01/coens/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:08:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/10/01/coens

AP photo

Directors Ethan Coen, left, and Joel Coen at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009.

So you want to hear a story? I've got one for you. It's about a beleaguered suburban dad who's got problems in his marriage and goes to see the rabbi -- actually, a whole sequence of rabbis -- with unsatisfactory results. It's got an envelope full of money and a glorious 1964 Coupe de Ville in it, both of which lead to startling and unforeseen consequences. It's got a secret message, possibly or probably from Hashem (aka God), inscribed on the teeth of an oblivious goy. This whole story might indeed be a fable about the way Hashem works in the lives of ordinary people -- or it might be about a dybbuk, a demonic spirit from ancient Jewish folklore. Then again, the fable might just be about the disordered, random operations of fate, and the futile human struggle to understand them.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/10/01/coens/feed/ 42 Early odds on the Oscar derby http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff/ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff

 

A still from "Up"

It's an autumnal phenomenon, as predictable in its own way as the first signs of red and gold in the treetops: As dozens of new movies flood the fall marketplace, most of them without a hope in hell of reaching a paying audience, people in the industry begin to protest that the film economy is finally and permanently broken. This year the alarm has been sounded by indieWire blogger Anne Thompson, long among the most levelheaded and reality-based of Hollywood reporters, and that fact has momentarily transfixed the attention-impaired elite of movieland.

"The old independent market is over," wrote Thompson last week, summing up the aftermath of the just-completed Toronto International Film Festival, which saw only a handful of modestly scaled distribution deals. "A new one will take its place. But we are smack in the middle between the end of one paradigm and the start of another, and it's a scary place indeed." Added Thompson, "I saw one movie after another [at Toronto] that was unreleasable in the current climate," predicting that most of the 145 films for sale at Canada's huge film marketplace "will wind up streamed, downloaded and viewed on a small TV or computer or mobile screen."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/09/23/oscar_kickoff/feed/ 17 Upcoming movies: Awesome or awful? http://www.salon.com/2009/08/18/must_stop/ http://www.salon.com/2009/08/18/must_stop/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/08/18/must_stop

Walt Disney Pictures

Mia Wasikowska as Alice in "Alice in Wonderland"

OK then, here's a pop quiz for pop-culture mavens. First, identify each of the following proposed movie projects. Second, identify which one I just pulled out of thin air. Or to put it another way, identify which one was not pulled out of thin air, or some darker, moister region, by someone sitting behind an extremely nice neo-retro desk in Los Angeles. After that we'll get to the subject of whether any of these motion pictures should exist at all.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/08/18/must_stop/feed/ 36 Still more DVDs you should have seen (but didn’t) http://www.salon.com/2009/05/28/dvd_roundup_4/ http://www.salon.com/2009/05/28/dvd_roundup_4/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 10:40:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2009/05/28/dvd_roundup

Clockwise from top left, Zeitgeist Films, Facets Video, Mitzi Trumbo, A.M.P.A.S., Severin Films

Clockwise from top left: "Careful," "The Steamroller and the Violin," "Johnny Got His Gun," "The Hairdresser's Husband."

For those of you who found last week's offerings too glaringly obvious and mainstream, here is further proof that we live in an age when no director and no film will ever be completely forgotten. OK, one selection this week is an obvious ringer, but I explain my reasoning below. Where can you find the only movie ever directed by the blacklisted writer of "Roman Holiday" and "Spartacus," the almost unknown first film from Russia's greatest director, some French arty softcore never released in the United States, and a double dose of films from a Parisian underground legend so obscure he's barely known in France? Right here, that's where.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2009/05/28/dvd_roundup_4/feed/ 7 Black gay men are the new, um, black http://www.salon.com/2008/10/29/roundup_27/ http://www.salon.com/2008/10/29/roundup_27/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:47:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/10/29/roundup

Logo

"Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom"

Before I move on to nibbly bits of news from the film world in a week when almost everyone's attention is on weightier matters, here's the casualty report, both metaphorical and, I am sorry to say, literal. New York film and TV critic Andrew Johnston, an intelligent and versatile writer whose weekly deep-think analyses of each new episode of "Mad Men" had attracted a loyal following over at the House Next Door, has died at age 40 after a long battle with cancer. I only knew Johnston by sight and didn't realize he was ill, so this news is especially upsetting and shocking.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/10/29/roundup_27/feed/ 3 No country for human beings http://www.salon.com/2008/09/12/burn_after_reading/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/12/burn_after_reading/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:35:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//feature/2008/09/12/burn_after_reading

Focus Features

Brad Pitt, left, and George Clooney in "Burn After Reading."

Here's the right word to describe Joel and Ethan Coen's star-studded, pack-of-maroons spy comedy "Burn After Reading": It's patchy. Of course that sounds like I'm dismissing it, but I don't exactly mean it that way. The film is hilarious in patches, shocking in patches, utterly convincing in patches and close to brilliant in patches. As with the much-laureled "No Country for Old Men," the Coens seem to be Mixmastering themes and elements of their earlier films; there are traces of "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski" and "Blood Simple" in the DNA of "Burn After Reading." But those comparisons aren't likely to benefit this work of lightweight inside-the-Beltway misanthropy, which possesses neither the morbid, cinematic gravity of their better crime films nor the absurd delirium of their best comedies.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2008/09/12/burn_after_reading/feed/ 16 Gone fishin’! Back soon — here’s what awaits http://www.salon.com/2008/09/10/vacation_9/ http://www.salon.com/2008/09/10/vacation_9/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:12:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/beyond_the_multiplex//2008/09/10/vacation

Photofest

Peter O'Toole in "Lawrence of Arabia."

Since there's no downtime in the film calendar anymore, I'm just going to go ahead and take a vacation during the busiest infotainment season of the year. I'm sorry to harsh out Harvey Weinstein's mellow and all, but my mom hasn't seen her grandkids in seven months, and there you have it.

I've got reviews of Alan Ball's literary adaptation "Towelhead" and the Coen brothers' new George Clooney-Brad Pitt spy farce "Burn After Reading" ready to run later this week. I wasn't super-nice to either of those films, but I won't be alone in that, I suspect.

Also opening this week are a couple of intriguing-sounding documentaries I haven't caught yet: film critic-turned-filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire's "Moving Midway," about the relocation of his family's North Carolina plantation house; and Irena Salina's "Flow," which is about the global water crisis, possibly the most urgent environmental issue of today, tomorrow and the day after that. Both open Sept. 12 in New York before national rollouts begin.

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