 |
||||||||||
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
The Power of Data Visualization website has an infographic detailing the budgets, box offices, genres, Rotten Tomato scores and Oscar noms/wins of all 14 Coen brothers movies. The most interesting thing on it, if you ask me, is that The Hudsucker Proxy scores only 59% on Rotten Tomatoes!
Lurking in Twitter I found a link to this, frankly awesome, collection of re-imagined Coen brothers movie posters. The designers at Poster Lab have reworked posters for Blood Simple, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There and No Country For Old Men. I think you’ll agree that they’re truly beautiful.
Click on the images below to see the full size posters;
.png "Blood Simple S")
+2.png "The Hudsucker Proxy S")
.png "Lebowsky 2 S")
.png "Lebowsky 3 S")
.png "The Man Who Wasn't There S")
.png "No Country For Old Men S")
Which is your favourite? Mine? It’s a toss-up (no pun intended) between No Country and Hudsucker.
I’ll keep an eye on Poster Lab and update if they do the missing movies, I really hope they do.
The American Film Institute has listed the Coen brothers’ latest movie, A Serious Man, as one of 10 movies of the year. The AFI’s intent is to generate a sort of visual history of American cinema by adding movies and TV shows of worth to the collection every year. Here is their explanation of what they do;
“AFI was created to protect and preserve the legacy of the moving image art form so that future generations will have a greater understanding and appreciation for the proud heritage reflected in the realities of a new modern day.
Each year, AFI AWARDS honors excellence in the moving image arts within the context of a Year in Review. One of AFI’s national mandates is the creation of an annual almanac that records and preserves the evolution of the moving image arts in the 21st century.”
Anyway, A Serious Man was joined by Coraline, The Hangover, The Hurt Locker, The Messanger, Precious, A Single Man, Sugar, Up and Up In The Air. Additionally, No Country For Old Men made the cut in 2007’s awards and Roger Deakins was awarded their Cinematographer of the Year award for The Man Who Wasn’t There back in 2001.
Just spotted this on Twitter but, for some reason, the Raindance website has made the screenplays for EVERY, and I mean EVERY, Coen brothers’ movie available for download. Now, this includes the screenplays for both A Serious Man AND their next movie, True Grit!!! You heard me right- including TRUE GRIT!
I suggest you get them ALL while you can because I can’t imagine the True Grit one being available for long. Get them HERE!
Obviously most of them are available right here on YKFK and have been for a long time however, I have gotten into a bit of legal deep water in the past for posting up scripts for forthcoming movies before which is why I have not uploaded the ones for Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and True Grit…
Empire magazine’s website has listed what they consider to be the the 20 best micro-part characters from the Coen brothers oeuvre. Here’s are those 20…
1. Loren Visser (M Emmet Walsh), Blood Simple
2. Dot (Frances McDormand), Raising Arizona
3. Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), Raising Arizona
4. Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), Miller’s Crossing
5. Tic Tac (Al Mancini), Miller’s Crossing
6. Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), Barton Fink
7. W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), Barton Fink
8. Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), The Hudsucker Proxy
9. Buzz (Jim True-Frost), The Hudsucker Proxy
10. Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), Fargo
11. Officer Lou (Bruce Lohene), Fargo
12. Marty (Jack Keller), The Big Lebowski
13. Penny Wharvey McGill (Holly Hunter), O Brother, Where Art Thou?
14. Freddy Reidenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), The Man Who Wasn’t There
15. Gus Petch (Cedric the Entertainer), Intolerable Cruelty
16. Wheezy Joe (Irwin Keyes), Intolerable Cruelty
17. Deputy Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), No Country For Old Men
18. Gas Station Proprietor (Gene Jones), No Country For Old Men
19. CIA Superior (J.K. Simmons), Burn After Reading
20. Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), A Serious Man
Nice to see a couple of entries from Intolerable Cruelty which I still think is massively underrated suffering, as it does, from the weight of Coen quality prior to it.
What do you think? Has anyone been missed? Only ONE from The Big Lebowski? I would have Knox Harrington (David Thewlis) in there right away! And no Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), surely Jesus’ part is small enough to make this list? None from The Ladykillers? Let’s talk…
I have been trying to formulate this into an article myself but I only go as far as making some notes. Vanity Fair has done a much better job than I would have done with a fun article about the chronology of the Coen brothers’ movie output to date and observes that, while they love to trip through time and period, they are yet to make a movie set in the 1970’s. To wit;
1920’s – Miller’s Crossing
1930’s – O Brother, Where Art Thou?
1940’s – Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There
1950’s – The Hudsucker Proxy
1960’s – A Serious Man
1970’s -
1980’s – Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, No Country For Old Men
1990’s – Fargo, The Big Lebowski
2000’s – Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers (even though it feels older), Burn After Reading
Now, obviously some of these movies aren’t period movies at all but contemporary movies set during the time they were made. Interesting none the less.
What historic theme do you think they could tackle to fill this 1970’s-shaped void in their oevre? Watergate? The Beatles breaking up? The founding of Microsoft?
Ponders the Guardian’s Joe Queenan using the fact that the Coens are yet to make a tear-jerker as evidence that they are not fit to be so highly regarded. Once again a journalist bemoaning the fact that the Coens have gone from making a serious, Oscar-winning movie (No Country For Old Men) to a light, knock about comedy (Burn After Reading). Like that’s a bad thing! His comment that “the Coen brothers revert to being smart-alecks making films for snarky college students” is so boring, so well-trodden and so wrong that I almost stopped reading the article right there. And again the line about the Coen brothers “creative slump” is regurgitated, only this time, to fit the theme of his article, Queenan, has decided to make that slump a lot longer than the period in which the much maligned (unfairly, or at least overly harshly, in my opinion) Intolerable Cruelty (“a real horror”) and The Ladykillers (“a gabby, klutzy reworking of the 1955 British classic of the same name”). He extends it to include the period 1998-2006, a period in which he claims the Coen brothers “hit the skids”, conveniently beginning after most people’s favourite Coen movie, The Big Lebowski to the aforementioned serious, worthy movie, No Country For Old Men. This merely gives him the [false] evidence to back up his claims and overlooks two truly tremendous movie offerings in O Brother, Where Art Thou? ,which, in his esteemed opinion, has nothing to recommend it but (you guessed it) the multi-million selling, award winning soundtrack, and The Man Who Wasn’t There.
He also contends that- “Everything the Coen brothers do is clever, eye-opening, and stylish. That puts them in a class with Salvador Dalí. It doesn’t put them in a class with Rembrandt”. Suits me, I much prefer the work of the surrealist master over that of Rembrandt.
In my opinion it is Queenan’s article that is a “recycling – more like a regurgitation” displaying for all to see how easy it is to write from a grumpy stand point. Of course, much like this post, his article is merely one man’s opinion to which he is entitled, however wrong it may be.
According to movie font of all knowledge, the IMDB, one Katherine Borowitz is to appear in the forthcoming A Serious Man as a character called Mimi Nudell. Using my rules for the Family Tree section of YKFK an actor must have appeared in at least two Coen brothers movies and Borowitz’s previous appearance was in 2001’s Palme D’Or winner- The Man Who Wasn’t There as Big Dave Brewster’s (James Gandolfini) wife, UFO conspiracist and future department store heiress, Ann Nirdlinger. To jog your memory here’s a pic…
Jacqui Landrum is a name that may not be familiar to most of you but she worked on four of the Coen brothers movies in the capacity of choreographer. Sadly she has died of cancer almost two weeks ago aged 64 and is survived by her husband. She worked on Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Man Who Wasn’t There. RIP.
From Variety. Thanks to Bunnie for notifying me.
What with all the news of The Dark Knight being the bestest movie in the world since time began (according to it’s IMDB user rating) and in conjunction with YKFK’s currently running poll to find out which was the best (or more accurately- most favourite) Coen brothers movie, I thought it might be interesting to see what the IMDB users thought in comparison. In terms of ratings here’s IMDB’s rundown of Coen awesomeness first by rating and, where there’s a tie, I’ve given preference to the one with the most votes…
Now, obviously, this is a live list so it will change over time. I just thought it might be interesting to compare what general movie fans think as opposed to specific Coen brothers fans who visit YKFK. At the moment the YKFK poll has Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski tied at the top with 19% of the votes a piece. Next up is Fargo with 16% followed by Barton Fink with 13%. The bottom two in the YKFK poll unsurprisingly mirror the bottom two in the IMDB rankings, each taking up zero percent of the votes thus far- come on- SOMEONE must like them 
.
I was very surprised to see No Country For Old Men top the IMDB list whilst it is sixth on ours, but these type of things are always coloured by short memory. Will the IMDB voters still consider No Country superior to Fargo and The Big Lebowski in 10 years time?
Come the end of the YKFK poll (I ain’t decided how long to run it really- perhaps it should never end- your thoughts welcome) we need to decide which of the two polls is more important to us here at YKFK- the one voted for by dedicated Coen nuts or the one voted for by a more general movie fan…
Incidentally, I’m seeing The Dark Knight tomorrow afternoon and am looking forward to it immensely. I am expecting great things but the best movie of all time… nope.
.png "Barton Fink S")
.png "Fargo S")