The Coen brothers’ latest movie, A Serious Man has been nominated for two awards at the 25th Film Independent Spirit Awards. The nominations for Joel and Ethan Coen in the Best Director category and for the ridiculously awesome, Roger Deakins in the Best Cinematography category. In addition the movie has been awarded their Robert Altman Award which is a special one awarded to just one film’s the director, casting director and its ensemble cast. The award ceremony takes place on Friday March 5th 2010.
The Coens have been successful at the Spirit Awards before. In 1997 Fargo won the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Female Lead (Frances McDormand), Best Male Lead (William H. Macy) and Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins – told you he was awesome!). In 1986 Blood Simple was nominated for Best Picture but was beaten by Martin Scorsese’s After Hours while that movie and Blood Simple shared the gong for Best Director, M. Emmet Walsh also won the Best Male Lead award for his creepy, slimey portrayal of Loren Visser.

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…

Regular readers of You Know, For Kids! will know that the Coen brothers’ latest, Burn After Reading, was nominated in two categories at this year’s Golden Globes, well, it won neither! In the category of Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical it was beaten out by Woody Allen’s supposed return to form, Vicky Christina Barcelona while thew award for Best Performance by an Acress in a Comedy or Musical went to Sally Hawkins for her performance in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky beating Frances McDormand.

Boo!

Great stuff- just stumbled across these…

I’m not claiming to know anything about marketing but, if I were in charge of the PR for a movie, I’d try my best to ensure that this kind of thing was sent directly to the people in a good position to show them to a lot of people at no cost, say… fan websites for example. I don’t know why I have to accidentally find them on the internet…

Nothing to say here other than I found this awesome photo of the Coens with some of the cast of Burn After Reading.

I don’t think anyone needs telling but- top row left to right; Ethan Coen, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton. Front row left to right; Joel Coen, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt.

This month’s Empire magazine has a 5 page article on HBO TV show, The Wire. It’s mainly an interview with its creator, David Simon and, in it, he waxes lyrical about the Coen brothers. This from said article…

He said, “I’ll watch anything by the Coen brothers. I’d spend a month on set bringing them coffee just to see how they work.” He might even get his chance, as Coen regular – and Mrs to Joel – Frances McDormand has optioned Every Secret Thing, by crime novelist Laura Lippman, who just happens to be Mrs. David Simon. A dinner for the two couples proved that even hardbitten, ex-hacks-turned-TV-big-cheeses can come over all starstruck.

“That was a fanboy moment for me. I couldn’t get a word out – all I was thinking was, ‘It’s fucking Joel Coen!’, and I’m an ex-reporter so I’m not allowed to go civilian! I don’t care if the President of the United States walks in the room – ‘Fuck you, I’m a journalist’ – but the Coen brothers, man…”

I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing a collaboration between the Coens and Simon. The Wire is an incredible show and, if you haven’t seen it yet, take a punt on the Season One boxset. I can’t recommend it enough.

Firstshowing.net have two new character trailers for Burn After Reading. This time John Malkovich’s Osbourne Cox and Frances McDormand’s Linda Litzke are the focus. Go check ‘em out here.

After the awesome “red band” trailer for Burn After Reading comes the regular, for all audiences trailer. Do we call these “green band”? Who knows? Anyway here it is. It has quite a few shots that weren’t in the original trailer and some ridiculous examples of cuss words being edited out. Pitt calling Malkovich a “dick wad” is now merely a silence and ”secret CIA stuff” isn’t near as funny as “secret CIA shit“. Pah! Anyway, it’s a good laugh, especially McDormand’s reaction to Clooney’s invention which, if you don’t know what it is you will crease up when you find out (I won’t spoil it). Enjoy.

In addition there’s the International Teaser Trailer which you can watch here. Again this has one or two brief new shots.

Thanks to Blake for mailing me the links.

My copy of Empire (July 2008) arrived today and the first article in it (after the reader’s letter page) is a four-pager on the Coen’s next movie, Burn After Reading. It confirmed the UK release date of October 17th and also contains five new images which I will scan in and post on YKFK in the next few days. Here is the text from said article lovingly transcribed by yours truly…

“After the (relative) seriousness of No Country For Old Men, it seems the Coens are back to more traditional turf for their next. It’s a thriller that’s kind of a comedy (or the other way around) born of one of their own brainstorming sessions (and not a famous novel), where the characters go by such typically syllable-torturing Coen-esque monikers as Harry Pfarrer, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer.

“It’s in the vein of Fargo and Lebowski,” delights Eric Fellner from Working Title, completing his sixth film with the brothers. “Somebody comes across something they shouldn’t, they completely misinterpret what they’ve got, and because they are fairly stupid, everything spirals horribly out of control. Mayhem and dead bodies ensue.”

More precisely, it is a spy caper about boozy CIA operative Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), so incensed at being fired he writes some inflammatory memoirs, the disc of which he accidentally leaves in a gym. It is discovered by less-than-intellectual instructor Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who attempts to blackmail Ozzie, while his boss Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) meets smooth-talking Harry Pfarrer (George Clooneey) via online dating. He’s the CIA lug assigned to clear the whole matter up, who also ends up sleeping with Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), estranged wife of Ozzie.

“I’m a guy that goes around killing people,” says Clooney, who would happily play a corpse for the Coens. “It looks really fun. This will be my third idiot – the Coens call it my trilogy of idiots.”

Shooting with typical zest (taking only 50 days) between No Country’s debut in Cannes 2007 and its rapturous US release last autumn, the New York boys stuck fairly close to home: Brooklyn Heights and Washington, DC are the main locations. And despite regular cinematographer Roger Deakins missing his first gig since Barton Fink (due to prior commitments) – Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men) replaces him - the production ran as smoothly as ever.

“They are so brilliant, Joel and Ethan, they just know what they want,” continues Fellner. “Most of the techs and craftsmen have all worked with Joel and Ethan many times. There is never a panic on set. You are never running out of time.”

However, the film, which will open this year’s Venice Film Festival (it wasn’t ready for Cannes 2008), finds its makers at something of a crossroads. Does the Oscar victory and box-office success of No Country For Old Men (a best ever $160 million worldwide) mean they are now a mainstream act and no longer the clever-cloging wiseacres only deciphearable by their army of delirious fans?

“That is the issue – how do you sell the Coens?” agrees Fellner. “Our experience at Working Title is that the point where we’re made mistakes is when we’ve not sold the film to the real audience. You have to start with the real audience and then go bolder. With some of their recent films made with studios (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were both studio-based films not produced by Working Title) , that could be where they went wrong: looking for too big an audience. This is quite mainstream, but not too mainstream.”

The Coens have been very busy of late. They will soon start another comedy, A Serious Man (also with Working Title), which Ethan has claimed will be ever-so slightly autobiographical: “It’s about a family of four in the Midwest, in 1967, and one of the kids is about to be Bar Mitzvahed. Horrible things happen…” After which they will get going on an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a couldn’t-be-more-Coens noir pastiche set in a reimagined Jewish state in Alaska. Meanwhile, Ethan has also found time to write a trilogy of short plays currenlty being staged together off-Broadway under the title Almost An Evening, produced with the help of Coens’ regular composor, Carter Burwell. The plays, one of which involves two opposing versions of God having a scrap, are helpfully described as Camus-meets-Kafka-meets-the Marx Brothers. Definitely not too mainstream.”

So there you have it. I found this article to put my mind at ease about their two next projects, both of which I’m looking forward to temendously, especially The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which, like the article says, is perfectly suited to the Coen brothers. If you haven’t read the book yet, I cannot recommend it enough.

Working Title’s site confims who is playing who in Burn After Reading. Thus;

George Clooney – Harry Pfarrer

Frances McDormand – Linda Litzke

Brad Pitt – Chad Feldheimer

John Malkovich – Osbourne Cox

Tilda Swinton – Katie Cox