Another wonderfully positive review, this time from Variety.

Scott Foundas;

The sounds of the early 1960s folk music revival float on the air like a strange, intoxicating perfume in the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis,” a boldly original, highly emotional journey through Greenwich Village nightclubs, a bleak New York winter, and one man’s fraught efforts to reconcile his life and his art. A product of the same deeply personal end of the Coens’ filmmaking spectrum previously responsible for the likes of “Barton Fink” and “A Serious Man,” this darkly comic musical drama with an elliptical narrative and often brusque protagonist won’t corral the same mass audience as “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit.” But strong reviews — for the pic itself and its stupendous soundtrack — should make this December release an awards-season success for distrib CBS Films.

As they did with the 1940s Hollywood setting of “Barton Fink,” the Coens have again taken a real time and place and freely made it their own, drawing on actual persons and events for inspiration, but binding themselves only to their own bountiful imaginations. The result is a movie that neatly avoids the problems endemic to most period movies — and biopics in particular — in favor of a playful, evocatively subjective reality. Perhaps most surprising to some viewers will be the pic’s surfeit of something the Coens have sometimes been accused of lacking: deep, heartfelt sincerity.

Where Clifford Odets provided the inspiration for “Fink’s” eponymous playwright, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) has been similarly modeled on the late Dave Van Ronk, a mainstay of the ’60s New York folk revival whose vaunted reputation among musicians never translated into the commercial success enjoyed by many of his contemporaries. Like Van Ronk, the pic’s Davis is a guitar-strumming balladeer whose repertoire consists mostly of vintage American roots music of the sort catalogued by musicologists John and Alan Lomax as they traversed the southern U.S. One such tune, the haunting “Dink’s Song” (aka “Fare Thee Well”) becomes the pic’s melancholy refrain in a version purportedly cut by Davis and his former partner, Mike (British musician Marcus Mumford), before the latter’s suicide rendered Llewyn a solo act.

This is how we first see Llewyn, lost in song onstage at MacDougal Street’s Gaslight Cafe circa 1961 — the year that a certain freewheeling tumbleweed from Minnesota would turn up on the folk scene and throw the doors open wide. But for the time being, Davis barely ekes out an existence from a cut of the door and the kindness of friends with sofas. Upon leaving the Gaslight for the night, he is confronted in the back alley by a shadowy figure who cold-cocks him for no (immediately) apparent reason.

From there, the pic adopts the odyssey narrative the Coens have employed on several previous occasions, most notably “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” though the tone here is more Joycean than Homeric. Waking up on what seems like the next morning in the apartment of a Columbia U. professor friend, a disoriented Llewyn pulls himself together and sets off on the long subway ride back to the Village — but not before accidentally letting out the pet cat. For the remainder of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” this uncooperative animal seems to be leading Llewyn from one strange adventure to the next, like a beatnik Leopold Bloom on the trail of a feline Stephen Dedalus.

If his music career is dangling by a thread, Llewyn’s personal life qualifies as an outright shambles. The sort of person who expects others to support him but rarely returns the favor, the commitment-phobic singer practically has a VIP account with the local abortionist, and may be back again after learning his brief fling with married folk singer Jean (Carey Mulligan) has resulted in another bun in the oven. Like most of the pic’s cast outside of Isaac, Mulligan has relatively little screen time but makes the most of every minute, as does Justin Timberlake as her oblivious nice-guy husband (and singing partner), Jim.

What’s a starving musician to do except keep gigging? So Llewyn drifts along, sitting in as a session musician on Jim’s novelty record “Hey, Mr. President” (the pic’s lone original song) and, in the movie’s surrealist centerpiece, traveling to Chicago in the company of a drug-addled, partly paralyzed blues man (a cross between Doc Pomus and Dr. John) played with magnificent, scene-guzzling brio by John Goodman. But the Windy City brings only wind, snow and an impromptu audition for a storied club owner and manager (an excellent F. Murray Abraham) which, in anyone else’s movie, would be the moment when Llewyn is finally discovered and can start paying the rent. Instead, he merely returns to Coenville and to pushing his boulder up life’s steeply angled hill.

Yet for all the pain in “Inside Llewyn Davis,” there is also abundant joy — the joy of the music itself, exquisitely arranged by T Bone Burnett and sung live on set by the actors themselves. Both dramatically and musically, the film excels at depicting the many varied styles that wound up grouped under the folk umbrella — from corny, Kingston Trio-esque harmonists to protest singers like Pete Seeger and self-proclaimed “neo-ethnics” such as Van Ronk. In keeping with the Coens’ interest in matters of Jewish cultural identity, the pic also touches — but never dwells — on the folk scene’s abiding spirit of self-reinvention, which allowed a Jewish doctor’s son from Queens to become the singing cowboy Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (a model for the movie’s Al Cody, played by Adam Driver).

Above all, “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a revelatory showcase for Isaac, who sings with an angelic voice and turns a potentially unlikable character into a consistently relatable, unmistakably human presence — a reminder that humility and genius rarely make for comfortable bedfellows. Tech contributions are outstanding on all counts, especially the wintry, desaturated lensing of Bruno Delbonnel (pinch hitting for usual Coen d.p. Roger Deakins) and the inspired period detailing of production designer Jess Gonchor, whose bygone Greenwich Village abounds with cramped cold-water flats and Kafka-esque hallways narrowing toward infinity.

In a bizarre twist it looks like the zombie article at the Daily Mail from a year ago could have risen from the grave for a good reason. Variety are reporting that the Coen brothers are indeed set to re-make True Grit next. It has apparenlty stepped ahead of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” in the pecking order.

Good news is that they plan to stick more closely to the plot of the original Charles Portis novel focusing on the story of a 14 year-old girl rather than follow the plot of the John Wayne movie. 

Bad news is- I was really looking forward to ”The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” because the novel is great and right up the Coen’s alley so to speak.

So, the Coens set to do a Western… could be interesting. Now I must read the book…

Thanks to Calvin and Erenik for tipping me off.

Variety has a brief interview with long-time Coen collaborator, composor Carter Burwell in which he discusses the ideas behind the music score for Burn After Reading.

Thanks to Bunnie (again!) for the tip off.

…or maybe Todd McCarthy from Variety just plain didn’t like Burn After Reading  Read on for his negative review…

“After their triumphant dramatic success with “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers revert to sophomoric snarky mode in “Burn After Reading.” A dark goofball comedy about assorted doofuses in Washington, D.C., only some of whom work for the government, the short, snappy picture tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller, with arch and ungainly results. Major star names might stoke some mild B.O. heat with older upscale viewers upon U.S. release Sept. 12, but no one should expect this reunion of George Clooney and Brad Pitt to remotely resemble an “Ocean’s” film commercially.

A seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters in this tale of desperation, mutual suspicion and vigorous musical beds, all in the name of laughs that only sporadically ensue. Everything here, from the thesps’ heavy mugging to the uncustomarily overbearing score by Carter Burwell and the artificially augmented vulgarities in the dialogue, has been dialed up to an almost grotesquely exaggerated extent, making for a film that feels misjudged from the opening scene and thereafter only occasionally hits the right note.

Ironically, said curtain-raiser shows the CIA actually getting something right. Career analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is shoved out, and his subsequent obscene tantrum demonstrates he has all the decorum and self-control of a 5-year-old. Lying to his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), that he quit, Osborne sets about writing an explosive memoir, while no-nonsense Katie now seriously begins considering leaving her unhinged husband for her happy-go-lucky lover Harry (Clooney), a federal marshal none too committed to wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel).

In an utterly unrelated orbit of D.C. life, desperately middle-aged Linda (Frances McDormand) is pissed that the insurance company for the fitness center where she works won’t cover the extensive plastic surgery she urgently wants done. So antic and frantic you wonder if anesthesia would ever work on her, she suddenly steps into merde with gym trainer Chad (Pitt), who’s even more hyperactive than she is, when the latter finds a disc they think is loaded with ultra-classified information.

With frosted blond hair, and appearing so dense he may as well have his low-double-digit IQ pasted to his forehead, Pitt’s Chad is what passes for a riot here. Film’s funniest scene may be that in which Chad, having traced the disc to Osborne, phones the latter in the middle of the night to initiate the blackmail scheme that will net Linda the coin she needs to transform her bod. Pitt slices the ham very thick indeed, but uniquely emerges as endearing in doing so.

Coincidentally, Internet dater Linda starts shagging Harry, who, amusingly, likes to go for long runs after sex, and just past the one-hour mark, one major character gets blown away in an accident, a development that’s supposed to be funny as well as startling.

The Coens’ script, which feels immature but was evidently written around the same time as that for “No Country,” is just too fundamentally silly, without the grounding of a serious substructure that would make the sudden turn to violence catch the viewer up short. Nothing about the project’s execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one. As it is, audience teeth-grinding sets in early and never lets up.

Incidental niceties crop up, to be sure. The Coens’ economy of storytelling is in evidence, as is their unerring visual sense, this time in league with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki; a low-angle shot of Harry, knife in hand, lingers especially. The date montages are cute, and the facial reactions of JK Simmons, playing a CIA boss more dedicated to avoiding fuss and bother than to getting to the bottom of things, are once again priceless. But on any more substantive level, “Burn After Reading” is a flame-out.”