Ranking the Coen Bros. Films
Given that they're the most talented filmmakers of their generation, and they seem to be on sabbatical, it's time to rank their films. The Coens have 3 distinct traits, not always employed and not always employed well when employed: intelligence, humor, and style. Keep those in mind. Starting with the worst:
11. Barton Fink - A movie about writer's block. Predictably boring. This film is sorely lacking in humor and is only mildly stylized. That leaves us with an intelligent film, but an intelligent film about writer's block and a bitterness towards Hollywood that is generally lacking in the Coens usually boisterous, light ribbings.
10. The Ladykillers - A film with too disparate a hodgepodge to pull together. Certainly the characters are good but the film lacks consistency and seems to bounce around aimlessly. A disappointing effort apparently done for the sake of Hanks' interest and a need to make money.
9. O Brother Where Art Thou - Because the film is good and soundtrack changed music, if ever so briefly, it may be a surprise to find this film so low. That said, kitchy journey stories like the Odyssey are a cop out. The film has strong moments, is beautifully shot, and features strong performances. But it wears thin.
8. Blood Simple - The Coen's first film is lacking in style and humor, but is brutal and smart. Very effecting but only a glimpse of potential.
7. Intolerable Cruelty - Extremely uneven. At its best moments, it is fantastic. Unfortunately, it is clear that the Coens took the project on and made it good rather than creating it from the ground up. There are mismatched elements and a bum stretch towards the end, plus a surprisingly humorless turn from Cedric the Entertainer, makes it lose steam. Still a very underrated film featuring moments of astounding comedic brilliance and real heart.
6. Raising Arizona - The first true Coen film, in parts bizarre, funny, and smart. Cage is good, Tex is better, and all around it is a genuinely likeable film. An appropriate midpoint to hold hands with the #5 film, which is very similar, only better in every sense.
TIMEOUT: I would just like to mention To the White Sea. To the White Sea was an essentially dialogueless adaptation of a very brutal novel by the writer of Deliverance about an American airman trapped behind enemy lines. To be done in black-and-white, and hopefully with a better ending than the novel, it was an artpiece to surpass all there other art pieces. They got the interest of the generation's most underrated actor, skill-wise, Brad Pitt. This was going to be their best art film...but they couldn't budget it. If only we had phlianthropists who made films for the hell of it.
5. The Big Lebowski - The best of the basically plotless comedies, a worthy cult classic. Nothing need be said here except that I think moview with real narrative features to be inherently superior.
4. The Man Who Wasn't There - The best of their art films, a dark, very intelligent, very powerful film, superbly scored (as always), brilliantly written, directed, and acted. There are, again, flights of fancy a bit too silly...it would have been better to play this one a little straighter. But a very impressive effort, a travesty to have received no Oscar attention. Whose shoes did these guys spit on that no one wants to nominate them? Perhaps it's because they're too smart for Hollywood and don't make dull overtly-political tripe.
3. Fargo - A controversial choice. Many Coen fans find the more mainstream dramas of the mid-90's to be a travesty against true Coendome. Others would say that Fargo is without question their best effort. The truth is that Fargo is a good film but not a deep one. It lacks the artistic flares, the repeated symbolism that would push it to the top of the list. But it is a great movie.
2. The Hudsucker Proxy - A delightful film, funny, consistently themed, a rare topic, well-acted and tight as a drum. Only second to:
1. Miller's Crossing - The only time the Coens blended everything perfectly and added a touch of Godfather to the mix. Funny, quirky, and intelligent, the film is missing the missteps and goofiness and inconsistency that takes away from many of the other films. It adds a literary stroke of intelligence and a slow, well-measured descent from light comedy to an extremely mature conclusion.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Monday, August 21, 2006
ESPN embarrasses itself.
With baseball playoff races still only percolating and football a few weeks off, ESPN has hit one of its low points in desparately trying to stir up controversy.
Points A and B: Reggie Bush and Terrell Owens.s
First TO:
TO and Bill Parcells are favorites because they feed ESPN stories to soak up time. So you put both of them together on America's team and ESPN starts shivering in ecstasy. So TO tweaked a hammy, now ESPN has to ride this story "TO not working hard, already causing controversy", "Parcells disgruntled" despite the fact that there's no story. He tweaked a hammy. Plenty of guys take it easy in preseason with a bum hamstring. There is no controversy, except now ESPN has forced TO back on the practice field, whether he's ready or not.
WORSE: Bush
Bush is really good. So ESPN wants to hype him. First, he missed a day of training camp unsigned and ESPN was reporting he would sit out the season. He practiced the next day. Then ESPN covered his Monday night performance. They knew it was something very..., they just didn't know what. They couldn't get their story straight. The Sportscenter crew was creaming itself like every cut he made was the next coming of Barry Sanders' highlight reel. Then they cut to the sideline reporter's post game interview, and she was blitzing Bush with questions about getting "completely stuffed".
Stop. Stop. Stop. Cover the event, stop embarrassing yourselves. It's too lame to even demand creativity.
With baseball playoff races still only percolating and football a few weeks off, ESPN has hit one of its low points in desparately trying to stir up controversy.
Points A and B: Reggie Bush and Terrell Owens.s
First TO:
TO and Bill Parcells are favorites because they feed ESPN stories to soak up time. So you put both of them together on America's team and ESPN starts shivering in ecstasy. So TO tweaked a hammy, now ESPN has to ride this story "TO not working hard, already causing controversy", "Parcells disgruntled" despite the fact that there's no story. He tweaked a hammy. Plenty of guys take it easy in preseason with a bum hamstring. There is no controversy, except now ESPN has forced TO back on the practice field, whether he's ready or not.
WORSE: Bush
Bush is really good. So ESPN wants to hype him. First, he missed a day of training camp unsigned and ESPN was reporting he would sit out the season. He practiced the next day. Then ESPN covered his Monday night performance. They knew it was something very..., they just didn't know what. They couldn't get their story straight. The Sportscenter crew was creaming itself like every cut he made was the next coming of Barry Sanders' highlight reel. Then they cut to the sideline reporter's post game interview, and she was blitzing Bush with questions about getting "completely stuffed".
Stop. Stop. Stop. Cover the event, stop embarrassing yourselves. It's too lame to even demand creativity.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Traffic Flow Dynamics for Dummies
(That means you idiot!)
My brother has a theory on driving and politics - we're all sympathetic to Democrats when we use public transportation - we all suffer together, we're all in it together. Then we get in our cars and realize, "I'm living in a nation of assholes."
It's bad enough that the traffic lights aren't synchronized...we all have to deal with drunkards, senile people, immigrants who come from countries with different theories than the "shortest route is between two points" standard, ladies afraid of the highway, and people who are lost and think the way is found by going as slow as possible.
So here are a few tips for sane, thinking people to consider when driving down the street to keep the traffic flowing and the roadrage safely controlled by CDs or talk radio.
1. The fast lane is for going faster than the speed limit.
2. Get out of the traffic and into the exit/turn lane...THEN SLOW DOWN.
3. Never go the same speed as the lane next to you
4. Merge at freeway speed
5. Do not use the brake on the freeway unless there is a traffic jam...taking your foot off the accelerator will slow you down sufficiently
6. It is possible to drive while it is raining.
7. Your blinker signals your intentions.
8. If you are pulling up to a red light and do not plan to turn right, please vacate the right lane so that those who do intend to do so can use it.
9. Cell phones, sandwiches and the radio are to be fiddled with only for those capable of driving their car normally while using them. Don't turn into a senile Asian woman just because you're talking to your girlfriend.
10. For heaven sakes do not NOT NOT drive slower than the speed limit up to a green light and then speed through it when it turns yellow with other cars left at the red behind you. THIS IS WORSE KARMA THAN CLUBBING BABY SEALS.
(That means you idiot!)
My brother has a theory on driving and politics - we're all sympathetic to Democrats when we use public transportation - we all suffer together, we're all in it together. Then we get in our cars and realize, "I'm living in a nation of assholes."
It's bad enough that the traffic lights aren't synchronized...we all have to deal with drunkards, senile people, immigrants who come from countries with different theories than the "shortest route is between two points" standard, ladies afraid of the highway, and people who are lost and think the way is found by going as slow as possible.
So here are a few tips for sane, thinking people to consider when driving down the street to keep the traffic flowing and the roadrage safely controlled by CDs or talk radio.
1. The fast lane is for going faster than the speed limit.
2. Get out of the traffic and into the exit/turn lane...THEN SLOW DOWN.
3. Never go the same speed as the lane next to you
4. Merge at freeway speed
5. Do not use the brake on the freeway unless there is a traffic jam...taking your foot off the accelerator will slow you down sufficiently
6. It is possible to drive while it is raining.
7. Your blinker signals your intentions.
8. If you are pulling up to a red light and do not plan to turn right, please vacate the right lane so that those who do intend to do so can use it.
9. Cell phones, sandwiches and the radio are to be fiddled with only for those capable of driving their car normally while using them. Don't turn into a senile Asian woman just because you're talking to your girlfriend.
10. For heaven sakes do not NOT NOT drive slower than the speed limit up to a green light and then speed through it when it turns yellow with other cars left at the red behind you. THIS IS WORSE KARMA THAN CLUBBING BABY SEALS.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
An Inconvenient Truth: I paid money for a 2-hour campaign commercial.
I went to Al Gore's movie having been told it was very good. Parts of it are and bring up consequences I had not before contemplated. But the movie is a slideshow, and we know how much we loved those in college.
More importantly. this movie has 2 glaring flaws: Al Gore and Al Gore.
Glaring Flaw #1 Al Gore plays Michael Moore.
As we all know, Michael Moore introduced the "documentary" political campaign commercial as a self-marketing ploy to actually get money from people for telling them how to think rather than spending to have them ignore you when you tell them how to think. Al Gore has a long history of lacking creativity, or claiming he had a creative idea after someone else invented it(internet, the movie Love Story, he even admits in his movie that his passion for this issue is based upon his 'soaking in like a sponge' the message of his professors.)
And so, for his hagiography, err...documentary, Al Gore mimick's Moore's canon. We have the oh-so clever cartoon, the photo montages, the quotes from great men, the angry documentor confronting wrongdoers. But most of all, just like in Moore's film, the subject is not the subject, it is only a vehicle for the ego of the filmmaker. At least Moore is a goofy, hokey presence on camera; even though it is a sham, it is a good one and we are all posers at this point anyhow.
But Gore, Gore never knew he was in the first place. He is his ambition and his sense of superiority. There is nothing else. Al Gore is not a man, like John McCain, or even a character, like Bill Clinton. He is a hollow man. He is a Richard Nixon. The words "Al Gore" mean nothing unless there is something, something like "Vice President" or "Congressman" or "Filmmaker" beside it. Because there is no Al Gore. What little there is of Al Gore is what he believes about the environment. But even that must carry the train to what Al Gore cares about most - Al Gore. If only there were something to care about.
Which is Glaring Flaw #2: Al Gore plays Al Gore.
This movie is not a documentary. It is a CV for president and just as doctored as your average average Harvard student's application. It diverges wildly from it's environmental message to allow the quintessential Empty Suit to take another stab at reframing his life to make him likeable and respectable. I could not believe what I was seeing for the first 15 minutes of the film - it was nothing but Al Gore. When they ran out of angles to shoot Gore from, they actually put the back of his head on screen for several seconds with no voiceover...TWICE!!!
This version of Al Gore is apparently funny. Or at least a canned audience of concerned Ivy League backbenchers is willing to laugh at the punchlines. There'll be at least one toady at your local theater obsessed enough with his/her politics to go along. We find time for Gore to show his 2000 Presidential run and the fallout from the contested election. If you were one of the few women out there who was turned on by Gore's condescending-ex-husband-like showings at the Gore-Bush debates, consider this an orgy of pedantry.
But more importantly, Gore and the director make an effort more labored than Shatner's rendition of Rocket Man (http://www.youtube.com/watch?search=Shatner&v=aVlf04AwHCI) to tie in a new, earthier version of the Life Al-a-Gore. In the first family segment, Gore's poor, noble, farmer father raises him on a rural road where they farm cattle. Gore mysteriously goes on to the Ivy League and jumps right into politics where he tirelessly lectures bought off scientists on their duties, only later to be cheated out of the presidency.
We are, of course, reminded once that Gore lived most of his childhood in a DC Hotel. If you were unfamiliar, Gore's father was a Senator, and not just any Senator, but the Vanderbilt family's personal senator. Don't be surprised if Gloria Vanderbilt's child, CNN nepotism-hack Anderson Cooper has a lovejones for Gore come 2008. Cooper's book was just as wastefully self-centered as Gore's film.
We also have a laughable rendition of Gore's connection to big tobacco. You see, Al Gore's sister died of lung cancer. You remember that humble cattle farm the Gore's kept...well, I guess they also grew a bit of tobacco. But when Gore's sister died, the Senator from Vanderbilt, according to Al, stopped growing tobacco. It just wasn't right to make money off of their sister's death.
Except Gore was widely bashed in the late 90's, before the hush campaign to get him past Bush, for his continued connections to, and profits off of, big tobacco.
The bigger question is - what in the name of Sam the American Eagle is any of this doing in a documentary on Global Warming? A few oblique literary turns of phrase are somehow supposed to bridge the gap and justify to the viewer that he spent 8 bucks to watch a long commercial?
An inconvenient truth: Al Gore is running for something - even if he's given up on the presidency, and that's not at all clear, he's still running for Al Gore (Fill-in-the-blanks-here).
I went to Al Gore's movie having been told it was very good. Parts of it are and bring up consequences I had not before contemplated. But the movie is a slideshow, and we know how much we loved those in college.
More importantly. this movie has 2 glaring flaws: Al Gore and Al Gore.
Glaring Flaw #1 Al Gore plays Michael Moore.
As we all know, Michael Moore introduced the "documentary" political campaign commercial as a self-marketing ploy to actually get money from people for telling them how to think rather than spending to have them ignore you when you tell them how to think. Al Gore has a long history of lacking creativity, or claiming he had a creative idea after someone else invented it(internet, the movie Love Story, he even admits in his movie that his passion for this issue is based upon his 'soaking in like a sponge' the message of his professors.)
And so, for his hagiography, err...documentary, Al Gore mimick's Moore's canon. We have the oh-so clever cartoon, the photo montages, the quotes from great men, the angry documentor confronting wrongdoers. But most of all, just like in Moore's film, the subject is not the subject, it is only a vehicle for the ego of the filmmaker. At least Moore is a goofy, hokey presence on camera; even though it is a sham, it is a good one and we are all posers at this point anyhow.
But Gore, Gore never knew he was in the first place. He is his ambition and his sense of superiority. There is nothing else. Al Gore is not a man, like John McCain, or even a character, like Bill Clinton. He is a hollow man. He is a Richard Nixon. The words "Al Gore" mean nothing unless there is something, something like "Vice President" or "Congressman" or "Filmmaker" beside it. Because there is no Al Gore. What little there is of Al Gore is what he believes about the environment. But even that must carry the train to what Al Gore cares about most - Al Gore. If only there were something to care about.
Which is Glaring Flaw #2: Al Gore plays Al Gore.
This movie is not a documentary. It is a CV for president and just as doctored as your average average Harvard student's application. It diverges wildly from it's environmental message to allow the quintessential Empty Suit to take another stab at reframing his life to make him likeable and respectable. I could not believe what I was seeing for the first 15 minutes of the film - it was nothing but Al Gore. When they ran out of angles to shoot Gore from, they actually put the back of his head on screen for several seconds with no voiceover...TWICE!!!
This version of Al Gore is apparently funny. Or at least a canned audience of concerned Ivy League backbenchers is willing to laugh at the punchlines. There'll be at least one toady at your local theater obsessed enough with his/her politics to go along. We find time for Gore to show his 2000 Presidential run and the fallout from the contested election. If you were one of the few women out there who was turned on by Gore's condescending-ex-husband-like showings at the Gore-Bush debates, consider this an orgy of pedantry.
But more importantly, Gore and the director make an effort more labored than Shatner's rendition of Rocket Man (http://www.youtube.com/watch?search=Shatner&v=aVlf04AwHCI) to tie in a new, earthier version of the Life Al-a-Gore. In the first family segment, Gore's poor, noble, farmer father raises him on a rural road where they farm cattle. Gore mysteriously goes on to the Ivy League and jumps right into politics where he tirelessly lectures bought off scientists on their duties, only later to be cheated out of the presidency.
We are, of course, reminded once that Gore lived most of his childhood in a DC Hotel. If you were unfamiliar, Gore's father was a Senator, and not just any Senator, but the Vanderbilt family's personal senator. Don't be surprised if Gloria Vanderbilt's child, CNN nepotism-hack Anderson Cooper has a lovejones for Gore come 2008. Cooper's book was just as wastefully self-centered as Gore's film.
We also have a laughable rendition of Gore's connection to big tobacco. You see, Al Gore's sister died of lung cancer. You remember that humble cattle farm the Gore's kept...well, I guess they also grew a bit of tobacco. But when Gore's sister died, the Senator from Vanderbilt, according to Al, stopped growing tobacco. It just wasn't right to make money off of their sister's death.
Except Gore was widely bashed in the late 90's, before the hush campaign to get him past Bush, for his continued connections to, and profits off of, big tobacco.
The bigger question is - what in the name of Sam the American Eagle is any of this doing in a documentary on Global Warming? A few oblique literary turns of phrase are somehow supposed to bridge the gap and justify to the viewer that he spent 8 bucks to watch a long commercial?
An inconvenient truth: Al Gore is running for something - even if he's given up on the presidency, and that's not at all clear, he's still running for Al Gore (Fill-in-the-blanks-here).
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