File under "Lost in Translation." Or maybe just "lost." Antisocial, aging Tokyo office lady Kumiko (29 and not even dating!) lives alone with her bunny Bunzo and her newly found VHS copy of the Coen Brothers' Fargo, a film that famously starts with the claim, "This is a true story" …
The Coen brothers' first-ever "unoriginal" work: a remake of a mid-Fifties British caper comedy by the underappreciated Alexander Mackendrick. In mitigation, the brothers throughout their careers have been so partial to the pastiche -- the neo-noir Blood Simple, the imitation-Hammett Miller's Crossing, the imitation-Cain The Man Who Wasn't There, the …
Bowl of Pablum ladled up from the series of children's books by Ludwig Bemelmans, about twelve orphan girls in Paris, especially the littlest of them (the name rhymes with "rain or shine"), and their vigilant Miss Clavel ("Something's not right!"). It raises serious questions for the fans of Frances McDormand. …
The first Coen brothers film to disappoint. That's not to say it's not good, certainly not to say it's not even as good as their first, Blood Simple, when there could be no expectations and so no disappointment. The brothers have not suddenly lost their touch. They do for Billy …
As always with the Farrelly brothers (Bobby, Peter), the dispiriting thing is not that their movie is never amusing, but that it's amusing once in a while. The rest of the time is a damn shame. The high concept (as they call these things in the trade), of a Rhode …
A salute to Dashiell Hammett, in particular Red Harvest, although the absence here of a hero on the right side of the law greatly embellishes (or truly establishes) the moral chaos that some people so obligingly see in Hammett. Overrated as a novelist, the creator of Sam Spade and the …
Although movies had been set in Minnesota before Fargo (notwithstanding its misleading North Dakota title), movies as disparate as The Farmer’s Daughter, The Heartbreak Kid, Purple Rain, Grumpy Old Men, it was the Coen brothers who converted that territory into grist for the mill. (On the laugh meter, Wisconsin and …
The Coen brothers' first literary adaptation, from a Cormac McCarthy original, an overflowingly bloody pulp thriller, plumped up with folksy first-person social commentary in italics, about a Texas good ole boy who stumbles upon the internecine scene of a drug deal gone bad, makes off with a satchel of cash, …
A road comedy, “based upon The Odyssey by Homer,” about three chain-gang fugitives in Depression-era Mississippi. (The title, should you need reminding, comes from Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels: the proposed title for a “meaningful” film by a refractory Hollywood contract director, whose subsequent quest to get in touch with the …
The Coen brothers, in their second movie, have taken great personal strides. No longer trying to walk the thin line between pastiche and parody that so held them back in Blood Simple, veering off instead into the woolliest wilds of their combined imaginations, they — director and co-writer Joel and …
At bottom, the Coen brothers' most "personal" work. To be sure, they've never been reduced to hired hands. They've always had the good fortune to be able to make the films they wanted to make, films that reflected their personal tastes and personal attitudes and personal interests and personal viewpoints. …
The coming-out of the “Australian Coen brothers” (director, editor, co-producer Nash Edgerton and co-star, co-writer, co-producer Joel Edgerton), an apt analogy as long as the scope of discussion is limited to first films. Apart from the fraternal collaboration, similarities to the Coens’ debut, Blood Simple, can be sensibly confined to …
Big (two hours, forty minutes) old-fashioned (not to say ancient) sword-and-sandal epic, complete with the traditional Cast of Thousands (however many of them may nowadays be computer-generated) and the mandatory Wooden Horse, plausible in its physical appearance if implausible in its placement at the foot of a downsloping sandy beach …