Category: Films
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Upended trajectories
At the point at which Burn After Reading was released, the Coen Brothers had a certain amount of form, in terms of making mainstream comedies populated by Hollywood stars. Like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty it stars George Clooney, but in contrast to those films, and to…
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A commercial flick gone weird
Of the four films that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, Dark Passage is undoubtedly the most outlandish, in both narrative and formal terms. Its central conceit, of an escaped convict undergoing plastic surgery to completely transform his appearance, would be a challenge for modern techniques, but for a…
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Fate has a car crash
In Alex Garland’s recent science fiction-series Devs (which is in my opinion as good a piece of SF as has ever been filmed) there is a central symbol of randomness—a moment of unpredicted rupture which tears through lives, opening narrative space for a discussion of determinism and free will. The…
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Scenes and scenesters
Watching a film like The Big Sleep in 2020 it’s almost impossible to see past its mythology. This was a movie founded on mythic archetypes—those modern, anomic archetypes of urban America that Hollywood had been instrumental in establishing as the twentieth century’s leading pantheon. But the mythic figures portrayed by…
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Unnecessary translation
I guess no-one hits the target every time, creatively speaking: I certainly know I don’t. But after our project to watch the complete Coen Brothers oeuvre in (rough) chronological order led us to three mediocre films in quick succession, I’m hoping they just had a bad patch—certainly their later movies…
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No contest
Having recently watched the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty, a film whose production is apparently predicated on a chemistry between the leads that never materialises, it was instructive to watch To Have and Have Not, in which Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s mythical partnership was initiated. Of course it’s almost impossible…
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A***holes looking pretty
It’s an interesting proposition, a romantic comedy starring Hollywood ‘A’-listers, written and directed by the Coen Brothers. What would these masters of generic subversion do with such a broad palette of obligatory tropes? Something intensely stylish, and fiendishly clever, no doubt. However, their previous mainstream comedy, also starring Coens fan…
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Homeric depths
‘Here’s looking at you, kid’. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’. ‘Round up the usual suspects’. ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’. ‘Play it, Sam’. Few if any films in the history of cinema have…
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Pretty appropriation
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an altogether more straightforward seeming film than the Coen Brothers’ typical output. Goofy comedies were an established facet of their oeuvre by the time they made this movie (released in 2000), but even there their only piece with a comparably linear narrative was Raising…
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Glamour and technique
Technique is a weirdly invisible thing in film. Everything a director or an editor does is right there in front of you, but it’s somehow really hard to notice it. The whole business of film-making is a matter of glamour, a sleight-of-hand facilitated by distracting the audience with shiny baubles…
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Beautiful scaffolding
Certain themes and techniques recur throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. Convoluted crime stories with arbitrary conclusions in which none of the characters possess any real agency are not their exclusive preserve—they specifically referenced Raymond Chandler when talking about their plotting of The Big Lebowski, for instance. Such tales have…
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Crashing out
We’ve been watching a lot of Coen Brothers films of late, which display so much love for the Golden Age of Hollywood that we’ve started to revisit some of those old movies ourselves. Of course Spouse and I remember them from their endless TV re-runs from the 1960s to the…
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An essay in unreality
People like to ascribe meanings to Coen Brothers films. I mean, they must mean something, right? They’re so tricksy and complex, full of so many layers, that surely Joel and Ethan must be getting at something. When an interviewer asked them, in respect of The Hudsucker Proxy, whether they’d intended…
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Rapid charm
‘Oh no, the lizard! The lizard’ I was heard to shout when I first watched Bringing Up Baby—in fact I can remember shouting it. I was three years old. I remember, in no particular order, the ‘lizard’ (in fact a leopard), the collapse of the brontosaurus skeleton, the dog running…
Oliver Arditi 