Tag: Frances McDormand
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No conflict
The American economy has had its ups and downs—in the 1970s manufacturing crashed so badly that several large cities were pretty much wiped out. But when the financial crash hit in 2008 the economy was less obviously predicated on a few huge industrial employers, and the ensuing collapse was more…
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Funny enough to be real
Black comedy crime dramas with inconclusive endings are almost a genre of their own now. The trick is to keep populating them with well thought-out characters and convincing concrete details, rather than leaning on tropes—in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Martin McDonagh nails that, making a film which is continually…
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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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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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Story in fragments
So, what to do with yourself when you’re confined to your house during a global pandemic? Watch all of the Coen Brothers’ films in release order, obviously. Although we actually started in the middle by re-watching Fargo so that Spawn could start watching the TV series with us. But now…
Oliver Arditi 