Re-coen-sidering: Hail, Caesar!

This is the final installment of my bi-monthly 2018 series in which I reconsider certain Coen brothers movies I didn’t love (and one I did).

If I’d made a list ranking Coen brothers movies from first to worst before starting this series, the second-to-last spot on that list might have been reserved for the one that was, until November of this year, their most recent.

That’s right, I really didn’t care for Hail, Caesar! when I saw it back in February of 2016.

And sleepiness victimizes yet another movie.

As written about here, I saw it with a friend, which kept me from smuggling in the snacks that are meant to keep me awake during a movie. (The dubious value of which were discussed only yesterday on this blog.) And the result was one of my most epic struggles to stay awake in recent memory.

I had no such trouble for my second viewing of Hail, Caesar! this past Tuesday night. As a result, I have now upgraded it from a non-plussed two-star rating in 2016 to ... “a hoot.”

So I still don’t love this movie, not by a long shot, but now I do think of it as “a hoot.”

I always had an appreciation for the big set pieces in this movie, particularly the “No Dames!” sequence led by Channing Tatum. But that’s just what this movie felt like to me on the whole: a series of disjointed and disconnected set pieces. Neither of the movie’s two real narrative throughlines – the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) by communists and the makeover of the image of movie star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) – held much value for me. They were both fatally slight.

Of course, the major narrative throughline is supposed to be the day-to-day struggle of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as he keeps the lid on any scandals that may threaten the studio and its stars. He’s also trying to decide if he should jump ship for a cushy job at Lockheed. But his arc didn’t interest me much -- he is, paradoxically, a supporting player in multiple storylines, giving him enough screen time to function as the main character. He doesn’t feel developed enough to be a traditional main character. He’s more like a fast-talking prop, played for humor even though the Coens think he isn’t being played that way. Then again, I can’t tell what the Coens actually think for a lot of the parts of this movie.

I do, however, now find this movie a hoot. Certain individual moments exist as isolated delights, like everything Hobie Doyle does with a lasso, like he and Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) duelling in their deliveries of “Would that it were so simple,” like some of the dialogue between the communists. They just don’t add up to more than the sum of individual hoots.

Given what the Coens have given us in 2018 – the anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I watched a few weeks ago – I now have a bit more context for where they were headed creatively. When they made Hail, Caesar!, they didn’t essentially want to make a single coherent narrative. They wanted to give us flavors of a world through the eyes of different characters. They erred, I think, by not just breaking it up into an anthology as they did with Buster Scruggs. There’s strain in the effort to make the connections between characters in Caesar. Like, what sense does it make that Hobie Doyle goes off in search of Baird Whitlock? I loved what they did in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and think Caesar could have benefitted from turning their creative impulses more explicitly into that kind of finished product.

During this series I’ve come to recognize that I tend to like melancholy Coens (Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis) more than bug-eyed Coens (O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading), except when I don’t – Raising Arizona and No Country for Old Men being the exceptions in each category. But Raising Arizona, my favorite movie of all time, is actually bug-eyed Coens undercut by a genuinely moving ending that brings home the film’s underlying sentiment. I suppose that’s my favorite version of the Coens, when they pull it off.

I think they try to pull that off here, but it doesn’t work. The sentiment doesn’t carry much emotional weight, and the jokes in the bug-eyed parts don’t land for me. I’ve noted the exceptions to that latter part. But for example, the scene where Mannix sits at a table full of religious leaders and asks them about the studio’s proposed depiction of Jesus Christ? I can tell that scene is designed to be hilarious, and that the Coens think it is. It just doesn’t land for me.

Still, though, the upgrade in my overall impression of the movie is reasonably significant. My two-star rating is more properly a three, I’d say, which makes this probably the most successful re-coen-sideration of the whole series.

And that finishes the series. In summation, there wasn’t a single film I watched that I actually liked less the second time I saw it. I wonder if that’s a Coens thing, as I just listened to the Filmspotting episode on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and they talked about how Coen movies benefit from repeat viewings, to a greater extent than your average movie. Of course, the results of my series are a bit skewed, as I only watched one movie I already liked. If I had watched exclusively movies I liked instead of mostly movies I didn’t like, I might have seen some of those drop in my estimation.

Still, positive result for the series, though possibly not a profound enough result to really reach any conclusions. The Coens are still some of my favorite filmmakers and I still have issues with some of their films. Two of the most beloved Coen films, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men, are movies I didn’t rewatch for this series because I’d already done that on my own time. I still can’t reach others’ level of affection on them.

Most creative talents are going to hit with you sometimes and miss sometimes. That’s just the way it goes. But when the Coens do hit, they hit better than almost anyone else.

I’ve got a bi-monthly series lined up for 2019, and it also concentrates on the work of a well-known director(s). I’ll tell you about that another time.

Re-coen-sidering: True Grit

This is the fifth and penultimate installment in my bi-monthly 2018 series revisiting Coen brothers movies I didn’t think were so great the first time I saw them.

True Grit had a distinct disadvantage over the other movies in this series, as it was the first I’ve revisited for this series (though not the last) where I was struggling to stay awake when I first watched it. December 2010 saw the release of two high-profile movies starring Jeff Bridges, and I watched both of them as part of a theatrical double feature (which I discussed here if you’re interested). Tron: Legacy was long (125 minutes) and a bit stultifying, so the 9:30 or whatever show of True Grit was a tough slog for me. I remembered the fight against my drooping eyelids better than any fight in the movie.

So what do I do when I watch it again in 2018?

I’m not saying these were the worst possible circumstances to give it a second shot, but I did start the movie after 9 p.m., after a beer, and after I’d gone out running in the late afternoon, which basically left me for dead once I got home. (I’m not in as bad shape as that suggests, but I usually do my weekly run at night, after the kids are in bed, when nothing else is required of me in the hour or two before I go to sleep myself. When I still had two more hours of children before their bedtime, and they wanted to walk down to the park after dinner, I think that was what nearly did me in.)

The benefit of this second viewing was that if my drooping eyelids won, there was something I could do about it. When you watch something at home, you have access to a pause button, a luxury you don’t enjoy in the theater.

I did have to pause True Grit twice for naps – it’s something I do even during movies that are really good – but I made it through in one night, which I count as a victory.

Why didn’t I save it until I wasn’t so tired? Well, for one, it’s a movie I’ve already seen, so better in a way to watch something you’ve already seen when you’re tired, than something whose details are entirely new to you. Secondly, I’m out of the country for the last week of this month, and I have lots to do before then, so I just need to keep powering through my various viewing appointments before I leave.

And I think True Grit ended up being the most better of any of the three I’ve rewatched previously that I didn’t love the first time. (You may remember I started the series with a movie I have always loved, Miller’s Crossing.) In fact, it’s probably the only one out of O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers and Burn After Reading where I would say there was an appreciable uptick in my feelings toward it. So, in the end, a second sleepy viewing was not a mark against it.

Of the five movies in this series that I didn’t really love (the fifth of which I’ll watch in December), True Grit is probably the one where I’d have the hardest time articulating what it wasn’t I didn’t like about it. (Leading to my theory that sleepiness had a lot to do with it.) Although I liked it better this time, I think this viewing also helped me articulate what I didn’t like about it the first time.

Simply put, this narrative does not proceed forward with what I would consider to be cleverness. The key to a good chase movie – which many westerns are – is that the reason the pursuers stay hot on the trail, or lose the trail, is because of something essential about them: tracking ability, ingenuity, instinct, or on the negative side, maybe a fatal flaw.

Nothing is gained or lost in True Grit because of anything the characters do or don’t do. It all feels pretty random. They are tracking Tom Cheney based on some smartly collected intel, but then they lose him without any real reason – one day two of the three main characters just declare that the trail has gone cold. So without any reason you can point to, the mission has gone from trending toward success to trending toward failure. It’s the end of the second act, the moment of the characters’ greatest crisis, but as no result of anything they did or did not do.

Then when Mattie does spot Tom in the river, it’s just completely random. Through nothing they have intentionally done, they stumble across him, and she even wounds him (though he ultimately drags her off). A few of the other twists and turns at the end revolve around similar dumb luck, almost – dare I say it – deus ex machina, which is a dirty word in narrative storytelling. Confusingly, Rooster Cogburn is kind of part of a different climax with Ned Pepper, that’s occurring alongside the one with Tom Cheney. Cogburn, nominally this story’s hero (it’s really Mattie), does not even participate in the Cheney portion of the climax, though he does help save her from that very unlucky snake bite (deus ex machina again – or maybe devil ex machina in this case?).

If the Coens’ point is that the apparent grandeur of the old west is indeed so illusory, then that would certainly be consistent with other downbeat and cynical endings of theirs (I’m looking at you, No Country For Old Men). Heroes are drunkards, and spend time on trial for the people they killed; villains are basically just dumb hicks who get caught in rivers with their pants down. I get it. It’s just pretty unsatisfying.

Except as I said, it did satisfy me more this time. It may have satisfied me a whole star more. In looking back in Letterboxd, I see that I gave True Grit 2.5 stars the first time around, probably because I felt that much of what was supposed to be distinctive about it was the suspiciously underdeveloped personalities of Cogburn and LaBoeuf (Le Beef as Cogburn says), whose name is only the first way in which his character is played for comedy. Yet if doling out stars for this movie today, I might go as high as 3.5.

As much as I was at a loss to tell you what I didn’t love about it the first time, I’m equally at a loss to tell you now what has dramatically improved. One thing is surely that I have a much greater appreciation for Hailee Steinfeld, who was in her first feature film role here but has since blossomed into one of our most promising young actresses. I actually thought at the time (and still think) that she delivers some of the Coens’ dialogue awkwardly, or maybe that they wrote dialogue that was too awkward for her to deliver naturally – which is interesting because she actually received an Oscar nomination and her performance was one of the film’s most praised elements. But I do like her a lot more in general now, so being reminded of her origins was undoubtedly a positive thing.

I guess I’m also a bit more predisposed to the Coens’ nihilism. If I was bothered that the film is essentially a collection of random stuff that results in a positive outcome, I’m probably a bit less bothered by that now.

I still don’t think the cinematography, from frequent Coen collaborator Roger Deakins, is one of the greatest examples of his work, either, though he was also Oscar nominated (one of his infamous 13 nominations before he finally won for Blade Runner 2049). There are some good vistas, but I noticed other moments when the lighting seemed blown out, almost like the celluloid was bleached. I don’t think it’s fair to automatically credit a western for its cinematography just because of the landscape in which the photography occurs. I suspect a little of that was going on here.

But like I said, I was more favorably disposed toward this movie than I was the first time, and no longer need to look sideways at people who say they love it. It’s definitely pretty good. I just wish there were a little more there there.

Okay, wrapping up this series in December with the film that is the Coens’ most recent, though won’t be by the time I watch it. I’ll watch Hail, Caesar! for the second time two months from now, and probably before then, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which debuts on Netflix on November 16^th. A post on that, but not under the Re-coen-sidering banner, may also be forthcoming.

Re-coen-sidering: Burn After Reading

This is the fourth in my 2018 bi-monthly series in which I’m re-examining the films of Joel and Ethan Coen that didn’t work so well for me the first time. This particular installment will contain SPOILERS.

When I held the box of Burn After Reading, which I’d borrowed from the library only that afternoon, in my hand on Thursday night, I looked at it and couldn’t help thinking: “God I hate this fucking movie.”

That gives you a little idea what this 2008 film was up against, even still, nearly ten years after I first saw it.

It had not only been my least favorite Coen movie, it was my least favorite by a significant margin, and the only film of theirs that was firmly in thumbs down territory. I might have gone as low as 2.5 stars on one of their other films, but even that is only mildly negative -- as close to a marginal recommendation as you can get, and the kind of thing that might be overturned to three stars in a series like this.

That’s not what we’re talking about with Burn After Reading. Burn After Reading was in possession of only a single star on Letterboxd, and I did not think there was much chance it would go up.

Well, that’s why I do series like this.

Burn After Reading will still be my least favorite Coen brothers movie, unless the last two movies I watch this year take a significant turn downward on second viewing. But it might be worthy of as much as twice the original star rating I gave it.

The first time I watched this movie, I just could not abide by its cynicism. I didn’t like the misanthropy inherent in the Coens killing off the two most likeable characters (played by Brad Pitt and Richard E. Jenkins), while the rest of the characters were blowhard assholes, blithe philanderers, narcissistic ditzes or self-satisfied masochists. (The latter is the best way I could think to quickly describe the CIA guys played by David Rasche and J.K. Simmons, who just want an expedient solution to everything regardless of who gets squashed in the process.) Some of those people do come to bad ends, but not all. I don’t expect the Coens to be paragons of humanism, because they’ve never been that, but I do expect a little bit of heart, of which I get none in this movie.

Ten years later, I guess I must be more cynical myself, as this did not bother me as much this time around. There are sacrificial lambs in the real world, and there are monsters who profit from them. Having a wicked sense of humor about those things is not inherently bad. And, I felt the plot worked a little better for me this time, the interconnections seeming a little more clever, even if the cast is going round and round in circles regarding imaginary intelligence and threats that only exist in their own head. That central absurdity felt a bit more useful to me this time as well.

I still don’t really like spending time with these characters, and maybe that’s the more germane similarity between the perspectives of the 44-year-old me and the 35-year-old me. Not only are most of the characters unlikable, but they are pitched at different levels. Frances McDormand, for one, is going over-the-top in a way that feels more consistent with something like O Brother Where Art Thou?, which is more of a fable than a realistic presentation of real people. Brad Pitt and George Clooney are a bit like that as well. Then you have John Malkovich, who is an incredible asshole but is not going over-the-top in the sense that his performance doesn’t have quotation marks around it. He’s giving us a realistic depiction of his fury, rather than a cartoon one. So performers like Malkovich, Jenkins and Tilda Swinton feel like they’re in one movie while McDormand, Pitt and Clooney feel like they’re in another. Either could work, but combined, it creates tonal awkwardness.

Now that this series has reacquainted me with two collaborations between the Coens and George Clooney, and one more still to come, I can’t help but reach the conclusion that these two creative perspectives are not a good match. Or at least, not the way the brothers typically deploy Clooney. Clooney could/should play roles like Gabriel Byrne plays in Miller’s Crossing, not roles where he bugs out his eyes and has lots of tics. He’s misused by the Coens in a way similar to how Tom Hanks was misused in June’s movie, The Ladykillers. I have an incredible amount of fondness for George Clooney, but I think I want him to play GEORGE CLOONEY, or someone with only a small or superficial variation on that. Three of his four collaborations with the Coens are misses for me, though we’ll revisit the third one of those in December, so I’ll withhold a final ruling on that until then. The one movie he’s made with them that I like better, Intolerable Cruelty, is one that most other people don’t like – and that I liked a bit less on my second viewing a few years back.  

But before we get to that heretofore unnamed December movie – which people with a knowledge of the Coens and the chronological nature of my project will have already guessed – I will tackle True Grit in October.

Re-coen-sidering: The Ladykillers

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2018 series Re-coen-sidering, in which I’m looking (mostly) at Coen brothers films I didn’t get the first time, to see if that’s still the case.

This is supposed to be a series in which I give a second chance to Coen brothers movies others liked, but I did not particularly like. However, only one of the three films to date actually conforms to that concept.

In February, I started with a movie I love, Miller’s Crossing, just because I could only find five movies I didn’t particularly care for that I hadn’t already revisited for some other reason. Essentially, I used this series as an excuse for a second viewing. In April, I watched a movie that did qualify, as O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one others like but I don’t (that much).

This month, though, I reverted to an exception to the rule, watching a movie that pretty much no one likes.

The Ladykillers is the first of an eventual two remakes in the Coens’ career to date, the other being True Grit, which is what I’ll be watching in October according to the current schedule. It’s probably the least-liked Coens movie overall. It’s only the second lowest on my Coens chart on Flickchart – we’ll get to the lowest in August – but in the global list on Flickchart, it’s dead last. Though, I must say, still at a respectable 6718 out of 68551, putting it in the top ten percent of all movies in the database. That’s either a recognition of how much people like the Coens in general, or of how many more bad movies get made than good ones.

My first time seeing The Ladykillers was under unusual circumstances. It’s the only time I can remember having a suitcase with me while going to the movies.

It was late March of 2004, and I was on a week’s trip back to the east coast from Los Angeles. The first weekend featured my friend’s wedding in New Jersey. The second weekend featured my fantasy baseball draft in Philadelphia. In between, I’d visit with my parents in the Boston area. I also took a day in New York to visit some old haunts, as I’d lived there from 1998 to 2001. And apparently, also to see a movie at one of the theaters I used to frequent. But I believe I was staying with different friends on the Sunday night and the Monday night, so I dragged my bag with me around the city that Monday as I stopped in for coffee and meals with people.

It was also a weird time as I was deep in the throes of trying to get back together with my ex-girlfriend. She had been invited to the wedding also – something that took me aback, since she only knew the bride and groom because of me – and I’d tried to rekindle our relationship at the wedding. It was no go, and I’d say it probably put me in a bit of a funk. (But did not stop my efforts to get back together with her, which I continued on and off for the rest of the year until I met the woman I would end up marrying.)

Anyway, I don’t think any of that had anything to do with me liking or not liking The Ladykillers. Nothing about the movie had any thematic relationship to my circumstances at the time. It just wasn’t a very good movie.

However, given those circumstances, I thought there was at least some possibility I’d feel more favorably toward it this time around.

I got off to a bad start with the movie, though. Right before inserting the DVD into our player, I noticed the box said it was a full screen version of the film. You know, otherwise known as “pan and scan.” I avoid these mangled versions of the director’s vision whenever possible, but this was a library rental, and I didn’t feel optimistic enough about my chances of liking The Ladykillers significantly better to prioritize renting the intended widescreen version from some pay service. Still, as the Coens are known for their visual compositions, it was not a promising omen.

I do think I might have like it just a smidgen better than the first time. Just a smidgen.

I still don’t think this is the right role for Tom Hanks. The Coens are really self-indulgent with his dialogue, which is literary to the point of being baroque, and the overwriting very much informs Hanks’ performance. Even though some of his most famous roles, such as Forrest Gump, involve Hanks playing a character with a capital C, he’s usually better off playing some variation on his regular persona. The role of Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr – even the name is ridiculous – would be something more suited to the proclivities of Johnny Depp than someone like Hanks. He’s probably not the film’s biggest problem, but he doesn’t help anything either.

I’m also not really sure how well this film fares on racial issues. Whether it’s the Coens’ direction or Marlon Wayans’ natural tendencies as an actor, Wayans does a lot of bugging of his eyes that reminds us rather unfortunately of a history of uncharitable characterizations of African-Americans in film. There may be a reason the Coens have not had as many black characters front and center in their films as they do here, which is that the broadness of their comedic instincts may present surely unintentional but nonetheless unfortunate reminders of a shucking and jiving history of blacks on film that we are trying to put behind us. The “lady” of the title, played by Irma P. Hall, is not quite as broad but I can’t quite tell whether the film does right by her either. I do love the portrait of her dead husband, though, the film’s one bit of magical realism. It changes expressions from grumpy to bemused to alarmed to superior depending on what’s going on in the living room below.

I also have some complaints about other members of Hanks’ crew of subterraneous thieves, particularly Ryan Hurst as a football player so dumb that the only conclusion must be that the Coens asked him to play the role as mentally retarded. Like their approach to the movie in general, it’s too much.

The thing I liked a little better, though, was the way the characters are hoisted on their own pitards as they make their march to the trash barges constantly passing on the river below, one by one. I noticed this time that each of the thieves dies as some result of a fatal flaw, be it being slowed by IBS (J.K. Simmons’ character trying to escape with the cash a moment too late) or being dumb (Hurst’s character shoots himself in the face when he thinks a gun is not loaded). Like everything else, it’s at the broader end of the Coen spectrum, but I liked how it came together, mostly.

I do have to ask, though – what city produces so much trash that it has to send a full trash barge off to a trash island once an hour throughout the night?

When I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? last month, I noticed a number of design details or other themes that had come up numerous times in the Coens’ work. I noticed only one this time that I wanted to bring up, but it relates to one of my favorite Coens movies so I thought it was worth mentioning. A recurring joke in this movie is how the widow’s cat, Pickles, is always getting out of the house and climbing up the tree in the yard. I couldn’t help but be reminded of how Ulysses, the cat in Inside Llewyn Davis, escapes the Gorfeins’ apartment and becomes symbolic of Llewyn’s Oddyssey-like journey through New York and Chicago.

There’s also a funny, though slightly gross, epilogue to my Sunday night viewing.

One thing I always remember about The Ladykillers is that it introduced me to the disorder known as IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Although I found it useful to know that this was an actual medical condition, my main association with it is how it is another too-broad-by-half element of the movie, especially since it really doesn’t play as much role in the events as the movie sets it up to play. Specifically broad is the expression on Simmons’ face as he tries to stifle a sudden onset of diarrhea before he needs to make a quick change of pants.

Then this morning, when I came to work, I must have eaten something that mildly disagreed with me in the previous 12 hours, because it was all I could do to get there and get to the bathroom before I had an accident myself. Fortunately, that was the only episode of loose stool rather than it being an all-day thing. But while trying to get to the bathroom that first time, I did have at least three instances where I focused every fiber of my being on making sure I held in the torrent that wanted to unleash itself.

I imagine the expression on my face was something like the one on Simmons’.

Okay, I teased it before, and now here you go: In August I confront the only Coen brothers movie I can truly say I hated, Burn After Reading. We’ll see how I go.

Re-coen-sidering: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2018 series in which I'm reexamining my feelings toward six movies made by Joel and Ethan Coen, five of which I did not care for the first time.

If I'm considering the matter as broadly as possible, I'd say that Joel and Ethan Coen have two tones they work in, both of which start with the letter M: madcap and melancholy. And that while both tones are present at some point or another in most of their work, I vastly prefer the films where melancholy predominates.

Of course, as soon as I said that I would immediately provide a staggering contradiction to that preference. My favorite Coen brothers movie, which is also my favorite movie of all time, is Raising Arizona, and most people would consider the madcap to far outweigh the melancholy in that movie. But then all you need to do is look at my next three favorite Coen movies to right the ship on my perspective. Fargo, Inside Llewyn Davis and Miller's Crossing contain almost no madcap. (Though one of their movies with zero madcap, No Country for Old Men, falls in the bottom half of my Coen movies, so the system is nothing if not unpredictable.)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a movie where the madcap fairly suffocates the melancholy. The movie makes gestures toward melancholy, to be sure, but they always fall flat, in part because the madcap has done such a powerful job preventing us from really being introduced to our three main characters.

I don't know that I would have been able to put my finger on this as a contributing factor to my middling response to the movie the first time, but when I watched it a second time on Friday night, 18 years later, it was easy to identify. We are meant to take an immediate liking to Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) -- all great names by the way -- but the manner of their introduction really keeps me at arm's length. In short, they never are really introduced. Their first handful of scenes are very set piece heavy, and their reactions are often the reactions of three staring faces operating as one, leaving us little opportunity to differentiate between them. Broadly you'd be able to say "Oh, Ulysses is the handsome one and the other two are the hicks," but that, you will agree, is not really characterization. Belatedly we are given an idea what drives them in a scene by a campfire where they talk about their hopes for how to use the money, but this does not actually reveal as much about their characters as the movie thinks it does, plus it's too little too late.

The movie doesn't really have time to develop these characters because it's too fixated on producing the next madcap scene. And these scenes are madcap all right, full of the kind of mugging expressions that always made me feel this movie was more condescending toward its characters than it was loving toward them. (Whereas I feel like a movie like Raising Arizona stays on the other side of that divide.) It was Clooney's performance in particular that made me feel that, though the others bug out their eyes plenty as well. Nelson is the most credible, I suppose because he is the closest to the type of character he's actually portraying. Clooney and Turturro are hopelessly northern by comparison, which is not to say they can't do reasonable southern accents or inhabit their characters in other ways. It's just that they seem to be mocking these characters more than is good for the movie.

If I liked the set pieces a little more, I probably wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. But each set piece is anywhere from ten to 30 percent less satisfying than I feel like it should be. As just one example that illustrates multiple points I've made so far, I don't get the appeal of the scene where John Goodman beats up Nelson and Clooney with a branch he pulls off a tree. It's not that I don't get why he attacks them -- he's trying to rob them -- but I don't get why Clooney entirely fails to take evasive action. In the Coens' interest in cooking up some good slapstick, they've robbed all credibility from the characters by having Clooney sit there, without defending himself, after Goodman has already gone upside Delmar O'Donnell's head about three times. He's still sitting there saying he doesn't understand -- in that oh-so funny, linguistically aspirational, southern hick way -- when Goodman finally gets to him and goes all Babe Ruth on him as well (get it, Goodman played Babe Ruth). Goodman's also at fault here by having taken his time getting to Clooney without any worries that Clooney would defend himself. When you have unbelievable reactions by two different characters in the same scene, you have an unbelievable scene -- even in a movie where most of the scenes are supposed to be heightened and unbelievable in some way.

Speaking of unbelievable, I just don't buy that these guys would just waltz into a recording studio and record the year's (decade's?) biggest hit as a lark. These don't strike me as guys who could perform a song like this off the cuff, and only two days later I can't remember if the movie actually provides an explanation for their golden pipes. I should say, I was a man of constant distractions while watching this movie, as I was going down some internet rabbit holes while watching it. Don't worry, I did give it a fair shake -- I was mostly pausing it when I'd do this -- but I could tell early on that my impression of the movie was not likely to improve significantly, so I considered some level of distraction acceptable.

The recording studio scene does give the movie one of its two big ties to one of my favorite Coen movies, Inside Llewyn Davis. Probably the most obvious comparison between the movies is that they both make use of the structure of Homer's The Odyssey, this one explicitly (it credits Homer in the opening credits), the other a little less explicitly (the cat Llewyn loses is named Ulysses). But the more specific -- like, bizarrely specific -- thing they have in common is that both movies feature a musician or musicians recording a major radio hit, without having the foresight to profit from its success. Llewyn actually rejects the chance for long-term profit on "Please Mr. Kennedy" because he needs the quick influx of cash from doing a one-off job, and doesn't believe a song this vapid could have any legs. (Hence, engaging in his fatal flaw as he does repeatedly throughout the movie.) In another sign of the contrast in quality between the two movies, the Soggy Bottom Boys never even think to consider anything other than the $10 they get paid to record "A Man of Constant Sorrow" -- improbably record it, as I mentioned earlier. Although I suppose it's also part of their fatal flaws of being exaggerated, idiotic hicks.

I don't want to suggest to you there's nothing I like about O Brother, Where Art Thou? In fact, I had retroactively given in three stars on Letterboxd and would probably stick with that rating, or at least, bust it down no further than 2.5 stars. The things I enjoy most about it are its look -- the sepia tones were one of the earliest examples of digital color correction, and the Dapper Dan hair gel containers makes a great example of the production design -- and some of its small-scale visual gags. Like, I love the scene where Delmar looks over at Ulysses' body lying on the ground after their run-in with the sirens, and then looks over where we'd expect to see Pete's body, and there's just an empty shirt and pants. I like the way this establishes our expectations and then inverts them. The idea that Pete might have been turned into the toad is one of the ways I'll go along with their exaggerated hick-itude, even. Alas, the movie just doesn't have enough moments like this.

So now that I have re-coen-sidered O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I'd say that not only does my initial impression still hold, but I probably like it even a little bit less than I did then. It's still obviously the work of masters, and they're surely in command of the type of film they wanted to make. But that type of film is just not for me, in this case.

Next up in June: The Ladykillers.

Re-coen-sidering: Miller's Crossing

This is the first in a 2018 bi-monthly series reconsidering the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, mostly (but not always) films I didn't care for the first time. Thar be SPOILERS ahead.

When you watch movies, you usually want to watch movies you think you will like. So it's kind of dispiriting to begin a year-long bi-monthly series watching movies you already know you don't like that much, and don't necessarily expect to view more favorably after a second viewing.

Therefore, it's nice to at least start a series like this with a movie you know you loved ... and discover you love even more after the second viewing.

That was my experience with Miller's Crossing (1990), the first film chronologically in my series Re-coen-sidering, in which I'm watching six Coen films I've seen only once, every other month in 2018.

It wasn't my intention to revisit one I'd really liked, but the title Re-coen-sidering alone does not suggest you're trying to improve your opinion of a movie you didn't like. You could also be putting a movie you loved to the test, to see if it was worthy of that love. (And anyway, I could only find five Coen films I'm cool on that others like, if you exclude The Big Lebowski, which I've already seen twice and still can't really get behind.)

But just catching up with Coen movies I'd loved but hadn't seen in 20 years -- which also include Blood Simple and Hudsucker Proxy -- seemed like a useful component of this series, though I'll only start this way. Blood and Hudsucker -- Bloodsucker, if you will -- will have to wait for another time.

I was in the movie's groove right from the pre-credits scene in which Jon Polito confronts Albert Finney about John Turturro, but a possible problem did occur to me early on. Namely, one of my realizations as a cinephile in the past five to ten years is that film noir is not one of my favorite genres. I suppose Miller's Crossing is a neo-noir and its first genre might be considered a gangster film, but if Gabriel Byrne's character is not a stand-in for your noir private dick who gets beat up all the time, and Marcia Gay Harden is not a stand-in for your noir femme fatale, I don't know what better corollaries you could find out there.

It was a genre I once thought I loved, but films like The Big Sleep and Inherent Vice have forced me to confront that many of this genre's tropes and convoluted storylines just don't work for me.

But it's truly all in the writing. A noir film's plot does not have to be convoluted just because it's complicated. And the best Coen scripts, of which this is certainly one, don't only have the great patter and other linguistic flourishes that go down smoothly rather than seeming showy. They also pay everything off, tie everything together, and leave you fully satisfied.

As I was watching I couldn't believe what kind of well-oiled machine this is. Every part truly matters. There's no character introduced who doesn't play some integral role in the story. There's no throwaway scene. The script keeps on building upon itself, layering upon itself, but miraculously, paradoxically, it makes everything seem more simple rather than more complicated as it goes. I have no idea how they did that, but it's true.

I suppose if your mind were to wander for five minutes at some point, you would still be lost. This is not the type of movie that is going to dumb things down for you. But it's not trying to trick you either. There are no red herrings or other strategies that unnecessarily muddy the waters. If you pay attention, you will be with this movie the whole way, and will feel increasingly satisfied with every minute that passes and every plot development.

I will acknowledge certain small confusions that did resolve themselves for me as time went on. Because we see Steve Buscemi's character in only one scene -- only one scene alive, anyway -- I was not sure for a while that he was actually Mink. In fact, I thought they were saying "the Mick," which would have been a way to refer to Finney's Irish character, Leo O'Bannon. But the context in which he was discussed eventually helped me sort it out, plus this fact: We wouldn't have even been introduced to Buscemi's character if he were not in some way important to the plot. So I fit him in as the loose end in my character synopsis, and all was well.

That's the thing about this script. It gives you exactly what you need for the movie to play out properly, and not a bit more. As another example, the gangster to whom Tom Reagan is in debt -- his Jabba the Hutt, as it were -- is seen as little as Jabba the Hutt was seen in the original Star Wars (before George Lucas went back and "fixed" it). The famous Lazarre is not seen once, simply because he does not need to be seen, and it's kind of interesting to have a character who is talked about but never seen. (I feel like there are other prominent examples of this in the Coen filmography, but none is immediately coming to mind).

It was also kind of amazing to me that this movie is almost exclusively about the shifting dynamics between characters, and that is more than enough to sustain it. There are a few big set pieces, of course. The attack on Leo's house, set to "Danny Boy," and both trips to the titular location are very memorable. But most of the rest of the time, it's just people in rooms talking about their relationships to each other, their suspicions of double crosses, their accusations, their attempts to convince each other of loyalty. Ordinarily I think of this as the type of narrative convolutions that bother me about film noir. Here, they crackle and leave me fully engrossed.

I've spent a lot of time on the writing, but I shouldn't fail to mention the look of the film as well. As I was watching I was really appreciating the cinematography of Barry Sonnenfeld, who many people forget had this life before he became the director of Men in Black and increasingly lesser films. I especially admired the movement of his camera, particularly his zooms in and away from characters, and his tracking of action across a room.

I could certainly go on about this film, but you know how great it is and you don't need me to break it down scene by scene.

I do want to spare a few words for Byrne's Tom Reagan, though. He's such a compelling character because of the codes he lives by that so often seem counter to his own interests, yet he does the things he does anyway, because of his heart. He's often accused of having no heart, but nothing could be further from the truth. Everything he does for either Leo or Verna is because he loves them, though he would never tell them that, because then they wouldn't believe the deceptions he believes are necessary in order to save them. And because then there would seem something less pure, to himself, about what he's doing. What movie character you've ever seen tells a powerful man who could easily kill him that he's been sleeping with his girlfriend? A man who loves both of those people and thinks that this will be the best thing for them, even if they can't possibly see it. He's a man who knows all the angles, and it almost gets him killed on numerous occasions. But he plays those angles because he's a gambler, and because he's thinking two steps ahead of everybody else.

The movies are filled with characters who think two steps ahead of everybody else, and a lot of times they are insufferable. They are the con men version of a Mary Sue, though I guess I'm not sure if that metaphor really applies. What I mean is that they are perfect in their grasp and manipulation of a scenario and its interpersonal dynamics, and when the final act comes around, it seems that they were playing puppetmaster the whole time.

The brilliant thing about Reagan is that even with his calculations, he still sometimes gets it wrong. When he leaves Bernie alive, calculating that Bernie's best move will be to disappear so no one makes another attempt on his life, he takes Bernie for the coward that Bernie is not quite. This almost gets Tom killed when he is muscled out to Miller's Crossing by Dane to find Bernie's corpse that should be there, rotting. Tom knows he's cooked and even kneels to vomit by a tree, until voila, the corpse of Mink is revealed. (Making Bernie more shrewd than we thought he was, as well.) Our Mary Sue conman would never have gotten in that position, and never would have shown fear of his own impending demise.

The reason Tom gets it wrong sometimes, and does things counter to his own best interests, is because he does have that heart that people say he does not have. His arc, in a matter of speaking, is coming not to have the heart -- by killing Bernie at the end. Of course, that's not what's really happening there. There he's only reading people for what they really are and refusing to have his heart appealed to. And Bernie is pond scum who has caused nothing but trouble for anybody. By closing that loop, he's not only getting everybody square, he's further honing his craft of reading the angles. But really, he's demonstrating his heart both toward Leo, whom he unaccountably still wants to protect despite his numerous faults and vulnerabilities, and Verna, whom he still loves despite her own moral shortcomings and other compromised qualities. Bernie's death is the best thing for both of them, though only one of them realizes it. He's willing to be quits with her because that's the best thing for her, even if he's not sure it's the best thing for him. And he doesn't have to be quits with Leo, but chooses that, because even though he still loves him, in his way, something has been broken between them that cannot be repaired.

What I like more than anything about Tom is that he is his own man. He pays his own debts in his own ways, and even when he is compelled to carry out an order, he takes ownership of it and does it in a way that will preserve his own dignity and give him an angle on it. His dignity and his control over his own personhood are the most important things to him, which is why he's tormented by that dream of chasing his hat as it blows away in the wind. There's nothing more undignified and foolish than a man chasing his own hat.

The thing I am wondering now about Miller's Crossing is how it compares to Inside Llewyn Davis. For years I'd considered Crossing my third favorite Coen film, behind only Raising Arizona and Fargo. But because I'd seen it only once, and have already seen Davis three times now in barely four years of existence, Davis had kind of bumped Crossing out of that third spot. I'd have to think about it a bit more, but I think Crossing might have a leg up again.

Anyway, amazing movie.

I can't say things are likely to continue on this note, though many if not most people will think I have another good one in store for me next time. In April we jump forward ten years to 2000, when I will grapple with the first film in this series that I struggled with on first viewing, O Brother Where Art Thou?

Introducing: Re-coen-sidering

By some criteria, you might consider Joel and Ethan Coen my favorite directors of all time. After all, they have two films in my top ten on Flickchart: Fargo (#8), and the film holding the very peak position on that chart, Raising Arizona. Inside Llewyn Davis, which I have now seen three times in its four years of existence, is at #98 and steadily climbing.

However, the Coens have also made films I absolutely loathe. Well, maybe only one I absolutely loathe. But there are a few others I don’t like, or at least, not at the level that other people like them.

So for a bi-monthly series in 2018, I’ve decided to reconsider – to re-coen-sider – their films that trouble me the most, to see whether I’m the one who’s wrong about them, or other people are. And if I’m wrong, it could make it a lot clearer that these guys do, in fact, deserve that “favorite director” status.

There are easily six films that would qualify for this series, films I don’t like nearly as much as others seem to. The only trouble is, I’ve already re-coen-sidered two of them on my own time. The first and perhaps most shocking of those is The Big Lebowski, which I have always struggled to like more than I do, the most recent attempt at which I wrote about here. The other, shocking in a different way, is No Country for Old Men. I did like it a bit better on the second viewing, which I wrote about here, but I still don’t like it as much as I wish I did.

So that leaves me with only four films where my opinion is significantly disconnected from the popular perception of them. Only four films where I like it less than others, I should say. There’s one where I seem to like it more, and that’s Intolerable Cruelty, though I have also re-coen-sidered this one on my own time. It dropped in my estimation on second viewing, but not hugely.

For the fifth film, I will start the series on a positive note by re-coen-sidering a film I love but have only seen once: Miller’s Crossing. This is my fourth favorite Coen film, but I’ve never gotten in that second viewing to confirm. So I suppose, in trying to start on a positive note, I could be starting on a negative one if I ended up finding out I don’t like this movie as much as I think I do.

That’ll be how we get started in February. From there, I will proceed chronologically and disperse these titles at two-month intervals: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Ladykillers (2004), Burn After Reading (2008), True Grit (2010) and Hail, Caesar! (2016)

My math is not off. There are six films in this series, but one of the non-Miller five I listed above is a movie nobody likes. In watching The Ladykillers, I will not be trying to get what other Coen fans got out of this movie. Most Coen fans do not like this movie, and I’m no different. So it might just be submitting myself to the tedium of watching it a second time.

There are a couple Coen movies I've seen only once that I’d like to revisit just because I like them, particularly Blood Simple (1984) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). But they will have to wait until they find their way back on to my viewing schedule organically.

You can follow along if you like, but I don’t need to tell you that. You’re an adult. You can do whatever you want.