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.

Netflix devours the upper echelon of great directors

When it was announced -- ages ago, it now feels like -- that Martin Scorsese's next film was going to call Netflix home, it seemed like kind of a one-off. It probably shouldn't have, as things like this often indicate trends. But at the time I thought "Why would someone like Scorsese cede the biggest cinematic stage in order to tell his larger-than-life stories? Surely others won't follow suit."

Well, they're following suit.

Steadily since then we've seen films debut on Netflix by other highly acclaimed directors, such as Noah Baumbach and Joon Bong-ho. The list starts but certainly does not end there.

However, the extent to which this is indeed a trend -- an alarming trend -- did not occur to me until this past week, when I learned for the first time about the Netflix debut of Alfonso Cuaron's new film, and about the very existence and Netflix debut of Joel & Ethan Coen's new film.

When two directors (or directing units) have directed a film you've named your #1 film of the year, and you learn in the same week that their next project is on Netflix, it tends to capture your attention.

Technically speaking, the Coens have never directed a #1 movie of the year for me since I've begun keeping track of such things back in 1996. But they've directed my #1 movie of all time (Raising Arizona), so yeah, I think I can just barely justify squeezing them into this conversation.

I knew that Cuaron -- director of my #1 film of 2006, Children of Men -- had made his long-anticipated follow-up to Gravity, Roma, and that it had done well at Venice. I didn't know about its Netflix associations until just reading an article on this year's Oscar hopefuls. The writer wasn't sure if the Academy would be willing to honor Netflix with its first best picture nomination.

The case of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was a bit more alarming in the sense that I didn't even know the Coens had a new movie coming out. So I learned about the existence of the movie, and the fact that it's debuting on Netflix in November (with the same nominal theatrical release Roma is getting, of course), in one fell swoop.

It could be argued that Netflix is an appropriate platform, in some respects, for these films, or at least less inappropriate than some of their other films would have been. Roma is a semi-autobiographical black-and-white film about a year in the life of a Mexican family in the 1970s, so it's not like it requires the same type of platform as Gravity. It's the first Cuaron film since Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban not to be shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (Cuaron himself is the DP), so that's another reason it could possibly more easily slide onto the small screen. As for Buster Scruggs, about which I know less, any Coen movie is visually dynamic and would best be seen on a big screen, but it's not like they're making movies about astronauts floating around in space. It's not like this is a Christopher Nolan film debuting on Netflix (that'll never happen, even if both Nolan and Netflix live to 100).

But then there's the more dominant argument, which is that any film, regardless of its scope or ambition, should be seen on the big screen. And those who are best at making films are therefore all the more likely to demand a big screen viewing of their films.

I haven't looked into the finances behind these, whether Netflix cut a several-movie deal with these directors (God I hope not) or whether their financing was the only thing that allowed the directors to make the films they wanted, the way they wanted (a lot more likely, especially in Cuaron's case, with a film less likely to find a big commercial audience). If I were being a journalist I would have to do that. But for now, I'm wearing my internet curmudgeon hat, so I'm not doing it.

Besides, the details of these agreements are not the point. The point is that Netflix is increasingly likely to entice the very best at what they do into marginalizing their own products on the small screen. You can say that the films wouldn't even be made if not by Netflix (which is a shame and I hope not true). You can say that these films will have a moment on the big screen, for people who seek them out. But the reality is that most people (including me) will probably see them on a TV, and that's a disappointing outcome for cinema's best.

There is one clear advantage I can see, and it relates to those #1 films I was talking about earlier. Both directors will indeed qualify for my #1 movie of 2018, as their movies' availability on Netflix guarantees I will be able to see them before my ranking deadline in late January. I've never missed the chance to rank a film by either of these directors, but I had to see Inside Llewyn Davis on the very last day before my list closed (which was the day it opened here in Australia), and Roma seems like just the type of film that would have a limited Christmas release in LA and New York and not open in Australia until late February.

But if I'm seeing the films on the small screen, what realistic chance will they have to be my #1 movie anyway? In my entire history of naming my favorite movie of the year, only three of them have come from movies I first saw on the small screen. Only three.

That could just be due to my diligence in seeking out the movies I'm most likely to love on the big screen.

Or, it could be that the big screen really contributes in some meaningful way to a film's power to envelope you in its world.

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.

How many directors do you recognize?

I was invited to participate in a Facebook event through my Flickcharters group that involved voting on the films of Frank Capra, and it included a picture of Capra as its artwork. This picture, in fact.

It made me realize how few directors I tend to actually recognize, even the important ones.

It's understandable why I might not recognize Capra, as he died in 1991 and looked much older than this in my 18 years of being alive to that point. A bit more shamefully, I have not sought out any old interviews with him or any documentaries that might look into his earlier years (something like Five Came Back, for example).

But it's not just older directors like Capra. Something came up the day before I saw this that prompted me to look up Tom Tykwer, a favorite of mine for having directed two of my top 50 films of all time: Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Tom Tykwer looks like this, but I wouldn't have known it:

Seeing the picture of Tykwer made me realize it was not the first time I'd seen a picture of him. But I clearly had not retained an image of him in my mind, as I couldn't produce this appearance when thinking about him. (And may not be able to the next time I try, either.)

But that's a rather fringe example as well, as Tykwer is not exactly a major director despite working regularly and having prominent examples of good films to his name. A more compelling example is that I have a hard time telling you exactly what Joel and Ethan Coen look like. They directed two films in my top ten (Raising Arizona and Fargo) and are some of the most celebrated directors working today. As you probably know, this is what they look like:

I knew they looked sort of like that -- like, I had the rough outlines of their appearance in my mind. But I guarantee you that if I ran into either of them on the street, I would not know it was them. If they were both together, maybe. If they were being followed by a group of people talking to each other in hushed tones and taking pictures, probably. But one by himself and without any fanfare? Highly doubtful.

It extends to others. Just thinking randomly of some of my favorite films by directors actively working, could I conjure a mental image of Alfonso Cuaron? No, no I could not. (I had a vague one, which I checked just now and was off a bit.) Guillermo del Toro? Closer, but not exact. Then again, I've got a perfect image of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (they are kind of the holy triumvirate of contemporary Mexican directors), but that may just be because he's won two directing Oscars in the past three years.

The point is, there's a strange disconnect for me, and for some other cinephiles I'm sure, between the extent that we revere the artistic exploits of these people and the extent that we'd be able to pick them out of a police lineup.

On some level it makes sense. We are not seeing them in front of the camera. And in the instances where we are, it helps tremendously. No one anywhere who knows anything about film could fail to recognize Orson Welles, for example. Or an example from my own recent viewing experience, Roman Polanski. He has that cameo in Chinatown, but he's the star of the Polanski film I just saw last weekend, The Tenant. Or an even more recent mention on this blog, Kevin Smith.

But if you're only behind the camera, you need to court media attention in some way to be recognizable, and I would say that the Coens do not particularly care for that. Someone like Christopher Nolan, however, is a lot more recognizable because you see him showing up to talk about his work pretty regularity.

I guess I'm not saying anything particularly profound here.

But I do wonder if it points to some kind of deficit in myself as a cinephile. It has occurred to me that although I continue to consume films at a ravenous rate, I may not be rounding out my knowledge of film history the way other cinephiles in my position -- or even more importantly, other critics -- would be. I almost never read about cinema in long form, for example. I read articles that I see posted on Facebook and the like, but I don't choose books on cinema for my next book the next time I'm looking for one. I think of this as a conscious form of counter-programming to my busy viewing schedule, but it means I'm not going in depth on the behind the scenes of these films, which I think is also essential to a well-rounded film education. I mean, most books aren't going to give you a better idea of what a director looks like, but they will create the greater all-around awareness of a person that is symbolized by the superficial element of knowing what they look like.

I won't think too deeply on it.

But I do wish that I had looked at that picture of Frank Capra and said "That's a picture of Frank Capra" and not "Who is that guy? Oh, it must be Frank Capra."

And it was interesting to me how Frank Capra did not look like Frank Capra -- or not how I thought Frank Capra would look, anyway. I think of Capra as a kind of reckless optimist, and this man looks too severe to conform to my preconception of him. Then again, Capra also directly The Lost Weekend so he can be just as dour as this photo implies to me.

What's perhaps worst is that I did not even know he was of Italian descent, another thing I discovered in just briefly looking up something about him now. Not that his descent is even particularly noteworthy, just that it challenges another wrong preconception I had about him, which was that he was born in America. A preconception I wouldn't have had if I had read up on this guy at all.

So, this just strengthens my resolve to do something I should have done a while ago: Make every other book I read be a book on film. Or I should say, at least a book that somehow deepens my understanding and appreciation of film. I guess if you are speaking cosmically you might say that every book does that, but in this case I'm clarifying because it will allow me to keep my planned next book on the docket, which is Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock (after I finish Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native). That'll be a worthwhile cinema-related reading experience as it will give me insight on how a film I love was adapted from its source material.

I'll become a better cinephile, dammit, one book and one director's face at a time.

Disregarding alphabetization

I'm anal retentive to a fault.

I love lists, and I love alphabetizing those lists. And I've developed very clear ideas of how to alphabetize, when an instance of ambiguous alphabetization arises. Little is left to randomness and none to chance.

However, there's one thing that comes along to throw the whole thing off:

How two names sound when credited next to each other.

If am going to list two directors, the rule I follow is that the one whose name comes closest to the beginning of the alphabet -- last name if they have different ones, first name if they don't -- goes first.

Except, of course, when I don't follow it.

Take the most prominent example, and the one that gave me the idea for this post when I was making up another one of my big movie lists recently: the Coen brothers. The correct way to list their names should be as Ethan and Joel Coen. That's often how you see their names in print nowadays. But I can't do it. These guys are, and have always been, Joel and Ethan Coen.

The brothers Farrelly have the same problem. They have never been Bobby and Peter Farrelly. They are, and should be, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, for a simple reason that's impossible to support with any type of objective evidence: the names just sound better that way.

Could it ever be Caro et Jeunet? No. It could only be Jeunet et Caro.

I do find it problematic, though. It offends my sense of order on some level. Yet I can't go inviting chaos by referring to them as "Ethan and Joel Coen." That's not who they are. They are Joel and Ethan, and that's who they have always been.

Joel must have won a coin toss back in the day, which led them originally to spurn the alphabet and ask for their names to be credited in this precise order. The rest is history, and I'm not going to overturn that history just because I'm anal retentive.

It's interesting, however, how often alphabetical order has been disregarded by these teams of director partners. The Wachowskis are Larry (now Lana) and Andy. The Hughes are Allen and Albert. (Aren't they? I think they are.) Those who go in the correct order (Jay and Mark Duplass, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) seem comparatively fewer.

Then there are of course those where the comparative prominence of the directors dictates the order. Evan Goldberg is never going to jump ahead of Seth Rogen, even though both of Evan's names comes earlier in the alphabet than either of Seth's. And are you more likely to be interested to know that Nick Park directed Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, or Steve Box?

Was this something worth writing about? Who knows.

I still don't love Lebowski

When I first watched Joel and Ethan Coen's cult hit The Big Lebowski in my parents' basement in probably either the summer or Christmas of 1998, I thought there must have been some kind of defect in my character for not liking it more.

Even then, I knew what people thought of it, and the adulation has become a genuine phenomenon in the ensuing years. Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski seemed to instantly join the pantheon of great cinematic characters, his adventures a kind of post-modern epic that immediately clicked with a legion of devoted viewers.

Well, not for me. And not for my wife, either.

We had both struggled with our inability to like The Big Lebowski more than we did. We knew we were crazy. I mean, everyone loves The Big Lebowski. Right?

So about a month ago we acknowledged we both wanted to see it again, and this was surprisingly able to happen this past Sunday night. I say "surprisingly" because I assumed it wouldn't be available on Netflix streaming. I was looking it up just to add it to my DVD queue, and there it was, ready to be played instantly. That was the afternoon, and it immediately became the headliner for our Sunday night slate of television programming.

Guess what? After watching it again, we still didn't like it all that much.

I'm being a bit provocative by saying that. I think it's definitely a "good movie," and there are dozens of little details I appreciate about it.

But this is the movie many people describe as their favorite Coen brothers movie, and I just can't go there with that. Especially when the Coen filmography also includes masterpieces like Raising Arizona and Fargo.

When I ranked the Coens' 14 films back in early 2010 (this was before True Grit), I ranked Lebowski sixth behind Raising Arizona, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple and The Hudsucker Proxy. Having watched it again, I would leap-frog both A Serious Man and Barton Fink over it, and leave it to do battle with other films that leave me with mixed feelings (The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men and Intolerable Cruelty).

If I were to go back and put myself in the mindset of the 24- or 25-year-old me from 1998, the thing I was probably expecting from Lebowski was something more along the lines of Raising Arizona. Like Arizona, it featured a colorful cast of characters working in the mode of a crime comedy.

But aside from both movies featuring John Goodman, the comparison pretty much ends there. There isn't what I would consider to be a single "mean" moment in Raising Arizona. The movie's heart shines through every scene. And by that I don't mean the movie is sickening or syrupy in any way -- it just gives its characters a fair shake and loves them despite their (ample) faults.

Lebowski, on the other hand, seems to resort to meanness on multiple occasions, and overall it just feels jaded. The problems could actually start with the beloved Dude himself. The ideal Lebowski, as I see him, is some kind of innocent rube who shows surprising smarts when it's required of him. And even if he is essentially passive in a world full of raging personalities, there's something sublime about his passivity.

But that's not really the Dude we get. This Dude really is a loser, and I don't find him half as lovable as I think I'm supposed to. There are things about his character that I like, such as his epic quest to get compensation for a urine-stained rug. But overall I find him to be more sour and ornery than I want this ideal Dude to be. It seems to me that his essential Dudeness should keep him above the fray, in an almost Forrest Gump-like way. But he's right down in the dirty fray, his hair soaked with alcohol, his bathroom slippers muddy with grime.

When I think of The Big Lebowski in the abstract, the scene that comes to mind is the scene where the porn entourage breaks into the Dude's bathroom and drops a ferret into his bathtub. In itself it is not any more memorable than many other scenes, but I suspect I remember it because it encapsulated a couple things that were troubling me on my first viewing, which troubled me yet again this time:

1) The film is more aggressive and violent than it really needs to be.

2) The film really doesn't have a point.

It's that last part I'd like to focus on now. And now is probably a good time to mention another Coen movie that was conspicuously absent when I listed the relative worth of the Coens' movies above. In fact, it was their next movie, O Brother Where Art Thou?

Both O Brother and Lebowski share a narrative structure that does not really work for me, which is essentially this: They aren't so much stories as a series of bizarre vignettes. The structure itself works a little better, I think, in O Brother, since the events are more or less based on Homer's The Odyssey. I like Lebowski more than that film, but I think its structure may be more unsatisfying. I know this has a cultural forbear as well, as it's more or less a Philip Marlowe story with The Dude in the Marlowe role. But the plot convolutes itself to such an extent that I had to read the wikipedia plot summary just now to make sure I remembered exactly what happened -- and I just re-watched this movie three nights ago. (Granted, we also started watching it too late, and yes, I did have two White Russians to go along with the theme.)

Speaking of convoluted, that last paragraph was a prime example. But what I really want to say is this: The Big Lebowski is not for the viewer seeking that sense of catharsis that comes from traditional character development and narrative payoffs. And I guess I am that kind of viewer. If I am going to get into a movie that's mostly just vignettes, I want the characters themselves to speak to me more.

And I guess that's an essential problem I have with this movie: I just don't find the characters as interesting as other people seem to. I've already described my hesitations with The Dude, but what about Goodman's Walter? He spends the whole movie pulling guns on people, concocting cockamamie schemes and shouting down his nice bowling teammate, Donny (Steve Buscemi). Seriously, why does he spend the entire movie telling Donny to shut up? Is that supposed to be funny? Is that a part that "really works" for the people who love this movie?

What happens with Donny reveals the nastier Coens whom I've railed against in the past. Another movie conspicuously absent from my earlier listing of Coen titles is Burn After Reading, my least favorite Coen film. I found that film pretty much repulsive from start to finish, but one of the things that really stood out was the Coens' sadistic desire to punish nice people. Two very nice characters pay a dear price for their niceness in Burn After Reading, and I feel it's that same mentality that leaves Buscemi's Donny dead of a heart attack at the end of The Big Lebowski. I'm not saying that nice people must always prosper in the movies -- that would make the movies really uninteresting. But I like there to be some reasoning behind why they don't prosper, some essential message that relates to the themes of the movie we've been watching. I feel like Donny's death doesn't have any meaning within the context of this movie -- and it just makes my belief firmer that there's isn't much meaning behind anything that happens in this movie.

And what lesson does Walter, a bad person, learn from his bad behavior? That they won't ban you from a bowling alley for pointing a gun at a fellow bowler and cocking the hammer. That you can send kidnappers a bag of your dirty underwear without any real-world consequences. That you can illogically yell at a nice friend who just wants to get up to speed in the conversation, and when he dies as an indirect result of your boneheaded decisions, neither will this cause you any shame or guilt. "Fuck it, let's go bowling," says Walter.

Fuck it, I'm just never going to love The Big Lebowski.

Fast and loose with the quickie divorces

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, in which I reconsider movies that I may have supported too strongly on my first viewing. This is their "second trial" of sorts. The series runs on Tuesdays.

A couple weeks ago, I hoped to spark a debate by singing the praises of what's widely considered the worst movie (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) by a very popular director (Wes Anderson). Having failed in that regard, I'm going to try the same approach again with Intolerable Cruelty and the Coen brothers -- although this time, my supportive adjectives are far more muted.

But I didn't know that before watching it again last Friday night. Then again, that's exactly why I'm doing this exercise.

When I first watched Intolerable Cruelty, I didn't get what all the negative fuss was about. Yeah, a couple of the courtroom scenes were a little broad, with defendants choking witnesses and judges saying "I'm going to allow it." But some of our favorite Coen films have been filled with such quirky broadness. To name one example I loved, Raising Arizona; to name another example I didn't love but liked okay, O Brother Where Art Thou?

What I saw in Intolerable Cruelty was the modernization of a classic screwball comedy, starring two of the most beautiful people in Hollywood -- timeless movie stars, as such a movie would have starred back in the 1930s and 1940s. The best screwball comedies -- your Bringing Up Babys, your Adam's Ribs -- involved a great battle between the sexes, and you certainly have one here between elegant gold digger Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and debonair divorce attorney Miles Massey (George Clooney). (I now see Adam's Rib is classified as a "sophisticated comedy" rather than a screwball comedy on the website I write for, but its battle-of-the-sexes courtroom themes make it a relevant film to discuss here, so "I'm going to allow it.")

And all the quirky Coen touches are there. In one great example of this, you see Clooney's brilliantly white teeth two different times -- at a dentist's office, exposed by implements that have drawn back his lips, and shining through the windshield of his car -- before you ever see the rest of his face. It's a great introduction to a character who obsesses over manipulating appearances (and juries) for the benefit of his clients, and by extension, himself. The film also has a really funny opening scene in which Donovan Donnelly (Geoffrey Rush) walks in on his wife having sex with the pool guy, even though they don't have a pool. It's got that delightful Coen zip, and features both a handgun and a daytime emmy award used as weapons, with the latter's pointy tip getting stabbed in Donovan's buttock.

(Donovan Donnelly is also the name my friends gave their son who was born two weeks ago -- when I heard the name, which I already considered memorably alliterative, appear in this movie, I immediately notified them via email and Facebook. Their failure to respond suggests that they didn't find this as funny/interesting as I did -- maybe they are already taking flak for the name.)

What follows is a pretty clever story that involves an escalating game of legal one-upsmanship between Marilyn and Miles -- who can bend this letter of the law to circumvent that prenuptial agreement, and so forth. On the most basic level, it's a clever story with clever players moving their chess pieces, thinking several moves ahead and surprising us with their ability to manipulate each other. This is what I took from the movie the first time.

The second time, I decided that the delectable details of the story were convenient from a narrative perspective but extremely suspect from a legal perspective. When you break it down to its basics, the world of Intolerable Cruelty is one in which the primary factor in divorce settlements is how cleverly one party tricked the other into marrying him/her.

It doesn't start out that way. Miles and Marilyn cross paths because Marilyn has caught (on video) her husband of five years, Rex Rexroth (Edward Hermann -- and my how the Coens love their funny names), cheating on her. She "nailed his ass," as she likes to say -- and as the private eye who videos her philandering husband (Cedric the Entertainer) repeats as he's filming. We find out it's a premeditated ploy to take half of his assets, and it certainly sounds legitimately earned in terms of appearances -- Marilyn invested five years in the marriage just for this payday.

But then the movie shifts gears in the interest of having its plot points play out (mostly) in the present tense. See, you lose momentum in a film if you have to have everything occur at five-year intervals.

(Spoilers ahead, for the rest of the piece!)

So before the ink is even dry on her first divorce -- which Miles spoils for her through good legal detective work -- she's introducing Miles to a Texas oil tycoon she's going to marry, Howard Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton), and insisting on a prenuptial agreement as a way of showing him how much she's marrying for love. This is, of course, a ploy designed to make Doyle think it's his own idea to tear up the prenup. Barely a week later, it seems, their own wedding is getting thrown, followed promptly by Marilyn filing for another divorce.

This turns out not to be exactly what it seems, either, but the problematic idea here is that Marilyn only needs Howard to sign on the dotted line, then she immediately has him over a barrel. Clearly, if a woman married a Texas oil tycoon, then filed for divorce only a couple months later, nearly any jury out there would recognize this as a transparent case of gold digging, and would not find in her favor. Yet the movie treats these realistic obstacles as though they did not exist. Merely entering into the contract of marriage means she can exit it at her leisure, with as much of her ex-husband's assets as she pleases.

We later find out that Billy Bob's character was just a soap opera actor hired to play an oil tycoon, and that Marilyn was never actually married to him. (Or if so, it was just a business relationship and was immediately annulled.) It turns out the entire wedding was a sham to make Miles think that Marilyn has become rich -- so when Miles, who has fallen for Marilyn, gets the idea to marry her, it's again she who is being magnanimous when she tears up the prenup. See, she's the richer party -- or so he thinks. But since she actually isn't rich, she can take half of Miles' money when they divorce. Not only is this an attempt to fulfill her original gold-digging aspirations that Miles foiled, but it's also revenge against Miles for foiling those aspirations. Two birds with one stone.

Again, though, this is highly problematic. Even if a jury wouldn't have sided for Marilyn in her theoretical case against the oil tycoon, the movie tells us that Miles believes the jury would have. And that, just six months later, she could already be swimming in Doyle's wealth. The movie is founded on the idea that Miles is extremely smart and legally savvy, so how could he think both a) that Marilyn already won a huge settlement from Doyle, and b) that she would enter into a hasty Vegas marriage with him, without having other tricks up her sleeve? You're supposed to believe that she's so beautiful and entrancing that Miles has lost his legal bearings, but I'm not really buying it.

But then, even this shouldn't matter, because Marilyn shouldn't have any right to half of Miles' fortunes just a single day after marrying him. No matter what her attorney might tell a jury to paint Miles in a negative light, a single day of marriage wouldn't warrant that kind of settlement, especially in light of the previous revelations about Marilyn's motivations for marrying her first husband -- i.e. gold-digging, pure and simple.

Yet the marriage contract is considered such an iron-clad agreement that it leads to the movie's most misguided passage, in which Miles hires someone to kill Marilyn, who then tries to turn the assassin back on Miles. This is dark quirky Coens rather than light quirky Coens. But this movie should be light quirky Coens all the way through.

I get that you aren't supposed to take a screwball comedy very literally -- there's a winking understanding, I'm sure, that a lot of this stuff exists for the purposes of plot mechanics, and doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny, legal or otherwise. And you probably aren't even supposed to take Miles' and Marilyn's attempts to kill each other very seriously.

But let's just say that I saw other people's concerns about Intolerable Cruelty a lot better the second time around.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Intolerable Cruelty: Still tolerable, but a lot more narrative cruelty than I'd remembered. Appropriate that the initial verdict should have been at least partially overturned in a movie about legal wranglings, eh?

What makes a satisfying story?

This is the fifth in my Second Chances series, which runs on Tuesdays. For other entries, please see the corresponding label on the right.

I can tell you the exact moment when No Country for Old Men switches from a satisfying story to an unsatisfying story.

It's when the recently introduced character played by Woody Harrelson is snooping around the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, near where the shootout occurred between Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Harrelson's character -- I'm not even going to name him, which is my comment on his narrative usefulness -- happens to walk out on the bridge leading up to the border, and happens to look down into the same grassy area where Moss tossed the case of money a night or two before. He immediately recognizes it for what it is, notes its location, and moves away, in order not to attract additional attention. Five minutes of screen time later, he's dead, and the money never makes an appearance in the movie again, as far as I could tell from my second viewing.

Huh?

This was my first indication that No Country was going south for me, and they just kept on piling up after that. I've always been a big believer in the idea that your script isn't tight enough unless everything happens for a reason. Harrelson's character is the perfect example of something that happens for no reason. He has one scene where he's hired to find Moss. He has another scene where he finds Moss and talks to him in his hospital bed. He has the scene described above, where he finds the money. And then he has the scene where he's held at gunpoint by Chigurh and ultimately executed.

Even after two viewings, I still can't figure out why his character even needed to be in the movie. He doesn't change the stakes for any character. He doesn't change the trajectory of the plot. He really only exists for a frustrating reason, which is to indicate that good detective work isn't even necessary to find what you're looking for -- sometimes you just stumble across it by dumb luck. Oh, and to provide yet more proof that Chigurh is a cold, heartless bastard, of which we already have ample evidence.

(Note: After finishing this piece I realized that without Harrelson's character, Chigurh and Moss would never get the chance to talk, because Moss calls the room where Harrelson's character is staying, and Chigurh picks up. In this conversation, Chigurh threatens Moss' wife, which has implications later on. However, I'm not sure if having Harrelson's character in the movie was the only way to accomplish these things.)

As you know, the story continues in this vein from there. Moss is killed off screen. Moss' mother-in-law is killed off screen. Moss' wife is killed off screen* (more on that later). Chigurh gets all effed up in a car accident that's so random and sudden that it's sort of like the opposite of a deus ex machina -- it's bad luck descended magically from the gods. And then the movie ends on Tommy Lee Jones talking about his foreboding dream.

Huh?

No Country for Old Men was never a thumbs down for me -- it was always a thumbs up with an asterisk. That asterisk was because the movie challenged our very idea of what makes a satisfying script. As does the Cormac McCarthy story on which it's based, No Country for Old Men leaves us feeling empty and unsatisfied if we are expecting clean, logical resolutions. The movie's motto, condensed to its most basic form, seems to be "Shit happens." And I don't find that to be a very good motto for a movie.

But is that my problem, or Joel and Ethan Coen's? Or McCarthy's? I'd like to think of myself as someone plenty capable of appreciating a non-traditional narrative. And I think there are numerous examples where I embrace such a narrative with open arms. Don't confuse this with me saying that there are certain people in each movie I think should live, and certain people I think should die, or else I won't be satisfied. That's not it either. I just need the explanations for their deaths to emerge logically from the story, and to be dramatized in some way.

What my second viewing of No Country gave me was a little more of an appreciation of what the Coens were trying to do. What I once thought was just messing around with us -- a theory that I considered confirmed when I witnessed the disdainful way they accepted their Oscars -- was, I'm pretty sure, an intentional artistic choice, not just anarchy.

Let's take Moss' death. It's what most people who don't love the film, including me, describe as its single most frustrating moment. Here you have the movie's protagonist, who you've been following almost from the start, through numerous smart decisions, some not-so-smart ones, and a handful of near misses. Then all the sudden he's just lying there, dead, in a doorway. And it wasn't even Chigurh who killed him. It was a truck of Mexican drug runners who were tipped off to Moss' location by his cranky and oblivious mother-in-law.

I now understand that this is the Coens trying to put us in the shoes of the film's real protagonist: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Just as Bell has been a few steps behind with everything else in the plot -- an investigatory deficit that has been good for his health -- he's a few steps behind catching up to Moss. We don't see the shootout that killed Moss because he didn't see it. And in fact, when you come right down to it, we don't see that shootout because it might disappoint us even more than not seeing it. Sometimes in life, the "hero" -- or in this case, the guy who happened across a bag of money, didn't report it, and decided not to give a dying man water in time to help him -- doesn't go down in a heroic gun battle, with the soundtrack swelling to emotionally manipulate us. He just gets gunned down in the doorway of a seedy motel.

The question I'm asking myself now is this: Understanding what the Coens were doing with the benefit of time and distance, do I "forgive" them? Do they even need to be forgiven?

At the time I saw it, I was cursing the film's name on the drive home. Needless to say, I was expecting the resolutions of a film like their masterwork, Fargo, in which some people who didn't deserve to die ended up dying, but the film had a kind of bleak neatness to its resolution. When No Country didn't give me that, I considered it an act of sadism and spite by the writer-directors.

Now I'm not so sure. I still think some different choices in the film's last 30-45 minutes would have made it a stronger film. (Because, I think we can all agree, the first half of the film is near perfection.) But I no longer feel like they made mistakes, per se -- I just feel like their choices were not necessarily the ones I would have made. And even after the second viewing, I still would have done away with Woody Harrelson's character.

I said I'd get back to the death of Moss' wife, played by Kelly MacDonald. On this viewing, I've decided that I'm not 100% sure that Chigurh kills her. We see him leave her house, and we assume, based on the morality he's displayed to this point, that he does in fact kill her in cold blood. But now I'm not so sure. I kind of like that the Coens don't tell you for certain. You don't hear a telltale gunshot, and you don't hear anything about her again. She could have lived. Chigurh could have made some kind of 11th hour appeal to his own remaining shreds of humanity. I like films where certain aspects are left unresolved, for you the viewer to determine what happened.

This is already a long piece, but I can't leave behind my discussion of No Country without sharing a different observation I had during my second viewing.

When I wrote my piece ranking the Coens' movies (check it out here), a regular reader of mine commented regarding No Country: "I just felt like I had seen it all before." At the time I sort of embraced the comment, because it was a snide remark about a film that had bothered me (but bothers me less now). But I guess I didn't completely understand it, because a lack of originality was never a complaint I had about No Country. I thought it was the perfect blend of originality and homage to their own previous work. (Can you make an homage to yourself?)

Upon second viewing, I realized just how much No Country alludes to their own work -- and not even the work you'd think it would. Numerous critics observed that No Country reminded them of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple. And while that's true on a surface level, it actually has a lot more in common with ... Raising Arizona, my favorite Coen movie.

Don't believe me? I started taking notes, so check it out:

1) Anton Chigurh is basically another version of Leonard Smalls, the Harley-riding, cigar-chomping, heavily bearded, highly antisocial bounty hunter from Raising Arizona, played inimitably by Randall "Tex" Cobb. Both characters are highly lethal and operate by their own rules -- though because Arizona is a comedy, we don't see Smalls actually kill anyone. Both have an uneasy relationship with the person who hired them, proceeding to either act on their own agenda, or to appear ready to do so. But what tells me that the Coens intended the comparison is that each fires at innocent creatures by the side of the road while cruising by in their vehicle (a car for Chigurh, the aforementioned Harley for Smalls). This is where Smalls does Chigurh one better -- he blows up a rabbit with a grenade and sharp-shoots a lizard out of existence, whereas Chigurh just shoots at (but does not hit) a crow.

2) When visiting the abandoned Moss residence, Sheriff Bell squats down to investigate the hole that was left in the wall when Chigurh blasted the front door lock out of its casing. This is a visual echo of when Leonard Smalls squats down in the abandoned McDonough household to read the word "FART" written on the wall in crayon.

3) Just as Moss is undone by the tracking device in the bag of money, which leads Chigurh to him, so were Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) undone by the blue paint bomb that blows up in the bag of money in Raising Arizona (and sends their car careening out of control).

4) One of the funniest throwaway moments in Raising Arizona is when Gale and Evelle are robbing a convenience store and ask the aged clerk if he has any balloons that make funny shapes ("Not unless round's funny.") There are several moments in No Country that echo this, notably the ominous coin flip scene with the aged gas station owner ("Friend-o"), the scene in which Moss comes to buy clothes in a hospital gown and asks the clerk if he often gets people coming in in his state ("No sir, it's unusual," is the response), and the scene in which Moss requests a second room from the perplexed motel owner ("That room's got two double beds!").

And then a couple similarities to other films:

1) Sheriff Bell and his slowish partner (Garret Dillahunt) have basically the same dynamic as Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her slowish partner in Fargo.

2) In another Fargo similarity, the Coens pan past the dead hotel clerk that Chigurh killed before confronting Moss the same way they pan past the dead parking lot clerk that Steve Buscemi's character shoots in Fargo.

3) In numerous Coen films, the hotel room is a major point of reckoning in the criminal world (Blood Simple, Fargo) and even in the non-criminal world (Barton Fink). It's clear the Coens see hotels/motels as kind of a waystation where major life events occur. Moss stays in four different hotel/motel rooms here, the last of which is where he's killed.

Okay, I've taken up enough of your time.

Second Chance Verdict, No Country for Old Men: My thumb is still up, and the asterisk is still there, but the asterisk is much smaller. This film has a ton of excellent stylistic details, bold decisions, and ominous moods. But I still would have given best picture to There Will Be Blood that year.