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Starting a retrospective of the entire oeuvre of the Coen Brothers. First movie: Blood Simple https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blood_simple
Review of Blood Simple: A man hires a private investigator to trail his wife, who is having an affair. The unfolding events fuse screwball comedy with nail-biting tension and shocking plot turns. Sharp dialogue, striking use of light and shadow, and a fine ear for the absurd.
Off to a great start! Quite a calling card - this first movie by the Coens. Several of the core elements of their later works are already in the DNA of Blood Simple.
Also, Frances McDormand!
2nd movie: Raising Arizona (1987). A small town crook (Nicholas Cage) and his police officer wife (Holly Hunter) steal a baby. Hijinks follow, including with two escaped convicts (one of them being John Goodman). https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/raising_arizona
Review of Raising Arizona: This screwy, over-the-top comedy just didn't resonate with me. Not to say that I'm opposed to the genre itself (I love Clue, for instance), but there's a point when the comedy gets too broad, too unfocused, too flabby.
Raising Arizona felt like ideas thrown together with little meaningful glue, and I found myself neither particular amused by the funny moments, not affected by the wistful ones. Knowing how much better the Coen Brothers are capable of doing, this is one of their lesser works.
3rd movie: Miller's Crossing (1990). In 1920s prohibition America, Gabriel Bryne plays the right-hand man of an Irish mob boss, involved in an increasingly intricate feud with the Italian mob while nurturing a romance with Marcia Gay Harden. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/millers_crossing
Review of Miller's Crossing: A reasonably fine film, though not necessarily one with the most convincing plot. Sharp, striking, funny dialogue, making the movie work as a Coen brothers take on the gangster film genre. Memorable characters, and Byrne is excellent.
My major gripe was with the manner in which, as the plot wound itself into intricate and improbable knots, and there were double and triple betrayals, the psychological motivations of characters became somewhat muddled. Nonetheless, a fine film, beautifully shot.
4th movie: Barton Fink (1991). A playwright (John Turturro), whose initial Broadway success leads to him receiving a contract to script a Hollywood movie, moves to LA and encounters a series of odd characters, including a traveling salesman (John Goodman). https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/barton_fink
Review of Barton Fink: A fantastic, twisted satire about writer's block, Hollywood glitz, literary pretension, and the artifice of reality. The movie takes about an hour slowly walking us through the drab existence of Turturro caught between a half-sincere desire to...
...achieve literary fame by capturing the struggles of the "common man," when the story takes a radical, warped, hallucinatory turn that I dare not reveal. This is unsurprisingly the movie that appears to have catapulted the Coens to international fame, because it blends...
...with risky and yet pitch-perfect balance so many of the themes that keep recurring throughout their oeuvre: sharp cynicism, dark humor, tangential philosophical musings, subversion of traditional genre boundaries, larger-than-life characters, surrealism.
