Cinema Science

This is an excerpt for a review of No Country for Old Men written by Moriarty (easily the sights best writer), over at Ain't It Cool News. These paragraphs don't even get into his critiques of that film, but it brings up a point I had never considered before but completely agree with.

Each of the great movies that the Coens made take place in self-contained worlds. Unlike Wes Anderson, who has created one self-contained world that he seems determined to explore every broken-familied corner of, the Coens create whole new worlds each time out. BLOOD SIMPLE and RAISING ARIZONA don’t take place on the same planets. MILLER’S CROSSING might as well be about a different species. BARTON FINK is a snapshot of the sweaty interior of one particular writer’s overearnest brain, and it doesn’t feel anything like MILLER’S, the film it followed. It also gave no hint of what to expect from HUDSUCKER, a gorgeous cartoon, lusher than anything they’d tried before. FARGO. THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE. Both crime films, but totally different in the way they play. Both exist as wholly realized realities that make me want to climb up into the screen.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI... a cult movie with a cult that grows more every day... a deliberate riff on the same tradition of detective fiction that also inspired MILLER’S CROSSING, but so stylistically different that you would never automatically assume both films sprang from the same minds. Same thing with O BROTHER. How is that similar to LEBOWSKI at all? It’s not. Not remotely.

I think the reason I dislike INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and THE LADYKILLERS is because they both feel pressed from more ordinary studio movie templates. INTOLERABLE CRUELTY feels like a Nora Ephron movie. It’s a little more wacky in a few places (I like Wheezy Joe, but he hardly makes the entire movie worthwhile), but it’s basically a generic chick flick in terms of look and style. Pretty. Forgettable. And with THE LADYKILLERS, it feels for the very first time like the Coens trying to do what Barry Sonnenfeld does, broad mainstream comedy. I think it fails as a mainstream film, but it also fails as an eccentric pleasure. It feels like the Coens imitating the people who imitated them, and the results left me cold.

Here is another excerpt from the review. This one about the controversial ending, it sums up how the way the film eventually unfolds makes complete sense. Don't read this if you haven't seen the film, it contains quite a few spoilers.

I’ve heard much debate about “the ending” of this film, but I think it’s really a bigger issue. The stuff that frustrates some viewers is pretty much part of the reason this story was even told in the first place. As much as I said this is a story about a guy finding some money, it’s also a story being told by the guy who finds the remains of the guy who found the money. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a guy whose attitude marks him as the last of a dying tradition. Tough, a survivor who’s seen it all. The film is more about his observations on the incident than it is about the incident. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, I think it’s managed the difficult feat of switching perspective, gradually, eventually telling us a story we didn’t even realize we were watching. Maybe that’s what throws some people, that thunderclap as they realize that this is Bell’s story, not Llewelyn’s. This is a film about how wicked we can all be under the right circumstances, but it’s also a film about what it does to someone when they spend their time chasing all these wicked people around, cleaning up the messes they leave behind.