What side of the Intolerable Cruelty divide to you sit on?

The twinkle of chemistry is definately there in CZJ's eyes, and I think Clooney has it too - LISTEN TO ME TRACEY HAND.

Actors act.

I have not, of course, seen this film, but I don't suppose I will or would find the claim any more convincing here than usual.

Possible argument: what the viewer wants is chemistry between viewer and star, not star and star.

But I tink what people mean by "chemistry" in the movies, or at least what I would LIKE people to mean by it, is that the actors allow themselves to show their vulnerability - in terms of the scene - to each other.

Handily that's what "chemistry" mean in real life, too.

Surprised you're so down on the comment that GC and CZJ lack chemistry - I thought this a prime example of the "pithy journalism" which you believe to be the essence of blogging. What should one say instead? A 12,000 word treatise on the unbridgeable ionic/covalent differential between the two leads, perhaps? Nope, whichever blogs win the Grauniad competition, I'll bet you they all have the term "lack(s) chemistry" somewhere within them. Several times over.

Are they believable as a couple or not (as any humour the film may possess depends entirely on this being a possibility)? I do not believe that they are. And even what GC does more or less repeats the same tics he used in Oh, Brother. It comes across as a documentary, not so much on actors, as one on a smug plank of wood and someone attempting to portray a reluctant suitor.

Taking it from another angle: every review has mentioned that the Coens did not originate the script, which is about the indie-est complaint ever.

Why 'Far From Heaven' gets more love than Van Sant's 'Psycho' is a mystery.

a) Coen's did not write original script. For first time evah!
b) CZJ is married to a rich person.
c) George Clooney was in O Brother Where Art Thou. His acting isn't that different in this.
d) A rubbish Coens film is still miles better than "standard Hollywood fayre"

Their next film is also not from an original story/script, it being a remake of The Ladykillers.

F) is an interesting one, because whilst you are right that reiteration (sarcastic or no) does not make any idea untrue it does suggest a critical consensus which is at least potentially lazy if not downright suspicious.

g) This is the most mainstream Coen brothers film yet.
(Uses generally in an negative fashion, though I think untrue).

I can see how the word "chemistry" is misleading, because it implies that actors have no more obligation to create a believable romance than normal people do, i.e. none: just wait to "get lucky." Actors do have to act, as the pinefox notes, regardless of what the actors think of each other in real life.

A personal chemistry between leads is actually a potential detriment to the scenes because the actors have to fight through their off-set conviviality in order to forge one that's specific to the drama. It can be a serious distraction if you've got no technique; it can lead you all over the map. Witness the supposedly strange phenomenon of real-life couples showing "no spark" on screen..

Who wrote the script is not very important unless you detect a falling off, and this is a much better film than the tedious noir retread 'The Man Who Wasn't There'.

The mechanism that makes screwball comedies work is the conflict of desires (typically professional/public desires vs. personal/private ones)—so the actors home in on their official public desires, but they keep getting sidetracked with this other personal thing that, were they to reveal even an iota of it, would leave them exposed to ridicule and certain loss of the original goal. Screwball comedies are classically heroic: the leads gamble everything, are willing to lose everything, for this "real" goal. "Chemistry," or the revelation of the leads' vulnerabilities to each other—is clearly indispensable here.

I also liked how Cedric the Entertainer stole the vast majority of the scenes that he was in.

I liked your description Tracer, i just need to fit it to Overboard and Foul Play to double check.

and who cares if the coens didn't write the movie? not me! actually, I always thought (well, after the last few stinkers) that they'd make much better movies if they took other peoples' scripts and just doctored the dialogue, which they seem to have done here.

intolerable cruelty wasn't great but it made me laugh and entertained me more consistently than any of their recent movies, which I count as duds. I'd say it's a little lower than lebowski in my esteem.

amusing enough comedies are I think the best we can expect from these guys these days.

Back that up! Why?

Re: the chemistry between CZJ and clooney - Germaine said on the late review that the reason there is no chemistry is because "clooney has more in common with Cary Grant than his publicists woud have us think"!!!! hahaha! i love germaine more than ever for suggesting to me the Gorgeous George is a homo!

Best Freudian slip ever.

Some people have just got stuff agin CZJ, I liked her in it.

Blimey, I'm still learning about myself, obv.

Wha? I'm not asking for a big critical hoe-down, but, sorry, what kind of subjective criteria are they?
Like, Why do you love this girl?
Oh, she has grebt taste in clothes...
Huh?
Taut -- Donald Kaufman!!

I think "unnecessary" is pretty self-explanatory. Something that is not needed or doesn't add anything to the movie. Like nearly 50% of Intolerable Cruelty.

Legal status of a document with a tear in it?
If the contract was torn deliberately and in front of witnesses then I think there's a good argument that it has been repudiated and is unenforceable by the person doing the tearing.

Hooray for ILx and its bank of experts.

Okay, can-do

Comedy is not a genre. Noir is a genre. It was marked by the partial emancipation of women during the war, the influenve of exciting new lighting techiniques from Europe (and many European personnel who had had to flee the fascist regimes here), and of course the source novels and their proto-existential worldview. It ended, I suppose in the mid-Fifties, when the trend in crime movies went towards 'bigger' organized crime type stuff like 'The Big Heat' and 'Touch of Evil'. The lone detective/femme fatale stuff died, partly because the sexual revlution (shorthand, people) made the idea of the femme fatale a bit silly.

Twenty years later you had some noir revivals like 'Chinatown' which basically questioned the genre premises (and 'Chinatown' has a lot of the 'Big Heat' big city intrigue, which maybe is a comment on how America changed from small to big capitalism) etc. 'Blood Simple' is kind of one of these 'neo-noirs', it's postmodern, it's premised on the idea that we all know the conventions of crime movies.

Oh God! I was, as I said, writing in shorthand!! But - for example, Cain's 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' was an influence on Camus. The impossibility of justice, etc.

An audience from 1950 might've enjoyed 'Blood Simple' (I can't remember everything in it) yes, but it clearly is koking with the conventions in a way that *most* classic noirs were not. The end credit music, etc. 'It's the same old song/With a different meaning sicne you've been gone'? Yes? Self-referential?

All I said was 'proto-existential', a throwaway line, and anyway doesn't 'The Man Who Wasn't There' explore this very idea?

I would overemphasise influence, and I'm bored with the sort of crit that says French cinema is the 60s is important because it influenced the movie brats, or conversely, the movie brats have worth because they liked early Godard. That's all dud. But I am interested, like Bazin, in the development of style, ie in Renoir, and this usually involves some concept of 'influence'.

I am still unsure of what you are calling influence here. The deliberate copying of something seen in another film, or the unconscious influence of the rest of film, literature, shagging et al which sudeenly broadens the canvas so much as to make the concept unworkable.

Because the 'order in which things happened' was not random. Of course it was the simple linear progression of Whig history; it was closer to the Hegelian dialectic. But! Nonetheless! The order in which things happened is significant in history. I would erect cast-iron 'causal links' between artists, but neither are such links 'imagined', or if they are than that doesn't make them 'unreal' in the suggested sense. Are you seriously saying that history operates like a Roeg film?

The concept is loose, it has to be, but that doesn't make it unworkable. With some directors -- Melville or Leone, for example -- it's impossible to imagine their work without knowledge of other pre-existing texts.

Just because the order in which things happen is not random, does not mean that there is any meaning behind it either. Problem with any conception of history is its selectiveness, here is an order in which things happened, here is why we think they happened like that (here is big pot of stuff that we either don't know about or are ignoring because they don't seem to fit into their hypothesis). Too much stuff happens.

Except: yes, one can say interesting things about Leone or Melville (et al) without reference to Huston or Daves or Ray -- but they'd be a big elephant in the living room! Like talking about 'Far From Heaven' without mentioning Sirk.

What's wrong with an elephant in the living room? I fear you are being needlessly dismissive here, what kind of historical conception of cinema must you have to truly appreciate cinema - and whose conception of this history must you follow.

(Sorry, I am obviously being a bit of a dick as above - but you seem to be bandying about influence without really defining what you mean by it.)

However imperfect our knowledge is though (and it always will be) I think it's best to get as good a sense of history as possible, but I do acknowledge that it isn't the only way of seeing films. I'm not an influence fiend, but another example for me would be 'The Man Who Wasn't There', which was just packed with 40s refs, without doing much with them.

That said, I've seen films that may well refer to a bunch of stuff I've never seen and enjoyed 'em nonetheless. When I saw 'Lebowski' I didn't even know who Chandler was, but I still knew it was fucking amazing.

Your final sentence is the reason why I am talking about this in the first place. A hater of necessary allegory/decoding I thought some of your stuff above about Blood Simple was far too glib critic talk (so good luck with the lancing!) I think too much emphasis on history of art is put upon appreciation of art, where something stands in a body of work, a genre, a canon - which then gets in the way of instinctive critical thinking.

In the words of another Chandler: can open -- worms everywhere!

I'm still not sure what your point is here Enrique--it's not like noir films from the classic era weren't aware themselves of the genre they were working in and its conventions, and how they could be played with...

That I said! I said some were aware (well, obv all makers were 'aware' but they didn't necessarily put that knowledge on screen).

origins of noir -- apparently to do with French fans of it, taking from 'series noir' (=pulp translations of Cain, Chandler, etc). I actually don't know when it became popular, but definitely not while the likes of 'Out of the Past' were in cinemas. I don't think the word 'noir' wd have gone down big in Peoria.

What do you mean by this? Have you been to Peoria?

Enrique i think you have got into a situation where everyone is taking offense to anything you say in this thread!

i haven't seen blood simple though and i have no desire to. Potmodern excercises in neo noir ain't my thing... Apart from The Last Seduction, of course.

Where is your evidence people in Peoria have trouble saying "French Fries." I thought the freedom fries movement started in North Carolina. If your premise is wrong, then the culinary intolerances of Beautfort, North Carolina have no influence on whether or not the noir movement found a friendly foothold in the cozy Illinois midtropolis of Peoria.

Oh -- right, yeah, you're joking too. I need to swap jobs with someone, stat.

Sorry, jed, I just think it's a little rude to barge into the middle of a discussion and tell one side to get over it. I am interested in the perceptions of others. Am I not permitted to be interested in such things?

Exactly. Felicity has been otm in this thread.

Middle America is a myth, so like all myths is not completely an invention. Er?

Where is that Time Of The Wolf thread, by the way?

Erm, toying with conventions -- 'The Big Sleep' not having a comprehensible plot. There were reasons for this beyond playfulness, but... I'm off.

i think whats happening in this thread is that people are deliberately taking offense at anything enrique says - this has got to be a joke, right?

you still haven't explained why this matters!

(at the risk of re-opening old ILE wounds i think part of the problem is calling BS "postmodern" instead of whatever you really mean - tho it was funny when jed said "potmodern")

xp

Jed, I thought I explained above that I was being a bit of a dick.

(sorry, just playing devil's advocate here)

It mattered upthread 'cos someone was asking me how Blood Simple isn't 'noir' (in my opinion) but instead 'neo-noir'. Same way Gabrielle's 'Give me a little more time' isn't Motown but neo-Motown.

but Enrique you said yourself its forty years later! if more toying with the form more in order to encompass all that elapsed time makes their movie "postmodern" and not toying with it at all would make it a standard rehash, i don't understand what you're prescribing here, other than a no-go expiry date on genre pictures altogether

This is my point: you can't make a film noir now. Even if your film is exactly like an old noir (ie 'The Man Who Wasn't There') it can't be a noir precisely because of the timeshift. So Van Sant's 'Psycho' is a radically different film than Hitchcock's.

In 'Blood Simple' the Coens 'update' noir; because of the collapse of Hollywood int he late Fifties, it's impossible to make a noir in the classic sense. Personally I'm not keen on these genre rehashes much; there are more interesting things to do with celluloid IMHO.

I'm not dead against them, though, and have really enjoyed some of them: I thought 'Miller's Crossing' was superb.

It is this kind of understanding of genre conventions which makes any new take on a genre as interesting as before. Intolerable Cruelty we might think is a simple genre rehash in the vague style of a screwball comedy, but fact of the matter is that screwball comedies went out fashion at least thirty years ago.

So how do we understand an old film if it has not caught up with the change in its own genre conventions. And what are the othe rmore interesting things we should be doing with celluloid?

A genre, to me, is not a critical term, but an industrial one on the whole -- because of course 'noir' was not a term used by the makers of these films. The noir cult took of in the States sometime in the 60s (viz: 'Play it again, Sam'). 'Western', on the other hand, was a common term during the Hollywood era; but similarly westerns were made on the production line, and finished with things like 'Rio Bravo', which is a wonderful piss-take of westerns, just as 'Some Like it Hot' is a great piss-take of gangster movies and 'Vertigo' is a suberb overturning of noir (all came out in 1958-9 -- the end of Hollywood).

The Coens were my introduction to noir, but I've found myself enjoying the oldies more, probably because I don't buy what goes on the the Coens' films (I don't think you're supposed to) whereas I can believe in 'Double Indemnity' more.

What to do with celluloid? I don't know. Truth be told, I've got into serial TV drama a lot. Just finished the UK 'Traffik' and to me that's good. Or Haneke's 'Code Unknown'. Or something inventive like 'Punch-Drunk Love'. Anyway, that was really about my not liking 'The Man Who Wasn't There' much.

In NYC I paid around $11 sometimes

Here in SF I pay about $9.50, except the PFA cos I is a member!

I've heard it's beyond extortionate in Japan.

Er, Twin Peaks was the Pacific Northwest, right? Although I guess the Black Lodge could be located in Middle America, but I doubt it.

Besides, the people in Twin Peaks were quirky, but they weren't stupid, except for like Bobby Briggs and Leo. Oh, and Deputy Andy - ok, he was kind of "Middle America" I guess.