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.

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.