Best Coen Brothers movie

Looks fantastic. And the Coens track record with farce is encouraging.

yeah i was gonna say, are we really worried about these guys being able to do farce!?

although it was funny to me to watch a trailer full of glamorous movie stars, many of which have never been in a Coen film before, and at the end Clooney opens a door to a room full of the kind of funny-looking old character actors that are usually in greater supply in their movies.

existential terror coens >>> farce coens imo, but I guess everyone needs a break now and again

When they mixed existential terror with farce, we got A Serious Man, which is currently my favorite of their oeuvre.

The underrated Burn After Reading as well, sorta.

yeah I'm a BAR stan as well

we should do this poll again, they've made five decent-to-killer movies since!

watched that three times and i think it was for brolin's "good lord!"

imo god came to shakespeare in a dream and showed him julius caesar (mankiewicz 1953) and shakespeare in wonderment knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life, so i am hyped

saw big lebowski again recently, i think its insanity is part of its cult appeal but it's not that good, at all really. out of what i've seen of theirs it's maybe my least favorite, and i think i've seen everything except for intolerable cruelty and the ladykillers (which i've heard are their worst.)

I wonder if an older Barton Fink might make a cameo in Hail Cesar?

intolerable cruelty underrated imo

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--0iPWki0E--/c_fill,fl_progressive,g_center,h_200,q_80,w_200/k1t2qnzuhlnp1stwa9xz.png

Just thought this thread needed a photo of the guy who wrote the Jezebel post "The Coen Brothers' New Movie Hail Caesar! Looks Very Funny, and Very White."

Hey at least... Robert Picardo... got in. Yeah, I got nothin'.

tbf to the Coen Brothers just every film that takes place in some kind of glamorous American pre-60s time... hrm. yeah...

The Coen Brothers' New Movie Hail Caesar! Looks Very Funny, and Very White

the almost-certainly-useless thinkpiece I knew was coming halfway through the trailer

Man I will ride hard for Intolerable Cruelty

Um, the Hollywood movie industry prior to 1965 was at least 99% white.

Um, the Hollywood movie industry prior to 1965 was at least 99% white.

This was brought up by commenters. The response was (literally) to post the dictionary definition of the word "fiction" over and over.

Aren't all Coen Bros movies 99% white?

Even the black guys in their movies like the Eagles.

Well, yeah.

Aren't all Coen Bros movies 99% white?

The Coens write almost every script they direct. Don't all the experts say "write about what you know"?

Intolerable Cruelty is far from their best but it is very, very funny

The transfer on the new Criterion disc of Blood Simple is so gorgeous that it has actually made me like the film a bit better than I used to (my first viewing, some 20 years ago, was on VHS, and my second, a decade-ish later, was a TV broadcast). I mean, the difference between a high 7/10 and a low 8/10, but still.

Someone needs to redo this poll. Though good luck trying to pick the best of the run from NCFOM TO Hail, Caesar! never mind the previous 25 years.

would NCFOM win?

A Serious Man would win

ncfom and a serious man are two of my favorite coen bros films. none of their other films of the last decade come close for me

True Grit was extremely solid, imo.

Ah,the only Coen bros film I havent seen

vvg

ya thoroughly enjoyed it and was thinking of rewatching it again actually

True Grit would definitely be my vote if we were to poll NCfOM onward.

Clooney directs a Coen script from the '90s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYga2m0V2O0

hard to get much of a sense of it from the trailer

Hasn't been a post on here for over six years! Does every film get its own thread? That's weird.

Drive-Away Dolls opens tomorrow. Looks kind of like a PTA-Licorice Pizza thing. Will see it soon with guarded optimism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vy_7UGICJU

A newer thread has overtaken this one:

Best Coen Brothers Movie - 2017

Every time I watch Blood Simple I have a moment of "how the hell is she renting that cool loft apartment in Williamson County?"

I wonder how often rep theaters have programmed Blood Simple and Evil Dead 2 together, there are enough shots in the former that feel like homage you could almost think it was the same camera crew/DP behind the scenes.

Can't tell if you're goofing, but there are lots of connections between Raimi c. Evil Dead and Coens:

After the extensive filming process, Raimi had a "mountain of footage" that he had to put together. He chose a Detroit editing association, where he met Edna Paul, to cut the film. Paul's assistant was Joel Coen of the Coen brothers, who helped with the film's editing. Paul edited a majority of the film, although Coen edited the shed sequence. Coen had been inspired by Raimi's Within the Woods and liked the idea of producing a prototype film to help build the interest of investors. Joel used the concept to help make Blood Simple with his brother Ethan, and he and Raimi became friends following the editing process.

Anyway, here's the investor trailer they cut for "Blood Simple," which literally includes some "Evil Dead" footage, which the Coens were helping Raimi edit, plus apparently Bruce Campbell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTHCKnhFkwM

Sonnenfeld:

I shot the trailer, which featured Bruce Campbell. It took a year to raise the money. We would take a 16mm projector and show the trailer to investment groups full of dentists and people like that. $15,000 got you one percentage point out of 50 available; the other 50 were given as incentives to actors and other people who worked on the film. A multimillionaire inventor friend who came up with the pump used in Windex bottles signed up; my father also got a point. Independent movies are usually a really stupid way to invest your money, but everyone made their $15,000 back many times over.

IIRC the Coens and Raimi all met when they attended Camp Herzl in Wisconsin (my Jewish classmates from Conservative families went and also send their own kids; there’s a different summer camp for the Reform kids).

Never seen that before, not sure if that would be enough to get me to pony up 15 grand. I expect there was a bit more to the pitch than that.

I wonder if anyone has spoken to the investors to see why they invested and what they thought of the final work.

They got a donor list from the local branch of Hadassah (the women of which were also responsible for inventing Bundt cake and collaborating with Nordic Ware to design the Bundt tin).

Like fellow Minnesota Jew and myth maker, the Coens have been pretty cagey about their origin story, so it's hard to say how much of the fundraising story is true. This was a quote from Joel:

"Sam taught us that if you call on the phone and ask people to invest in a movie they'll tell you to go hell. But if you tell them 'I have a piece of film to show you,' then some of them would let you come into their living room and set up your little projector and show it to them."

I don't think they and Raimi went to the same summer camp, though. Raimi was a Michigan guy. But after Evil Dead, apparently Joel, Ethan, Sam, Frances McDormand and Kathy Bates all lived together in LA, which as far as roommates goes tops Robert Duvall rooming in NYC with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman.

IDK where you grew up but Herzl takes campers from the entire upper Midwest (Bob Dylan went there too). A college friend from Michigan hit Raimi up for work experience because he’d been her camp counselor.

I totally get that people travel from all around, but every story I've read said that Raimi and Joel met making Evil Dead.

It's definitely possible that they both went there but didn't know one another! I think they're five years apart.

tbh had no idea Raimi was Jewish!

But after Evil Dead, apparently Joel, Ethan, Sam, Frances McDormand and Kathy Bates all lived together in LA

Holly Hunter, too