INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, the new Coens joint set in the early '60s Village folk scene, starring Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, Carey Mulligan

The alleged Dave Van Ronk basis seems unofficial at best.

http://nymag.com/movies/features/joel-ethan-coen-2012-3/

lol will watch the shit out of this

lol will watch the shit out of this

― the sir edmund hillary of sitting through pauly shore films (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, March 12, 2012 1:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Someone made a coen bros just for ME

awesome

Even if this is bad I will like it

huh, cool

i have a feeling my mother will hate everything about this

you say that about everything

Someone made a coen bros just for ME

― the prurient pinterest (Hurting 2), Monday, March 12, 2012 1:09 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you can tell it's 1961, bcz we don't have snow on Christopher Street anymore.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/first-look-oscar-isaac-carey-mulligan-justin-timberlake-on-set-of-the-coens-inside-llewyn-davis

god i hate ledes like this

Last year was bittersweet for fans of the Coen Brothers. While it was the first time in four years the prolific duo didn't have a film released, it was announced that they'd be returning to the music world in 2012 for their next feature "Inside Llewyn Davis" which would focus on the '60's Greenwich Village scene that included names like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Joni Mitchell among others.

"yes... 2011 was a bittersweet year for me... no new coen bros movie... but they announced a new one... what a year!"

learn to skip such ledes

you should have warned us

why bittersweet? there wasn't a coen brothers movie at all! surely the REAL fans would just be bitter, full stop

"goddamn these coen brothers"

ya but they announced a NEW one, adding just a tinge of sweetness to an otherwise bitter, bitter year

that's just soft

ashamed of beard?

http://www.indiewire.com/static/dims4/INDIEWIRE/1e4fa38/4102462740/thumbnail/680x478/http://d1oi7t5trwfj5d.cloudfront.net/0b/3a8da05eaf11e19987123138165f92/file/timberlake-llewyn-davis.JPG

I did not know who Oscar Isaac was til I looked up the resume

as excited as i am to learn about this, i am slightly concerned about the timberlake. is he the lead role? the beard & hairdo are pretty great! but idk... timberlake. hm.

no, O.I. is presumably the lead. Timbo/Mulligan are a folk rivas of Davis's.

I'm glad JT looks diff enough that I can pretend it's not him.

ashamed of beard?

too easy

y'all JT haters are crazy, although I'm not sure the folk scene suits him very well. do love that he is biting my beard and peacoat look though.

not hating! just... unsure. i'm sure my concerns will prove unfounded because i really want this to be an awesome movie, but i've never seen JT act in a dramatic role. i have expectations that must me maintained!

I did not know who Oscar Isaac was til I looked up the resume

― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Monday, March 12, 2012 1:39 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

he's been the best thing about almost every movie ive seen him in (damning w/faint praise in some cases). i dunno where he came from but he seems to have a lot of promise

going to go ahead and assume you're talking about this: "Lenny the Wonder Dog - Fartman (as Oscar Isaac Hernandez)"

am wondering if F Murray Abraham's role is as folk club owner or Beat poet

also if title is Inside Daisy Clover hommage

beardo timbo does have a "young dave van ronk" look going on.

van ronk has an album called "Inside Dave Van Ronk", soooo...
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GVKH99SKL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

likely just an allusion rather than some roman a clef bio tho

oh yeah, i doubt that the coens would do that kinda movie, but i'm assuming that's where they got the title...

great album btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ngyALMRR4

yup

hey all right

yes yes yes

Hmmm. I hope this is one of those instances where the actual film is much, much better than the trailer, b/c this doesn't look so hot.

i didnt watch it but im already sold on the combo of subject and filmmakers

I'm honestly amazed at how much Oscar Isaac looks like my friend Jesse Poe of Tanakh.

dylan in the trailer, hmmm

It says Joel & Ethan Coen on the trailer, that's good enough for me.

i didnt watch it but im already sold on the combo of subject and filmmakers
yeah, me too.

dylan in the trailer, hmmm

I know. Why??

wiki sez: It is loosely based on Dave Van Ronk's posthumously published memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street. which is a good enough reason for me, coens an added bonus imho

so maybe tylerw was even more on the nose upthread than we thought

ya but they announced a NEW one, adding just a tinge of sweetness to an otherwise bitter, bitter year

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Monday, March 12, 2012 1:31 PM (10 months ago) Bookmark

lol

xp yeah, looks like they even pretty much re-created that van ronk album cover

f murray!

abraham!

jean is the best

if Llewyn was straightforwardly sympathetic in any way, this movie would have been AWFUL

If he was sympathetic in any way at all, it might have been better.

He tries to take care of a cat!

I see what you're saying. I'll note it.

still probably my favorite film of the past 10 years

A Serious Man is 10x the movie this is

I mean it's fine but it's a lot of window dressing really

Ya

Liked the trailer better than the film.

Xpost Weeeell... Maybe 5x but, yeah, I feel ya. This was still great fun, though, on second viewing. However, It was a toss up between this and "The American Friend" as a purchase on Blu during this last Criterion sale and Wim won.

by NYC showbiz standards, LD is not all that unpleasant

He's nice enough

for some reason it's Adam Driver's short appearance in this that seems to have stuck with me with this flick.

I liked just about every supporting character and performance--Driver, Goodman, Neelix from Star Trek Voyager--just not Isaac and Mulligan.

I finally did see this and it was the sort of film where I could agree with both a good and a bad review. Ultimately my biggest problem was that it felt weird to make such a joyless movie about such an energetic time and subject. Dave Van Ronk's widow agrees

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/dave-van-ronks-ex-wife-takes-us-inside-inside-llewyn-davis-6440396

I guess maybe if the film was in some more well-trodden setting to begin with, they could get away with making a sort of alternate, purgatorial version of it (like films that take place in the"seedy underbelly of the hippie era" or whatever). But here it just seemed bizarre. The film is barren - it's as though there barely even is such a thing as the "folk scene." Where are all the buskers and late night hootenannies and people going to each other's gigs in succession?

I dont look to the coens for versimilitude

Yeah for sure. But usually I feel like they are more working within some kind of period/genre expectations and playing with them, and Greenwich Village 1961 seems like a weird place to do that and I didn't get any sense of what they were playing with. In fact the whole thing felt unusually dreary and not playful by their standards. The deadpan humor didn't really land.

coens have been joyless for so long

idk, the joylessness fit with llewyn's cynical beaten-down character, since he's our guide through this world. he's not gonna go mix it up where the fun & action is, he would hate that scene (and would have burned all his bridges there anyway) . he can barely tolerate the open mikes at the Gaslight!

but i am a huge stan for this movie so :)

it's thru a Coens prism, and i'm sure there was misery in folk cuz showbiz

Phil ochs seemed p miserable

Its a movie about authenticity

The Wanderers also closes with a young relatively unknown Bob Dylan playing (I think) the gaslight, but it has sort of an opposite significance to it - suggesting that the character may leave behind the greaser gang life and become a folkie or something more expressive. Whereas for Davis I guess it signals, idk missed opportunity or the fading of his dim star or something. Wonder if maybe it was deliberate given The Coens tendency to reference other cinema.

Dylan in this = the Tornado in "A Serious Man"

(xpost) Wow, that's a film I'd completely forgotten about--saw it on release, never since.

I'm kind of a Stan of that movie, actually.

Dylan in this = the Tornado in "A Serious Man"

haha yes, awesome

^^^

Yeah that's great

For some reason it took me a while to think of what "Please Mr. Kennedy" was a reference to, but I'm almost sure it was this, at least in part (although it didn't come out til 1964):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZGr6nQRLNc

finally watched this film and yeah, Dylan was the tornado for sure

I think the underlying cynicism made me really believe that the Coens don't really give a shit about folk music and it was just the backdrop for their story -- how cynical is it to do that, when a lot of the scenes involve performance!

also Eric was otm about the one-two punch of passing Akron and then the cat magically reappearing

I felt bad for the cat, but really, it was more of Llewyn grasping for a way to help followed by a "fuck you, Llewyn" as the cat kind of limps off into the woods. That cat was fine. Llewyn doesn't help anyone, and everyone gets by just fine without him.

I kinda doubt they wd've immersed themselves in the milieu to the degree of making this film w/out significant interest in it.

there's a different between interest and enjoyment imo

I feel like coen bros enjoy folk music more than paul thomas anderson enjoys fashion or scientology.

fair

Just watched this again, because it rules, and I could not help but view it as like a quasi-Buddhist companion piece to A Serious Man's Jewish absurdism/existentialism.

In ASM, all the misfortunes that befall Gopnik are random vicissitudes, but in this, almost everything bad that happens to Llewyn is karmic, the results of his own bad choices. There are so many specific little setups/payoffs with this--telling his sister to throw out the box of stuff and losing his seaman's license as a result, waiving royalties for the Mr. Kennedy record and being told later that it will probably be a hit, and of course getting the shit beat out of him for heckling that dude's wife. The circular structure = the wheel of samsara.

I love how many scenes there are of him just sitting down and performing an entire song. It never feels like an interruption, and it meshes with the themes above: each time this happens, he gets outside his own head and experiences a little moment of transcendence and mercy.

Inside Llewyn Davis is one of those films where every time I read a post like zchrys', I get an itch to rewatch it again.

otm

Included in a haul of albums given to me a couple of months ago--a co-worker's father died; they go way back--were a lot a folk albums, a few of them quite obscure. This one, from 1963, made me think of Llewyn's solo album.

https://img.discogs.com/jxuRmLJkvrGjwlZ_7QNnS1gzxBs=/fit-in/600x586/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-4851226-1586188264-1089.jpeg.jpg

Required a bit of detective work, but same guy! So in case you were wondering, Llewyn quit the business and went on to write action/adventure thrillers.

http://www.amazon.com/Alex-Lukeman/e/B000APYA0G%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

The Amazon link led me to Alex Lukeman's website, which had a contact e-mail, so I figured "Why not?"--thought he'd enjoy hearing that someone had stumbled onto his album 57 years later. He e-mailed back this morning, very polite, but with an aside that "Just to be clear, I'm not Llewyn, thank God. You might want to correct the impression left in the thread." He mentioned an article written by Terri Thal, Dave Van Ronk's wife, who also was his manager.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2013/12/13/dave-van-ronks-ex-wife-takes-us-inside-inside-llewyn-davis-2/

Missed that at the time--sounds like the movie is not a favourite with contemporaneous participants.

Which I can understand but doesn't affect my own enthusiasm for the film; I don't think I ever thought much about its accuracy, or placed much importance on that.

thanks clemenza - fascinating read.

rewatched today

def one of my favorite cold weather movies: whenever i think i’d like to go somewhere where it snows i watch this & remember that cold snowy weather sucks when you have to drive in it & walk around in it

that voice piece is interesting but most of her issues with the movie (too depressing, everyone is mean, no one seems to love music) seem to be coming from a place not understanding that its all being reflected through the POV of the main character, a mean depressed person whos sick of music. also this:

The music? It’s done well, but the movie never shows how it comes about. The inept Llewyn Davis arranged some of those songs? Sang them as well as Oscar Isaacs does? I don’t believe it. That schmuck couldn’t make that music.

she really never met anyone in the music business who was talented but also a dumb jerk?

to think this was our first taste of Poe Dameron and Kylo Ren's rivalry

This surely can't be coming up for nine years old, fuck that.

Now I think on it Llewyn's bleak odyssey to nowhere resonated a lot with my own personal wilderness era which I was still very much in at the time. Trudging around to places I didn't particularly want to go in order to try and feel like I was doing something to dig myself out of a rut I'd been trapped in for years at that point, listening to Bookends on a loop while waiting for trains in the bitter cold in that horrible winter of 2013.

I can't find it after all this time but I'm sure I read the weirdest wrong take where someone thought the woman in the folk club Llewyn heckles was supposed to be June Carter-Cash(!) based on the fact the guy in the alley that beats him up looks a bit like Johnny(!!).

I can't even begin to get my head round the sheer impossibility of that being the case even in the context of largely fictionalised narrative, the idea that a well-known country singer, who had that point had always played with either her family group or as part of her husband's band, would for some reason be schlepping round doing solo spots on the New York folk scene, looking about twenty years older than she would've been at that point, is so absurd it's honestly bothered me for years. I kind-of want to find that person and ask them what they were thinking.