ysbreker

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Well, the nice thing about the Coen Brothers is that their work supports that sort of disagreement. The story isn't about success, it's about how a combination of personal and societal shortcomings leads to protracted personal failure. If you can't connect to the story of an essentially good person struggling with depression and a generally caustic attitude about life getting left behind while those hundreds of people go on to their wonderful vibrant careers, that's really unfortunate. For me, it remains possibly my favorite Coen and I think it's fairly odd to fault it for being "meaningless" literally sentences after praising Burn After Reading, a satire that's literally meaningless, as in "eschewing meaning."

 

I bolded where I think we disagree.

 

If Burn After Reading and Inside Llewyn Davis were even halfway attempting the same thing at all, I'd say that'd be a valid equivalency. Also, I don't know where the idea that Burn After Reading is meaningless is coming from. Maybe in a vacuum, but not in 2008 after 7+ of the Bush years.

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I bolded where I think we disagree.

 

Fair enough. I guess I'm more sympathetic to Llewyn because I've been there and I know friends who've been there. His partner just committed suicide and he's got an entire city saying that he's got no worth without him (and, in the case of Lem, unwittingly but explicitly encouraging Llewyn to join him). I feel like all the moral tests of the movie (taking care of the cat, helping with Jean's abortion, leaving his ex to her own life, sharing his music with people who want to hear it) Llewyn passes or does his best to pass, and his failing is just that he's not nice to people. I personally am tired of protagonists in movies for whom niceness is a signifier for fundamental goodness, so I enjoy watching a movie about a character who is not nice but not evil either and watching how he is still made to suffer for it.

 

Anyway, I don't want to clog up the discussion of the Coens' oeuvre more, so let's just agree to disagree.

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Inside Llewyn Davis is near the top for me. Haven't seen all of them mind. Like how varied everyone's lists are. Maybe a Coens thread similar to the Pixar one is needed "Ladykillers sucks... A Coen Brothers thread"

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I'm rather with Patrick on Inside Llewyn Davis.  It's an interesting character study of a self-centered asshole, but I don't feel like it has as much to say as others do.  But it also falls in a category of movie for me that is best described as: "I'm glad I watched that, I'm never watching it again."  Though I suspect Gorm's argument about it being a snapshot in time of the character has a lot of merit as well, given the love and loyalty of a few people in his life that likely stems from a time when he wasn't as not-nice as he currently is. 

 

I seem to have a much more positive opinion on Hudsucker Proxy than almost anyone else.  It's been too many years since I watched it  last (10ish years) for me to give a critical defense of it, but the visual design of that movie is incredible, and when the Coens come up in conversation my mind is as likely to bring up some of the images from it as it is anything else from their catalog.  It's also likely that it was a breath of fresh air to someone stuck in the cultural wasteland of Western Kansas when it was released, and I was in a period where I had been watching a lot of the reference material for it on late night television.  I do remember it balancing worldliness, naivete, cynicism and optimism in interesting ways.  It's unreal, certainly, but that unrealness (approaching Brazil levels at times) is something I like about it. 

 

This whole conversation reminds me though that there are a half dozen Coen bros movies I've never got around to watching. 

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I've not seen Hudsucker, intolerable cruelty, man who wasnt there or Barton Funk.

Gonna watch those and revisit the rest before I see Hail, Caesar.

Saw Millers Crossing for the first time yesterday and liked it a lot. Even the bit where one man shoots another man with a Tommy gun for a full minute.

Edit: Barton Funk is their little seen musical, you've probably never heard of it.

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Fair enough. I guess I'm more sympathetic to Llewyn because I've been there and I know friends who've been there. His partner just committed suicide and he's got an entire city saying that he's got no worth without him (and, in the case of Lem, unwittingly but explicitly encouraging Llewyn to join him). I feel like all the moral tests of the movie (taking care of the cat, helping with Jean's abortion, leaving his ex to her life, sharing his music with people who want to hear it) Llewyn passes or does his best to pass, and his failing is just that he's not nice to people. I personally am tired of protagonists in movies for whom niceness is a signifier for fundamental goodness, so I enjoy watching a movie about a character who is not nice but not evil either and watching how he is still made to suffer for it.

 

Anyway, I don't want to clog up the discussion of the Coens' oeuvre more, so let's just agree to disagree.

 

Sure. I also want to point out that I do like Inside Llewyn Davis a whole lot, just not compared to the rest of the Coen Brothers work. This was the review that ended up coming the closest to how I felt.

 

Also, I relate to Llewyn Davis a LOT. Like, scarily so (I literally was in the local folk music scene and acted and felt how he did). So when I say I don't think he's an essentially good person, or find the time I spend with him pretty meaningless, there's probably a lot of baggage there.

 

But speaking of meaningless, Hudsucker Proxy is a film I find so goddamned charming I can't really fault it for being a total trifle. The second Jennifer Jason Leigh pops up as a Katherine Hepburn caricature, I'm hooked. 

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Few thoughts on Inside Llewyn Davis

I really related to Davis's depressive atmosphere and of feeling stuck and not going anywhere.

I also think Davis is an asshole. He's an asshole who lost his friend who was the glue for many of Davis's relationship, which start to fall apart when his friend is gone. What a painful thing to go through and experience; I've been there, so another thing I related to.

The blues and tonal colors of film really portray what it's like to be in a funk, a severe depression in which Davis is in throughout the film.

hell, even the end, of things repeating, is what is like to be in a depression. Having been a depressive most my life, life just feels like that, a repeat of bad mistakes and of situations you can't get out of



As I'm writing these random thoughts, that movie had a greater impact on me than I thought and I really want to re-watch it. The depressive nature of the film really got to me There's more I want to say, but I'm on my phone and don't feel like typing it all out

Edit: I'd say it's my second favorite Coen film. 

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This reminds me that I should (re)watch more Coen brothers' films, but I already have 222 films on my watchlist and it's growing every day. I'm basically set for this year if I want to also see new movies that will be coming out. I think I'll try to see more varied authors from varied periods and then maybe in a year or so I'll have a Coen brothers binge. Unless we do some group watching or something...

 

I think my personal favourite is Big Lebowsky, but I did like O Brother a lot at the time. I don't think I have rewatched it in the last decade. So far I agree that they don't really make bad movies. Every one of them is good in some way. I did like Llewyn Davis, but thought it was a bit ordinary, not that I can personally relate.

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I believe Burn After Reading to be the single greatest satire of the 21st century. So far.

 

And I think you've put Inside Llewyn Davis far too high for what is essentially a meaningless story in a wonderful milieu (honestly not that different than O Brother, just far less entertaining), and Blood Simple far too low for the second best neo-noir film ever. The rest I won't quibble with, as I know Raising Arizona is beloved but I just happen to find it almost entirely unfunny.

 

I really enjoyed Burn After Reading, but I just found there to be better Coen Brothers films, the satire and performances were great but I think it suffered from having been straight after No Country For Old Men. I get a lot of stick for Blood Simple but I've tried to watch it 4-5 times and apart from M Emmet Walsh it was just okay, nothing is bad about it but there is nothing that I could latch onto and enjoy whole heartedly. 

 

As for Llewyn Davis - that film is all about Oscar Isaac, his central performance ties the whole thing together. There shit going on in his face all the time, you can see the ticking time bomb of a personality degrading his ability to be a civil person to even the nicest people in his life. Yes, the film is essentially small in terms of what it explores but, fuck me, it is so powerful because in a weaker actor's hands it wouldn't have worked, in a more melodramatic writer or director's hands it would have some kind of explosive ending (Llweyn breaking down, killing himself, killing someone else - something really BAD would have to have happened). Instead, nothing really happens, Llweyn just carries on being empty like so many before him.

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Inside Llewyn Davis is near the top for me. Haven't seen all of them mind. Like how varied everyone's lists are. Maybe a Coens thread similar to the Pixar one is needed "Ladykillers sucks... A Coen Brothers thread"

 

Ladykillers sucks...Darjeeling Ltd. sucks...Tales from Earthsea sucks... etc.

 

I want to put Llewyn Davis pretty high on my list, but I also probably have to acknowledge that I think the roadtrip/John Goodman interlude, while cool, is a weird incongruous part of the film. 

 

Still there's a lot I like about Llewyn Davis, like the fact that I think it has the best Coen musical moments (from the films I've seen, anyway). I do think Llewyn is a good person, and I think he's really easy to relate to for anyone who has ever experienced any kind of arbitrary fate, positive or negative, in any competitive artistic field. That alone seems to make the movie stick with a lot of people. 

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I want to put Llewyn Davis pretty high on my list, but I also probably have to acknowledge that I think the roadtrip/John Goodman interlude, while cool, is a weird incongruous part of the film. 

 

That's funny, because I don't think the film holds together at all without that that whole sequence.  Goodman's character isn't..like an alternate future for Llewyn, but he's a man who followed a similar path.  In any other story, he'd be the magical, wise old man met on the side of the road (a quintessential Old Master role) who provides the right sage advice at the right time for Llewyn to get his shit together and let the movie end in triumph, or with triumph being able to be imagined.  This ain't a magical world, and you don't find strange, wise old men on the side of the road.  You find cranky old heroin addicts who are just as unpleasant to be around as you are. 

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That's funny, because I don't think the film holds together at all without that that whole sequence.  Goodman's character isn't..like an alternate future for Llewyn, but he's a man who followed a similar path.  In any other story, he'd be the magical, wise old man met on the side of the road (a quintessential Old Master role) who provides the right sage advice at the right time for Llewyn to get his shit together and let the movie end in triumph, or with triumph being able to be imagined.  This ain't a magical world, and you don't find strange, wise old men on the side of the road.  You find cranky old heroin addicts who are just as unpleasant to be around as you are. 

 

That's an interpretation of John Goodman's character that I hadn't fully processed, thank you for that. I always thought that Goodman's speech about voodoo and your life mysteriously turning to shit were the meaningful parts of that sequence, but this gives me more perspective.

 

It's so important that Llewyn's life goes nowhere and we're never informed whether he's right or wrong in his beliefs and actions. To steal a part from the review that Patrick linked, which really summed the appeal of the craft in Inside Llewyn Davis for me: "...I love a great deal of Inside Llewyn Davis, and especially admire its stubborn refusal to exonerate or condemn its anti-hero (who continually tries to do the right thing and then gives up when it proves too daunting or difficult)..."

 

As for Llewyn Davis - that film is all about Oscar Isaac, his central performance ties the whole thing together. There shit going on in his face all the time, you can see the ticking time bomb of a personality degrading his ability to be a civil person to even the nicest people in his life. Yes, the film is essentially small in terms of what it explores but, fuck me, it is so powerful because in a weaker actor's hands it wouldn't have worked, in a more melodramatic writer or director's hands it would have some kind of explosive ending (Llweyn breaking down, killing himself, killing someone else - something really BAD would have to have happened). Instead, nothing really happens, Llweyn just carries on being empty like so many before him.

 

That kind of performance is really Isaac's strength. Another movie (not by the Coens) that was excellent for me but mixed for almost everyone else to whom I talked was A Most Violent Year, which relies on Isaac's understated but ineluctably expressive performance to convey the inner strength of someone who is simply having the worst imaginable year of his life and not... ah, stopping, either metaphorically or literally.

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Ladykillers is pretty good, whatever dudes. Lots of laughs to be had and many funny lines stick out.

 

I can't decide if I hate Intolerable Cruelty or A Serious Man more. I thought Inside Llewelyn Davis was super lame not to mention absolutely boring. Don't care about any of whatever that movie was trying to say. Coens work best when they are funny I think rather than an overdose of symbolic nonsense like Barton Fink. I also wish I had walked out of the theatre for both There Will Be Blood and Synechdoche, NY and got those hours of my life back, so judge my opinion on that I suppose. Although I do find Barton Fink very entertaining though, so I don't know what to say there.

 

The more genre, violent films like Fargo, Miller's Crossing, True Grit, and No Country rank very well for me. But Blood Simple is an amateur garbage snoozefest, I'm sorry. With the included DVD commentary on however, it is very entertaining.

 

Also Hudsucker Proxy is indeed very good.

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If you have Netflix then The Good, The Bad, and the Weird is really good. Kimchi Western set in 1930s Manchuria during the Japanese occupation. A lot of really creative and dynamic action scenes. The intro train robbery scene should, at the very least, be checked out.

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[...] I also wish I had walked out of the theatre for both There Will Be Blood and Synechdoche, NY and got those hours of my life back, so judge my opinion on that I suppose. [...]

 

I just wish There Will Be Blood simply ended one scene earlier. I think it would have been better for it.

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Ladykillers is pretty good, whatever dudes. Lots of laughs to be had and many funny lines stick out.

 

I can't decide if I hate Intolerable Cruelty or A Serious Man more. I thought Inside Llewelyn Davis was super lame not to mention absolutely boring. Don't care about any of whatever that movie was trying to say. Coens work best when they are funny I think rather than an overdose of symbolic nonsense like Barton Fink. I also wish I had walked out of the theatre for both There Will Be Blood and Synechdoche, NY and got those hours of my life back, so judge my opinion on that I suppose. Although I do find Barton Fink very entertaining though, so I don't know what to say there.

 

The more genre, violent films like Fargo, Miller's Crossing, True Grit, and No Country rank very well for me. But Blood Simple is an amateur garbage snoozefest, I'm sorry. With the included DVD commentary on however, it is very entertaining.

 

Also Hudsucker Proxy is indeed very good.

 

This is why I love Coen Brothers - already across 7-8 different people, what each person prefers is wildly different.

 

I quite like how you compartmentalised genres within the Coen Brothers ouevre. As I was making my list I was trying to look for patterns in terms of what 'type' of Coen Brothers film I preferred. I think I might like their bawdy comedies less than their more 'serious' stuff.

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Yeah basically what attracted me to them in the first place was the comedy and the funny lines, first Raising Arizona when I was younger then on to Big Lebowski and the rest. The way they write dialogue and situations leading to the exchanges is the big draw for me. The dialogue is still what gets me through their more heady, symbolic, and confusing movies like A Serious Man where I probably would have left the theatre if not for the funny parts. I guess I don't like when they make movies like that because I can only work so hard to unravel the content in a movie that is coy about what it was trying to say and the events that happened.

Also I firmly believe that most of the reasons people laugh at Bad Santa are their rewrites of the script and the great dialogue, but they aren't credited as writers for the screen actors guild, just producers for that.

And then on just their scripts, I'm also a bit shocked on their credit for writing Unbroken. There is absolutely nothing signature about the Coens in that movie's script and very little dialogue in general. I also felt like Gambit may have shown some of their brilliance in the first half but the movie was directed like a 90s Rick Moranis comedy so I felt like the timing was all screwed up

I thought Crimewave was really stupid, but they wrote it after Blood Simple so it sort of figures. I haven't seen The Naked Man but I have it downloaded so I should probably give it a shot. My friend enjoys it a lot. It's an Ethan Coen only script so maybe it doesn't count?

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I have not. I'm not really a fan of Richard Stanley, but I'll keep it on my radar. Also it doesn't really sound like the sort of thing I'm talking about.

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Yeah, I guess it's not really, I'm sorry.

It was just on my mind after hearing it mentioned on a podcast do I just blurted about it at the first opportunity.

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I love ILD as a study of an artistic purist in a world that values trends, not to belittle dylan. 

 

in new TV i'm really loving The Expanse. I love sprawling space shows, and space stations. 

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I feel less like posting here now that I'm logging watches in letterboxd, but in the past couple of weeks I've seen some (mostly old) movies I can recommend:

 

The General (1926) - this almost seems like a Fury Road prototype, and I almost like it more. Buster Keaton on a train chase and back. Great physical comedy!

 

12 Angry Men (1957) - everyone probably knows this, and I may have seen it before as a child, but I didn't remember how good it actually was. Really gripping.

 

Roar (1981) - this one is a bit nuts, because the crew actually lived with big cats in Africa and a lot of them got injured and some almost killed. Nobody will ever make another movie like this again. Worth seeing just for being so unique (AFAIK) and it has some good physical comedy and occasional cuteness overdose.

 

Walkabout (1971) - A great Australian outback movie, one of my favourite kinds of movies.

 

Embrace of the Serpent (2015) - Slightly ruined by a weak ending, but overall a good movie about a journey to find a very specific plant in the Amazon.

 

Solaris (1972) - Holy shit, I can't even describe how good this is. I had always thought I had seen it around the time I watched Stalker, but maybe I didn't because I can't have forgotten this. It's just gorgeous and almost perfect in every way. Tarkovsky might end up being my favourite director after all, but I haven't watched all of his films yet.

 

Jauja (2014) - Viggo Mortensen walking on rocks, what more do you want out of a movie?

 

Mustang (2015) - Grandma and son try to keep 5 turkish girls virgins so they can be married off. Really liked it.

 

Also saw Revenant, Hateful 8 and The Danish Girl. The first half of Hateful 8 was amazing, but then a boring drawn-out conclusion started, that just had to explain everything in painstaking detail. The Danish Girl also started out really strong, but ended up losing me at the last third or so. I almost cried a few times, though. Revenant was more consistently good, but I think ultimately it might be forgettable.

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