I was thinking about this recently when watching
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Joel Coen
calorioles — 10 years ago(November 10, 2015 12:48 PM)
I was thinking about this recently when watching
O Brother Where Art Thou?
. It could have been just a silly forgettable movie, an adaptation of the Odyssey set in the Depression era South, with some bluegrass tunes mixed in here and there. But watching it in the hands of the Coens, it just ended up being so much more.
There's no question the Coens are my favorite filmmakers, by far.
Fargo
,
The Big Lebowski
and
A Serious Man
have to be in my Top 5 all time favorites;
O Brother
and
Raising Arizona
are in my Top 10.
But I'm hard pressed as to how exactly they manage to make such great movies time after time.
Obviously, there's great writing. And you have multiple A list actors who have filled the ranks of their casts, so there's great acting, too. But there's got to be more than just that. I've seen many a film with great acting and great writing but they don't make the same impact on me as the Coens' best films do.
So what is it? Perhaps it's the attention to stylized detail. Perhaps it's their ability to pay homage to past Hollywood works. Perhaps it's the feeling you get that you've managed to get the same deeper sense of satisfaction in watching one of their movies that you get after reading a good book (not too many movies can pull that off.) Or perhaps it's that in so many characters they've managed to perfect the concept of the Wise Simpleton, an otherwise ordinary character who somehow manages to have a far deeper insight into things than one might expect.
So what is it? What makes the Coens movies so Coen? -
Robbmonster — 10 years ago(March 16, 2016 08:40 AM)
It's an interesting question. I was over at the Fargo board last night, and someone was asking what makes Fargo so great. I was going to try to reply, but I just couldn't. I can't articulate it.
Luckily, your question is a bit more broad.
One thing is their versatility. No director worth his viewfinder is a one-trick pony, but the Coen's have taken it to the extreme. These are the guys who made Miller's Crossing AND O Brother Where Art Thou. The guys who made Blood Simple AND Raising Arizona as their first two films. They can write a variety of styles and genres, and can direct them, all while maintaining a very distinct voice.
Another thing is that very voice. There is something distinctive that is hard to describe. They make the big trivial and the trivial big. They da0make the tragic funny and the funny tragic. Their characters often have an ability to talk in circles in ways that few others do.
It's a really difficult thing to divine what makes a director or director's great or even distinctive. It's really just the ability to have a distinct vision and voice, as well as the ability to perfectly articulate it and transfer it to screen. And that voice being so specific is a major reason some people just adore the Coen's, and some people simply never will.
As much as I love the Coen's, I STILL have not seen some of what is considered their best work. Hudsucker Proxy, A Serious Man, Barton Fink,even The Big Lebowski are still ones I have yet to see. And Intolerable Cruelty.
That's about the best I can offer, but I really didn't do a good job of expressing myself.
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