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The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind
The first full-length book to concentrate on the Coen brothers' body of work.
- GenresMedia Tie In
192 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2001
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March 27, 2020
In James Mottram's film by film guide (up to 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou') on the work of America's most consistently outstanding filmmakers, he starts off my listing the ten films that the Coens' picked to be screened at a tribute to them by the Stockholm Film Festival, looking for clues that will help him look into the heart of his inscrutable subjects.
Good luck, dude. Those ten films are, of course, both as obvious and irrelevant as you would expect, telling you something and nothing, offering no real help at all. True enough, the correlations drawn between them and the subjects' own movies are tenuous, half-hearted and of very little meaning or value when you sit down to watch, say, Miller's Crossing
But what is there really to say about the movies these two mischievous brothers make? I wouldn't bother myself. Fuck it, let's go bowling. But Mottram tries, and what results is a string of pretty dull, disjointed essays, short on cohesiveness, long on nods to Cain, Chandler and Hammett, as well as a fair few mentions of that accusation of style over substance that they get all the time.
Oh, and The Hudsucker Proxy has lots of circles in it.
As weak as this is, it's still preferable to using the Coens' own words to make a point. Joel once claimed that Raising Arizona contained "all the basic elements of contemporary movie-making - babies, Harley Davidsons and high explosives.
This is an obvious leg- pull, yet Mottram then proceeded to list three films to support this drivel ('Three Men and a Baby', 'Baby Boom', and 'Parenthood') that a) only featured one of those things, and b) came out afterwards.
Mottram isn't helped by his publishers either, this printing was positively riddled with horrible typos throughout, the worst of which was the appearance of the word "accompany" when it should read "accomplish". Quite an accompanylishment.
All told, the only point made of any use in understanding the Coens' work was a borrowed quote from Ryan Gilby, film critic for the Independent, who wrote:
"The Coen Brothers make films about nothing. Really, nothing...and does that matter?"
Good luck, dude. Those ten films are, of course, both as obvious and irrelevant as you would expect, telling you something and nothing, offering no real help at all. True enough, the correlations drawn between them and the subjects' own movies are tenuous, half-hearted and of very little meaning or value when you sit down to watch, say, Miller's Crossing
But what is there really to say about the movies these two mischievous brothers make? I wouldn't bother myself. Fuck it, let's go bowling. But Mottram tries, and what results is a string of pretty dull, disjointed essays, short on cohesiveness, long on nods to Cain, Chandler and Hammett, as well as a fair few mentions of that accusation of style over substance that they get all the time.
Oh, and The Hudsucker Proxy has lots of circles in it.
As weak as this is, it's still preferable to using the Coens' own words to make a point. Joel once claimed that Raising Arizona contained "all the basic elements of contemporary movie-making - babies, Harley Davidsons and high explosives.
This is an obvious leg- pull, yet Mottram then proceeded to list three films to support this drivel ('Three Men and a Baby', 'Baby Boom', and 'Parenthood') that a) only featured one of those things, and b) came out afterwards.
Mottram isn't helped by his publishers either, this printing was positively riddled with horrible typos throughout, the worst of which was the appearance of the word "accompany" when it should read "accomplish". Quite an accompanylishment.
All told, the only point made of any use in understanding the Coens' work was a borrowed quote from Ryan Gilby, film critic for the Independent, who wrote:
"The Coen Brothers make films about nothing. Really, nothing...and does that matter?"
Displaying 1 of 1 review