Schlock and Awe

  The last part of my Cinematic Coen Itch.... BURN AFTER READING (2008) Burn After Reading is a movie I like with performances I love.  Everyone is great, and really builds and walks on that fine line of being Simpsons' characters and characters with depth and an inner life.  It's filled with characters the Coen's do best, like George Clooney, the idiot that thinks he's the smartest in the room.  It's a kind of performance where he is not taking it seriously and having fun, his main of the movie is to make a sex toy, which he makes himself out of materials from Home-Depo; the reveal of the penis seat is even on a second watch a brilliant moment.  You also can't help but feel sympathy for the likes of daffy Brad Pitt or unrequited Richard Jenkins, or Francis McDordmand who just wants her plastic surgery.  They have unwitting found themselves in a spy movie and don't know the rules.  But are all lonely and unsatisfied enough to go along with it.  M...

Sometimes you get a cinematic itch.    Sometimes it’s just a single movie, other’s it’s a Director.   It’s more the individual style or flavour a Director or Auteur brings to a movie.   And I for what ever reason or what ever Movie Podcast I was listening to that week, I got the Coen Brothers Itch.   So I started from the beginning. I am working my way through all eighteen movies, Blood Simple to The Ballard of Buster Scruggs.   Some of these movies I watching again,  they are old friends, some are new to me.   It’s going to be an Odyssey of quirky humour, classic characters, folksy music and a deep mythology that Joel and Ethan Coen keep returning to again and again.       Blood Simple (1984) When I watch The Coen’s debut, all I wanted to do is yell ‘I Quit’ to my unimpressed cat and stalk out of the room in pure frustrated envy.   Blood Simple is still one of my favourite Coen Joints, it’s lean mean, and sleazy; well...