Where would cinema be without its paid assassins, hired guns, and hitmen? The profession of hitman seems a fairly straightforward job description, but the great hitman movies both differ enormously and are far from straightforward. The target, the contract, the money, the hit, right? Wrong. These various tales of men hired to kill other men forms a genre which comes at you from different perspectives and in varied cinematic styles. (more…)
Tag: the Coen brothers
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Hollywood gave Shakespeare fans a Christmas present: a new version of one of the Bard’s most iconic and gripping tragedies. Although the plandemic delayed production by four months or so, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth was released on Apple+ on December 25. According to IMDB, it should hit the theaters on January 14. Variety reported that a sneak preview in September was a hit at the New York Film Festival, which had just cautiously reopened: (more…)
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Miller’s Crossing (1990) is the third Coen brothers movie, and in my eyes, it remains their best. Miller’s Crossing is set in an unnamed Midwestern city during the 1920s. (It was primarily filmed in New Orleans.) It tells the story of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), who serves as advisor to two warring gangsters, Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) and Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito).
Miller’s Crossing has a superb script, (more…)
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There is little satisfying critical literature on the Coen brothers’ 1991 film Barton Fink. Most viewers are inclined to think that this is because the film is a pretentious, meaningless piece of crap. And Barton Fink is surely the most widely detested film by the Coens. The fact that it swept the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d’Or, Best Director, and Best Actor (John Turturro) can simply be chalked up to French perversity and anti-Americanism. These people think Jerry Lewis is a genius, after all. (more…)
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1,216 words
In daily life, how do we determine who’s white?
Most whites never think about this. We have a psychological tendency to assume the answer is obvious. (more…)
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I don’t have much use for light comedies, but I love dark ones. Thus I have been a fan of the Coen brothers ever since their first movie Blood Simple, which I regard as a masterpiece.