Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ethan coen

"Intolerable cruelty"

Intolerable Cruelty is een Amerikaanse romantische komedie uit 2003, geregisseerd, mede geschreven en gemonteerd door Joel en Ethan Coen. Het script werd geschreven door Robert Ramsey en Matthew Stone en Ethan en Joel Coen, waarbij laatstgenoemde de laatste versie van het scenario schreef. Intolerable Cruelty ging in première op het 60e Internationale Filmfestival van Venetië op 2 september 2003…

#Catherine Zeta-Jones #Ethan Coen #George Clooney #Joel Coen

This movie is moody as fuck and that mood is ANXIOUS.

#blood simple #joel coen #ethan coen #coen brothers #criterion #criterion collection

Burn After Reading (2008)

director: Coen Brothers

#burn after reading #coen brothers #ethan coen #joel coen #movies #watched #izlediklerim #film

#drive away dolls #ethan coen #margaret qualley

As someone who is a fan of Tricia Cooke's past work, and furthermore aware of the, uh, optics at play here, Drive Away Dolls presents a unique struggle, simply because Cooke is in fact the new addition to the mix just as Ethan Coen's work mysteriously gets bad. Maybe all the talent was stored in the Joel?

I've been doing my best to try and explain away why Coen (and Cooke) made the movie the way that it is, but the fact of the matter is that Drive Away Dolls isn't particularly good. It's fun, and I enjoyed it, but I can't say that as a film it was really that good at all.

I hesitate to point the entirety of the blame towards Tricia Cooke, longtime Coen collaborator, Notable Artistic Lesbian, and Wife to Ethan Coen (I'm not kidding). While she did co-write the film, and is the movie's uncredited co-director, there were choices in this film that equally lie at the feet of Coen himself as the co-director, and considering the strength of the combined Coen body of work, you really have to ask where it went wrong. The whole point of co-directing is that two heads are better than one here, and you should catch things in a film when they don't work. In any case, the absence of Joel and the addition of Cooke, in whatever order, has done the film a disservice.

It's not that Cooke doesn't know movies. In her many capacities working in film she's put out some really solid stuff, and her editing is part of the reason that many Coen films over the years were as good as they were. Which is really why Drive Away Dolls came as a surprise to me.

The movie is still fun, and I wouldn't quite call it a "bad" film, just an unimpressive one. It's a zany crime drama about two lesbians stumbling into an underworld conspiracy that reaches right to the top as they fumble some very valuable goods belonging to some very valuable people. There are goons, there are psychedelic interludes, there are some properly entertaining gags, but it all falls short of the Coen magic I expect. Which is really the crux of the matter, the film is a letdown.

Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan give pretty solid performances in this, managing to hold their own even though they were cast alongside acting giants such as Bill Camp, Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Coleman Domingo. The cinematography is solid, and the writing is honestly pretty solid (Cooke knows how to make movies!)

And yet! The movie's general choices, pacing, and delivery just don't work. Despite Qualley and Viswanathan's performance in the film overall, the chemistry between the two of them is simply nonexistent. Qualley's Texas accent nails the inflections and tone, but delivers the film's dialog with a speedy, clippy delivery that runs much to east coast to be believable, even for a fast talker.

But most of all Drive Away Dolls simply tries too hard to be silly goofy zany. It's a film that is always turning to the audience for approval as it turns a big dial marked "goofy," giving the same insecurity in its gags as a middling short film that some college students entered into their first festival. Which is fine for an end-of-semester final project film but less so when you've been making films for as long as Coen and Cooke have! They have the skills to make something better than this.

One thing I will note about the film is that while it's unabashedly an LGBT movie by lesbians for lesbians, it does a great job of avoiding any self-congratulatory back-patting about this. This movie is about lesbians the same way The Departed is about Bostonians. The flavor is essential to the character of the movie, but the directors don't continually self-aggrandize for making the film either. Probably one of the best executed parts of Drive Away Dolls for sure.

I always find myself making multi-paragraph filmposts about mid films that are barely better than your average Marvel Movie, and Drive Away Dolls was exactly mid enough to trigger this behavior in me. I thought it was a fun watch with a bunch of great needle drops and a lot of wasted potential. It's not the worst Lesbian crime drama out there, but it's certainly not the best.

#filmposting #tricia cooke #ethan coen #drive away dolls