(JTA) — Asked about diversity in Hollywood last week, the Coen brothers defended to the Washington Post their history of making movies about Jews and Minnesotans. The Oscars So White controversy, #OscarsSoWhite, may reflect a real problem, the film writing-directing-producing duo agreed: Money drives commercial movies, people who invest money want more of what has…
To the Coen Brothers, we are all fools. Jut take a look at their characters: There’s the pretentious and deluded playwright Barton Fink in “Barton Fink”; hard-luck schlemiels like Larry Gopnik (“A Serious Man”) and Llewyn Davis (“Inside Llewyn Davis”); and entire casts of nitwits in movies such as “Raising Arizona,” “O Brother Where Art…
Joel and Ethan Coen, the American filmmaker brothers, will be the first co-presidents of the jury for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the organizers said on Tuesday. The Coen brothers, who made “Fargo,” “Barton Fink” and “No Country for Old Men,” replace Australian filmmaker Jane Campion, who was last year’s president. The jury will choose…
This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film, “Blood Simple.” Since then, the pair have written or directed eighteen of the wackiest, funniest, and most memorable movies of all time. Here are seven of the greatest scenes from the Coens’ impressive catalogue: 1. Fargo – “He’s a little guy,…
Success always seems inevitable in retrospect. Once you’ve arrived, it must have been destined all along. But failure — especially dream-crushing, life-destroying failure — is plagued by what-ifs and what-might-have-beens. Was it just bad luck, or did you really not have what it takes? Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), the tortured protagonist of Joel and Ethan…
Jeff Bridges, with his new “The Dude and the Zen Master” book, may be having a hard time saying goodbye to his “Big Lebowski” alter-ego. But that is not at all the case with the Coen brothers, who recently said quite definitively that there would be no sequel to the 1998 cult classic, whose popularity…
I have a lot of faith in the Coen brothers. But when I heard that their next film, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” was going to be about a singer-songwriter in Greenwhich Village during the folk revival, I was a little worried. If there’s a period ripe for nostalgia among beardy folk music types, this one is…
The Cannes International Film Festival announced the lineup for its main competition today, and the film I was hoping for most isn’t there. Still, there are movies to look forward to. Chief among them is “Inside Llewyn Davis,” by Joel and Ethan Coen, about a Bob Dylan-esque Greenwich Village singer-songwriter in the 1960s, which is…
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