The Screengrab : barton fink

Take Five: The Squared Circle

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling. High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that. It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies. And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible. Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage. While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line: "Wallace Beery! Wrestling picture! Whattya want, a road map?" Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves. John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS (1998)

Bret "Hitman" Hart comes from what can only be described as one of professional wrestling's royal families. His father, a tough-as-nails Canadian legend and a strict disciplinarian who planned his childrens' careers from the crib, runs one of the most respected schools in the sport, and almost everyone around him -- his brothers, his in-laws, his friends -- are involved in pro wrestling. In this A&E documentary, we follow the everyday life of someone immersed in the game: his strained family life, his true feelings about the sport, and his growing discomfort with the storylines being written for him -- which results in one of the most memorable betrayals, both real and staged, in the modern-day history of wrestling. A little-seen film, Wrestling With Shadows is a sharp, perceptive piece of work that deserves a wider audience.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950)

Jules Dassin's legendary British film noir would probably have worked just as well if it had featured boxing -- that violent and often rigged sport so beloved by the makers of moody crime dramas -- instead of professional wrestling. But by having Richard Widmark's needy, creepy, desperate little hustler Harry Fabian wrapped up in the sport of wrestling, we get a number of elements that prove highly rewarding: Herbert Lom's compelling performance as Kristo gives some sense of the strange dynastic quality of some of the great wrestling families, and best of all, we get the unforgettable fight scene between Mike Mazurki as the Strangler and Stanislaus Zybyszko as Gregorius. Both men were actual wrestlers -- but Zybyszko, then an astonishing 70 years old, was from the transitional era when it was actually a legitimate sport. His performance in the scene -- almost silent, incredibly brutal, and absolutely mesmerizing -- has both incredible dignity and repulsive, visceral emotion.

BEYOND THE MAT (1999)

Inspired by Wrestling with Shadows and covering a lot of the same thematic territory, Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat had a theatrical run and thus attracted a good deal more attention than its predecessor. Both films shared qualities in common, though, from the alternatingly absurd and tragic lives of those who try to make a living as professional wrestlers to the personal dramas of the ring workers that mirror their gamed-out struggles. (They also share the quality of making WWE head honcho Vince McMahon look like an utter fucking creep, but that's not so hard, since he does the same thing himself every time he opens his mouth.) This time out, the most compelling figures are the ruined, crack-addicted wreck Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his opposite number, the witty, gregarious family man Mick Foley.

SPIDER-MAN (2002)

One of the most successful and enjoyable big-screen super-hero adaptations, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man gets a lot of its juice from the way it envisions Peter Parker's origin story without being boring or disrespectful. Since Spider-Man's is one of the most familiar origin stories in comics, Raimi had to do it just right, and one of the just-rightest scenes is the one where Parker, his powers newly acquired but not fully mastered, decides to cash in on them by taking part in a televised wrestling match. Raimi updates the scene by making it a big, flashy, ECW-style 'extreme' competition, but keeps the sense of fun and absurdity, most especially by casting lovable legend Randy Savage as Spidey's squared-circle nemesis, Bonesaw. To this day, the scene is one of my all-time favorites in any superhero movie to date.

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The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We’re Thankful For (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE IS THANKFUL FOR:

BARTON FINK (1991)

It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself agreeing with the French, and it wouldn’t be the last. But when this richly layered film by the Coen Brothers swept the major awards at Cannes, it was, for me, a confirmation that what I had only previously suspected was indeed true: Joel and Ethan Coen were not just good directors, not just great directors, but the greatest living American filmmakers. Barton Fink, to this day, is not one of the Coens’ best-loved films; it tends to be very divisive, and while its greatness isn’t frequently in question, where it belongs in their filmography is hotly disputed. For me, even in the wake of later triumphs like Fargo, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country for Old Men, it seems obvious that it’s one of their greatest movies, and likely their best altogether. For a movie that was apparently scratched out during the making of Miller’s Crossing to help the Coens overcome a bad case of writer’s block, it’s astonishingly deep and complex, a deft blend of satirical comedy, character-driven drama and existential horror that seems all along to be about one thing and ends up being very profoundly about another. Not even The Big Lebowski equals Barton Fink as an evocation of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and its intricate, dreadful set design surpasses anything the Coens have ever done. And to top it all off, it’s one of the few cinematic evocations of the process of writing that isn’t an embarrassment. The day I saw Barton Fink is the day I finally realized that the greatness of Hollywood films wasn’t a thing of the past: it was something I was living through.

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

One of the marks of a truly great film is that it seems you can never find enough things to say about it. Sitting down to write this, I wondered what I could mention about The Big Sleep that I hadn’t already talked about a hundred times; but now, I realize I could write a hundred pages about it and still not even begin to cover all the things worth discussing. Although everyone involved with this imperishable hardboiled detective yarn was at the top of their game, its greatness is largely the work of four geniuses at the absolute peak of their powers: the brilliant pulp novelist Raymond Chandler, who provided the source material about Philip Marlowe’s foray into pornography, blackmail and murder; the great novelist William Faulkner, who was brought on to write the unforgettable screenplay and who added his own raffish twists; the consummate professional, director Howard Hawks, who filmed one of the tightest movies of the era; and actor Humphrey Bogart, who cemented his role as perhaps the greatest leading man of all time with his utterly wonderful performance as Marlowe. Every single set piece in the film works perfectly; it’s a testament to how well the movie succeeds that whenever someone brings up the fact that the plot has a massive hole in it, it’s only to say that it doesn’t really matter one whit. The movie is drenched in L.A. atmosphere despite its back lot settings, and not a single performance is a dud: Bogart and lead actress Lauren Bacall got all the attention, but everyone, from the hired goons to the butler, shines during their moments on camera. Often identified as the father-film of the golden age of noir, I’d argue that The Big Sleep is lacking a few key elements of my favorite cinematic genre, but it does contain enough of them that it kick-started my interest in crime dramas; and maybe it’s a good thing that it’s not pure noir. If it was, it would have no competition.

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Dr. Strangelove did a lot for me. It was one of the first movies of my color-charged adolescence that taught me how to appreciate the virtues of filming in black and white. It was my first introduction to the work of the savagely funny Terry Southern, whose ultra-black absurdist humor, and whose underlying premise that people in high places were like as not entirely insane, would be a huge influence on my later life. It was my second encounter, after The Shining, with the great Stanley Kubrick, who I am still convinced is even more brilliant than he is generally given credit for, and that’s considerable. But most of all, what it did for me was to convince me of something that, up until then, I had not believed, and that even now, in my darker moments, I suspect might not be the case: it convinced me that a funny movie could also be a great movie. I had always had an affinity for comic writing, especially of the variety as poisonous and coal-black as that found in this Cold War apocalyptic comedy, but I was also learning to appreciate great art, and I so rarely found the two within shouting distance of one another that I started to despair. The truly great, I decided, and the truly funny, were incompatible, and I’d have to make a choice. Luckily, Dr. Strangelove came around and showed me how wrong I was. It is unquestionably a great film: brilliantly structured, astonishingly well-filmed, crammed full of great performances, and featuring a few set pieces (the first shots of the War Room, in particular, and the breathtaking hand-held shots of the invasion of Burpelson Air Force Base) that are undoubtedly the work of a great filmmaker. But it is also a paralyzingly funny movie, and the telephone conversation between Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley and the unseen Soviet premier may be the most hilarious scene I’ve ever encountered.

PERSONA (1966)

Just before I saw Persona for the first time, I was starting to get worried about myself. My taste in movies ran decidedly towards rugged genre work, and there was something unsettlingly dude-ish about my attraction to films about murderers and lowlifes. And I didn’t quite understand what great acting really was; I tended to confuse character with acting, and I often mistook dynamic presence for talent, not realizing they are two substantially different things. What’s more, my attempts at appreciating Ingmar Bergman had been pretty thoroughly jobbed. Sitting in a small theatre in Phoenix in 1993, though, changed all those things. Persona, which today I count as one of the very tiny number of movies I’d contemplate if asked to name my all-time favorite films, was a quiet, sinuous film whose significant emotional power came entirely from within instead of being generated by external threats. Its acting was explosively great, and yet so subtle and calm as to be nearly invisible; it taught me the value of reaction, of contemplation, and of silence to great acting. It showed me what Bergman was truly trying to do, and allowed me to finally appreciate him for what he was; and, beyond that, it proved to me, in the same way Dr. Strangelove had proven that comedy and genius were not incompatible, that a movie could be deeply, intrinsically philosophical and not be pretentious, preachy or incomprehensible. Genre film never really relinquished its hold on me, and I later figured out how to look far enough below the surface that I could see depth when there had seemed only to be tension; but that’s a lesson I never would have learned if it weren’t for Persona.

WAVELENGTH (1967)

“Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses never happened,” asked the Scottish experimental writer B.S. Johnson, “and still rely on the crutch of storytelling?” It’s a question I’d learned to ask of literature, but until I lucked into a screening of Michael Snow’s daring structuralist masterpiece Wavelength in college, I had not yet learned to ask it of film. Every movie on my list, I included because I’m thankful that it introduced me to some new element of filmmaking that hugely enriched my life as a viewer. In the case of Wavelength, it’s simply stated: it taught me that there was such a thing as experimental film. That alone opened up huge new vistas for me, and led me to great filmmakers like Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Chris Marker, and, especially, Stan Brakhage. Wavelength itself is quite a curiosity, even decades after its debut: a 45-minute tracking shot across a New York loft, accompanied by disjointed conversation, hints of a murder, an atonal whine, the final and unending terminal focus on a photo of the ocean. It straddles the border between narrative and non-narrative while opening up huge possibilities for visual poetry, the freeing of the camera from spatial limitations and traditional usages, and the nature of time in this most time-based medium. Prints of Wavelength are hard to come by, and often as not in terrible condition; it would be wonderful if America treated Snow (who filmed Wavelength here) as well as he’s regarded in his native Canada.

Click Here For More Thanks From Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Long before Robert Altman gave three quarters of the Screen Actors Guild an opportunity to parody and celebrate themselves in The Player, Billy Wilder managed to corral a Golden Age Who’s Who (including Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper and Cecil B. DeMille, playing funhouse mirror versions of themselves) for a project which, even had it failed, would still have been a worthwhile snapshot of an epochal changing of the guard at the crossroads of Old Hollywood and the dawn of the modern era. But, of course, Sunset Boulevard didn’t fail: this classic dance of death between Swanson’s desperate, deluded has-been and William Holden’s bitterly conflicted never-was received critical hosannas, eleven Academy Award nominations and three wins, a fairly secure spot on the AFI list of the greatest American movies and a mediocre musical adaptation (a sure sign of massive cultural penetration). Box office-wise, the movie failed to click with the hix in the stix upon its initial release, possibly contributing to the movie industry’s ongoing conviction that Middle America has little interest in movies about (A) the movie industry and/or (B) monkey funerals.

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1951)

One of the best musicals ever made, Singin' in the Rain is also one of the freshest self-satires ever to come out of Hollywood. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen play silent movie stars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, whose continuing success as a screen couple is endangered by the coming of sound, which is a problem because of lovely Lina's pronounced vocal resemblance to the sound a cat makes when you feed its tail into the garbage disposal. (I was eight years old. The statute of limitations has long since run out.) As a parody of a narcissistic star's condescending attitude towards the fans, Hagen's adenoidal speech to the "little people" has never been bettered, except maybe for a few real stars at awards shows who didn't know that they were competing with a put-on.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch's love/hate relationship with Hollywood is well-documented, and both sides of the equation are on full display in this masterful fever dream, rescued from network television oblivion after clueless ABC suits deep-sixed the pilot for Lynch's proposed follow-up to Twin Peaks. The set-up could have made for an intriguing continuing series: cheery, naïve small-towner Betty (Naomi Watts) comes to L.A. and finds amnesiac raven-haired beauty "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring) hiding in her aunt's apartment. Betty tries to help Rita unlock the secret of her true identity even as she pursues her dream of an acting career, which takes off after an electrifying audition for brooding filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). The feature film version of Mulholland Drive turns the entire scenario inside-out, reconfiguring all the characters and events into a nightmare straight out of Hollywood Babylon. In Lynch's twisted vision, the film industry is presented as a shadowy conspiracy of malevolent oddballs. You get the impression this is exactly how Lynch thinks show business is run, and who knows, he may be right.

BARTON FINK (1991)

One of the Coen Brothers' most divisive films, Barton Fink is famously an extended meditation on writer's block, conceived when they found themselves unable to progress any further on the labyrinthine plot to Miller's Crossing. And, indeed, it's a fine treatment of writing and writers, a subject Hollywood gets terribly wrong more often than not. But there's more than one of Joel & Ethan's crippling neuroses on display here: they're also extremely diffident about working within the Hollywood system, and while they may not feel much sympathy with the phony working-class sentiments of the titular playwright, they're certainly not on the side of the impossibly crass, bullying toadstool of a producer, played by Michael Lerner in one of the Coens' finest 'angry man behind an expensive desk' roles. The writers' own vices, from Fink's arrogance and ego to Faulkner stand-in Bill Mayhew's alcoholism and self-pity, may be what sinks them, but studio bosses like Lerner's bombastic Jack Lipnick, Jon Polito's toadying Lou Breeze, and Tony Shalhoub's irritable Ben Geisler are always willing to throw them a boulder. In the end, Fink, trapped by his own unwillingness to listen, finds himself in what is likely one of the Coen Brothers' worst nightmares: locked into an unbreakable studio contract, largely incapable of producing any worthwhile work, and even when they can, unable to find anyone to produce it.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Hebrew Hammers: The Top 12 Tough Jews of Cinema (Part II)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

JOHN GOODMAN AS WALTER SOBCHAK IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

Okay, so technically, this one is a bit of a cheat. Not only was Walter Sobchak portrayed by the decidedly non-Jewish John Goodman, but the character isn’t even technically of the People; as the Dude points out, he’s a Polish Catholic who converted when he married a Jewish woman. Still, that doesn’t stop him from maintaining his Jewish identity to the point of outright hostility; he won’t roll on Shabbos, and claims that he’s “as Jewish as fuckin’ Tevye”. Nor does it stop him, in a movie not exactly known for its macho tough guys, from being the toughest guy on screen: whether it’s pulling a .45 on a burned-out hippie for going over the line while bowling, hatching a scheme to take out an entire gang of phony kidnappers, or biting the ear off of a German nihilist, the proprietor of Sobchak Security displays a toughness that borders on the psychotic. And if he sometimes flags a bit, backing off from an outraged neighbor whose car he’s just totaled, he makes up for it later by brusquely yanking a paraplegic out of his wheelchair to see if he’s faking. (Turns out he isn’t, but hey, he had to check, right?) As an aside, Walter may be the toughest Jew in the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ouvre, but he’s hardly the only one; their films are crammed full of hard-assed Hebrews. There’s tough-as-nails furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (nee Huffheinz) in Raising Arizona; steely mob moll Verna Birnbaum in Miller’s Crossing, who has plenty more guts than her conniving brother Bernie; monstrous movie producer/force of nature Jack Lipnick (played by longtime tough Jew Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink; scheming business tycoon Sidney Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy; and inscrutable post-modernist shyster Freddie Riedenschneider in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Sure, only one of those characters was actually played by a Jewish actor, but the Coen Brothers clearly have a soft spot for tough Jews, and Walter may be the best, but he won’t be the last.

HANK GREENBERG IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG (1998)

No other baseball player could ever match the impact of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1947, or go through the hell he did to achieve it. But as the 1998 documentary The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg makes clear, the major leagues were no picnic for the first Jewish slugger either. When Greenberg got his start in the Texas League, a teammate was puzzled by his appearance; he'd been told that all Jews had horns. Things didn't improve when he made it to the show in the 1930s. Between Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, Detroit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Chants of "kike" and "sheeny" rang out through the stands and opposing dugouts. But through it all, Greenberg was a one-man wrecking crew. He was twice voted the American League MVP and he led the Detroit Tigers to back-to-back World Series in 1934 and 1935, despite refusing to play on Yom Kippur during the pennant drive. (He did play on Rosh Hashanah, though – his rabbi found a loophole in the Talmud.) The Hebrew Hammerin' Hank was the first prominent Jew known for physical prowess and an inspiration to kids like Walter Matthau ("I was just delighted to know there was someone like Hank Greenberg around, and I didn't have to wind up as a presser, a cutter or a salesman in the garment center") and Alan Dershowitz ("He defied every stereotype – he defied Hitler's stereotype!"). He's in the baseball Hall of Fame – and now he's in our Hall of Tough Jews.

MICHAEL LERNER AS ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN IN EIGHT MEN OUT (1988)

How tough was Arnold Rothstein, the only man to successfully fix the World Series? So tough that Rich Cohen, the author of Tough Jews, calls him “the Moses of organized crime”. Though the man many refer to as the most successful Jewish gangster in American history met an ugly end, getting his gut shot after he bowed out of what he claimed was a crooked poker game, he made quite a name for himself along the way: starting out as a masterful oddsmaker and proposition bettor, he rose to such prominence that Lucky Luciano credits him as having taught the Italian mobsters of the day how to act and dress, and Frank Costello claims he was the first to truly recognize the vast amounts of money to be made off of prohibition. He became fodder for no less an artist than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim on him; Damon Runyon picked up the gauntlet, writing Arnold into many of his stories under a variety of names. Along the way, he also became a legendary pool shark (providing inspiration for the marathon game in The Hustler) and made a nearly unprecedented mark on modern organized crime – so much so that another tough Jew, The Godfather Part II’s Hyman Roth, cites him as an inspiration. Oh, yeah – and he fixed the 1919 World Series and got away with it scot-free. Although the names of many a White Sox great was dragged down into ignominious disgrace (including two, Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver, who were likely innocent of any wrongdoing), Rothstein, the architect of the fix and the man who made more money off of it than anyone else, was completely exonerated by an impressionable jury. In Eight Men Out, Rothstein is expertly played by Michael Lerner, no stranger to playing tough Jews (see the entry on Walter Sobchak, above); his icy, unflappable confidence and contempt is perfectly realized in a scene where, discussing with his fixer the likelihood that the best players in baseball will take a dive, says “I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. ‘Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say. ‘Sit down, maybe you'll learn something.’ Well, I learned something all right. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands.”

LEE STRASBERG AS HYMAN ROTH IN THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

By the time we meet him Hyman Roth is an old man in ill health, yet we'd never think to call him frail. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharp and his lust for wealth and power undiminished. The Godfather saga's fictionalized version of Meyer Lansky was one of the few screen roles taken on by Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, and easily the greatest. In a few short scenes, with a handful of well-chosen gestures – the dismissive passing of a gold telephone, the raising of a plate of cake – Strasberg gives us a man in full. We may never have seen him in the full bloom of youth, but we can guess how terrifying he must have been from his "Moe Green" speech to Michael Corleone, one of the all-time great movie monologues. His gaze steady and full of fire, his breath hitching in fierce, staccato snorts, Roth lays it on the line: This is the business we've chosen.

ADAM GOLDBERG AS MELLISH IN SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998) AND THE HEBREW HAMMER IN THE HEBREW HAMMER (2003)

In comedic roles from Dazed & Confused to Entourage, Adam Goldberg frequently comes across as a younger, hairier Woody Allen with his fast-talking, hyper-cerebral neurotic characters. But, even in his lighter moments, there’s always a sense of intensity and simmering anger underpinning his performances, leading my fellow Screengrabber Phil Nugent to suggest his work in 2 Days In Paris for this list (“What can I say? The guy scares me!”). But instead, I’ve chosen two of his more overtly tough screen personas, in films where his characters literally bring the pain. As the Jewish soldier Private Stanley Mellish in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg’s character is a smart, regular guy hardened by combat and his own, very personal stake in the war. Even when his tough façade finally cracks (in one of the most harrowing, visceral depictions of impending death I’ve ever seen), Mellish, despite his fear, remains determined and clear-headed to the end. As the titular superhero in The Hebrew Hammer, meanwhile, Goldberg tweaks the popular notion that Jews are more brainy than brawny in what writer/director Jonathan Kesselman dubbed the first “Jewsploitation” movie. As Mordechai Jefferson Carver, Goldberg wears the wide-brimmed hat of a Hasidim like a pimp crossed with Clint Eastwood as he fights to save Hanukah from the clutches of Santa’s murderous, power-mad son, Damian. Non-P.C. hilarity and Jewish stereotypes repurposed as standard Hollywood action clichés ensue. Shabbat Shalom, muthahfuckers!

CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)

It’s one of the crowning ironies in the history of religious cinema that Charlton Heston, a man who tended to project about the same spiritual qualities as a forcefully hurled brick, portrayed not only the author of the Pentateuch, but also the Pope. It’s even more ironic that Moses, perhaps the toughest Jew in history, was given his most memorable screen portrayal by a man so WASPy his first name was “Charlton”. The Bible tells us that Moses was a willful but often reticent man, a man so unsure of himself, so terrified to lead, that he asked his brother Aaron to do his public speaking; in Cecil B. DeMille’s last huge Bible epic, Heston’s Moses couldn’t be farther from that portrayal. Moses, in the hands of Chuck amok, is a primal force of nature, as intimidating as God himself; when he struts down from the Mount after having received the Decalogue, he looks less like a man awed by coming face-to-face with the creator of the universe than he does Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. His jaw jutting even beneath his pasted-on beard and his iron chest swelling outside of his robes, Heston’s Moses looks like he’s received special dispensation from Jehovah to start kicking ass and taking names, and he can’t wait to get started. When Moses sneers “Hear His word, Ramses, and obey,” he isn’t imploring, he’s demanding – let my people go, he seems to say, or I’ll take these stone tablets and flatten you right across the choppers with them. It’s no wonder this portrayal resonated with Chosen People and Gentiles alike; the goyim got to claim the actor as their own, and the Jews got to see their main man transformed from thoughtful liberationist rebbe to one-man Pharoah-stomping machine. Heston would go on to play Judah Ben-Hur, who was almost as tough a Jew as Moses, but The Ten Commandments still remains the pinnacle of big-screen Hebrew bad-assery.

Click here for more Tough Jews!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Back in 1989, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg may have been making a point about what a bad-ass their archaeologist superhero when they cast the original James Bond as their hero's father and then showed that he felt no awe for this paragon: instead, he filched his personal style from some whip-wielding, ethically dubious mug in hobo-wear. In the forthcoming new Indy movie, Indy has acquired a son of his own, and it seems a safe bet that the movie will not end without li'l Indy looking up at his dad's craggy face and recognizing how lucky he is to have such an icon to admire and learn from. Thus does Indy come full circle as an instructional figure, an odd fate for a guy who used to sneak out of his campus office through the window so that he wouldn't have to face his students and risk earning his paycheck. If you're looking for a really impressive mentor, educator, guru, you could always do worse than get yourself into a movie.

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), WALL STREET (1987)

Mentors don't always do well in Oliver Stone movies. The hero of the autobiographical Platoon had two of them, but one of them got killed and the hero wound up having to shoot the other. The fast-talking uber-capitalist Gekko is luckier; he has a smart wardrobe to construct around his power suspenders, an Academy Award, and a famous speech that will get replayed on the nightly news every time there's a market downturn or somebody who's worth more than the national revenue of Venezuela gets nabbed for insider trading. Actually, Gekko's weak link is agreeing to share his wisdom with the obnoxious little mouth-breather played by Charlie Sheen, the scowling kid from the wrong side of the tracks with the chip on his shoulder. Unable to work out his issues, Sheen screws his sensei over and then adds injury to, well, injury by setting him up and selling him out to the feds. Back when Wall Street was in theaters, it was possible to feel sorry for Gordon at the end, but since then it's become possible to get some perspective on these things. Today, after his stay at some Club Fed, he probably has his own reality TV show. Charlie Sheen can watch it when he gets home from his job scrubbing public toilets.

Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), THE KARATE KID (1984)

I feel confident that Pat Morita's martial-arts-instructing janitor richly deserves his place here, even though I'm actually pretty sure that I never did see The Karate Kid. (Hell, I might be less sure if I had seen it.) Consider that this is a guy who, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance here, managed to pull off a comeback almost a decade after he'd ill-advisedly abandoned the cast of Happy Days for a starring role in the sitcom Mr. T and Tina. (Can you tell me what ever became of Tina?) And he must be really good in this, because a lot of people lined up to see the movie, and they must have had their eyes glued to him, because I did see The Outsiders, and the one thing I remember from that is that looking at Ralph Macchio will make your eyeballs bleed. True, most of his biggest later roles would be in Karate Kid sequels, and while I'm not sure that I ever saw any of them either, I'm sure that they gave him the chance to really explore the possibilities of the character, plus he got to meet Hilary Swank. Clearly he was a fellow anyone would be well advised to seek out for advice, except on the subject of which Gus Van Sant movie to appear in. Wax on, wax off, motherfucker!

W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), BARTON FINK (1991)

Lured to Hollywood with the promise of easy money and big-screen glory, Barton Fink (John Turturro) quickly reaches an impasse in his writing. So with nowhere else to turn, his producer suggests that he find an established writer to mentor him. For his troubles, he gets W.P. Mayhew. Mayhew, played by a pre-Frasier John Mahoney, is a literary legend clearly modeled after William Faulkner, one who has toiled on countless screenplays for the studio in all possible genres. Tellingly, Barton first discovers Mayhew while puking out his liquid lunch in the men's room of the studio commissary. But Barton is so starstruck that he pursues him anyway, despite Mayhew's reputation as a washed-up souse. Unfortunately for the would-be student, the master whose guidance he seeks is too busy drinking and ranting at his secretary/live-in lover(Judy Davis) to give him much help with his writing, and indeed, it's Davis who's been doing most of the writing lately anyway. Yet while Mayhew isn't the mentor Fink bargained for, he's nonetheless valuable to Fink, providing him an objective lesson in what can happen to even truly great writers when they've been swallowed up by Hollywood. The lessons he teaches aren't pretty, but Barton isn't likely to forget them.

Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn), DODGEBALL: A TRUE UNDERDOG STORY (2004)

The schlubby regulars at Average Joe's gymnasium are facing difficult times. With their beloved gym struggling financially and facing takeover from a more sophisticated fitness center, they have to raise a boatload of money to keep from going under. So they do what any bunch of scrappy underdogs would do in a similar situation- they enter a nationwide dodgeball tournament, even though they're not especially athletic and can't compete with more experienced dodgeballers. What's a ragtag band of self-labeled Average Joes to do? Find a coach, that's what. Or more precisely, let a coach find them. But not just any coach, mind you. None other than Patches O'Houlihan (Rip Torn) a fifties-era dodgeball legend who's now confined to a wheelchair. With a mixture of abuse and tough love, Patches whips the Joes into shape using exercises such as one founded on the theory, "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball." Faster than you can say "Eye of the Tiger," the Average Joes are national contenders. Of course, their ascent has less to do with Patches' coaching style than it does to the demands of the plot- to say nothing of divine intervention from Lance Armstrong and Chuck Norris- but Torn is so irascibly funny in the role that it seems wrong not to include him. After all, how can you not love a guy who gets a line like, "is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do it anyway, because it's sterile and I like the taste."

Cole (J. T. Walsh), THE GRIFTERS (1990)

Midway through its narrative, Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's seamiest pulp classic pulls the brakes on itself to fill in Myra's (Annette Bening) back story, to show that she learned the intricacies of the con-artist's game at the feet of the old pro Cole--played by J. T. Walsh, an actor with a blandly sturdy facade that, more often than not (Breakdown, Sling Blade, Nixon, The Last Seduction), served as the mask of a mean, sick puppy. Here, he's onscreen just long enough to show the highs of his profession (pulling off a sweet scam and celebrating after) and the lows (he goes nuts). Maybe the filmmakers wanted to get him on and off fast so that he didn't turn to the audience and make a bonus pitch for the United Way.

--Paul Clark; Phil Nugent

Click here for Part 2.

Rep Report (February 28 - March 6)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Sunday, March 2 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of King Kong's debut appearance in New York City, and to honor the event, Film Forum is running the 1933 classic for two matinees, one day only. Those attending the 1:00 P.M. screening are automatically eligible to stick around and participate in the Fay Wray Scream-alike Contest, to be judged by a crack panel of experts that includes Film Forum repertory program director Bruce Goldstein, film critic Elliott Stein, and Ms. Wray's actress daughter, Susan Riskin. One lucky, leather-lunged winner will receive a two-disc DVD set of the movie, a one-year membership to Film Forum, (trust me on this — if nothing else, it pays for itself!), and a romantic trip for two the top of the Empire State Building. Jeez, you'd think it would be thrill enough just to get to be in the same room as Elliott Stein...

Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2008" (February 29 - March 9) kicks off with Claude Lelouch's Romain de gare with Fanny Ardent and Audrey Dana, introduced by the director. There are also new films by Sandrine Bonnaire, Claude Miller, Sophie Marceau, and — this sounds interesting — Fear(s) of the Dark, a black-and-white animated omnibus film that incorporates material from such comics artists as Charles Burns and Lorenzo Mattotti.

SAN FRANCISCO: "The Unabridged Coen Brothers" (February 28 - March 2) at the Castro was apparently assembled for the benefit of anyone who's just landed here from Mars and is curious about these fellows who just won the Oscar. Of course, it might also be useful to any Coen fans who see this as a fine time to have themselves a wallow. Includes Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which, it says here, includes "Southern folklore, slapstick stunts, cinematic tributes, religious ritual, political satire, and social commentary." All that and dancing Klansmen too!

SEATTLE: The Grand Illusion Cinema brings back four of "the No-Nonsense Films of Phil Karlson in the '50s". Karlson was a specialist in hard-nosed, low-budget action noirs whose resume of grungily efficient little knuckle-busters makes Don Siegel look like Busby Berkeley. (After decades of scuffling from one small-time gig to the next, Karlson hit the jackpot with his next-to-last picture, the rabble-rousing 1973 blockbuster Walking Tall, which he had the foresight to own a piece of.) Starting February 29, the theater is showing the fifties films Five Against the House with Kim Novak and Brian Keith and The Brothers Rico with Richard Conte; on March 6, it trades them in for the Western Gunman's Walk and the newspaper melodrama Scandal Sheet with Broderick Crawford.

In Other Blogs: Oscar Special

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The hot topic this week is the 80th Annual Academy Awards, which will mercifully be over sometime early Monday morning. Until then, there’s still a few items of interest in the blogosphere:

The full coverage over at Cinematical includes not only the staff predictions, but those of Filipino cruise ship bartenders and Jose the Cabbie, as well as a look at the all-important Borgnine Factor: “It's hard to get a statistical breakdown of the Academy's membership, but over the years I've formed a mental picture of the Academy's average member. He's male; he's been in show business for decades, usually as an actor; he's wealthy enough to be "liberal"; he's white…In short, Ernest Borgnine. So, when I try to handicap Oscar picks, I ask: WWEBD?”

IFC Film News clues us in on five Oscar nominees who never existed, one of whom is nominated this year. Roderick Jaynes is “one of the most respected film editors in the business, if one of the most elusive. In addition to penning introductions to the published versions of the Coens' screenplays for Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There, Jaynes was celebrated as one of Entertainment Weekly's 50 Smartest People in Hollywood last year and had been previously nominated for an Oscar for Fargo in 1997.”

Film Threat can always be relied on to focus on what’s really important. Screw the Oscars – who’s going to win the Razzies? A hint – put your money on Nicolas Cage for Worst actor. “He's not an actor anymore, he's morphed into a plague of cinema. All leather and twitches, this Cage fellow.”

Finally, if you’re going to be stuck at a desk somewhere unable to watch on Sunday night and just want to keep current, our friends over at GreenCine will be live-blogging the event. At least you won’t have to worry about what to wear.

“Freaky Little People”: The Coens Burn On

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

The red carpet continues to roll out for Joel and Ethan Coen en route to Oscar night. On January 27th, the brothers convened in Hollywood for a three-part Q &A on the crafts of No Country for Old Men, moderated by Spike Jonze. On the first panel, dedicated to cinematography, the Coens were joined by Roger Deakins, who has lensed all of their movies since 1991’s Barton Fink. They discuss the Coens’ detailed storyboards, their shorthand manner of communication, and the difficulty of shooting the early morning sequence in which Josh Brolin's Moss is discovered at the crime scene and chased into the Rio Grande, which was pieced together from footage that could only be shot within a few minutes of dawn and dusk. The second panel shifts focus to sound editing and mixing, with Oscar nominees Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland sitting in, and the third covers production design with Jess Gonchor. Although moderator Jonze often comes off like a character from a Saturday Night Live sketch about a nervous high school AV club president, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the Coens’ working methods, and all of it can be viewed on the No Country website.

Not content to rest on their laurels, however, the brothers are already looking ahead. In an interview with the L.A. Times, the Coens dismiss the idea that an Oscar coronation will turn them into the grand old men of cinema. “Our movies are too outside of the mainstream," says Joel. “This is the biggest-grossing movie we've ever had. [No Country has grossed over $50 million at the box office, the first Coen movie to cross that mark.] And even at that, it doesn't approach the kind of business and influence, in terms of people's perception of American culture, that big, Hollywood studio movies do.” Or as Ethan puts it, “We ain't leadin' anything, buddy.”

Next up for the brothers is Burn After Reading, a sort of spy tale written specifically for a ground of actors the Coens wanted to work with, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovitch. “All the characters in Burn After Reading are numskulls,” says Joel, “which Malkovich had no problem with; Clooney has never had a problem with…Brad was initially taken aback. He's very funny in the movie. He grew to love it as much as George does. Each character is dumber than the next. But they're all lovable.”

Other irons in the fire include Hail, Caesar!, described by Joel as the third part of the George Clooney “Numskull Trilogy," and A Serious Man, “about a Jewish community in the Midwest in 1967.” Joel describes the latter as “a domestic drama.” Sure. And Fargo was a true story.

Face/Off: Fargo

Peter Smith — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

LEONARD PIERCE: Unlike our last Face/Off, when we discussed Children of Men (a film which you will be marrying next summer in a small private ceremony at the Film Forum, whereas I view it simply as the most overrated movie by one of the Three Amigos prior to the release of Pan's Labyrinth), today, we're going to talk about a movie we both really liked, albeit possibly for different reasons — Fargo by the Coen Brothers.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the movie feels about Marge Gunderson, its main character and moral center. One of the most common critiques of the Coen Brothers as filmmakers is that, while they're technically gifted and skilled synthesists, they lack heart, soul and feeling — the humanistic qualities of the directors they choose to ape. I don't believe this is true, necessarily; while I don't think the Coens will ever be accused of Capraesque oversincerity, I think they believe, more or less, in the message as well as the medium. But I do think that the Coens are very cynical filmmakers, not calculating or phony, but with a pretty jaundiced view of humanity. I don't, in short, think they really like their characters very much.

I won't go as far as to say they hate Marge Gunderson; she is clearly a decent human being for the most part, and they don't reserve for her the contempt with which they treat Jerry Lundegaard, who doesn't even have the courage to be a bad man, or Wade Gustafson, who treats the kidnapping of his daughter like a business deal only he is competent enough to close on. But I think Marge is meant to be yet another manifestation of the dull, unimaginative "Minnesota nice" of their childhood, which they sought to exorcise in Fargo just as surely as Todd Haynes did the wealthy Southern California of his youth in Safe. There are a number of scenes in which the film's attitude towards Marge peeks out: her choice of cuisine, her reaction to Mike Yanagita, her small pleasures and simple dreams, her "police work" which so impresses Deputy Lou but which is strictly small-town. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the final scene with the blank-faced killer Gaear Grimsrud: with the murderer, captured through little more than luck, sulking in the back seat of her prowler, Marge counts down a list (incomplete, as it happens) of everyone who has died because of his crimes. "And for what?" she asks of this Nordic hulk, so far removed from her world of Arby's and postage stamps. "For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."

Indeed she doesn't. She doesn't understand it, and she probably never will. We aren't privy to the decision-making process that led someone as cloistered as Marge Gunderson to become a law enforcement agent in the first place, but her befuddlement — almost irritation — at being exposed to the ugly reality that the police must often face is less sadness than it is annoyance. We see here what we glimpsed in the scene with Mike Yanagita: Marge doesn't like being out of her comfort zone. She wants a quiet little life of sameness and simplicity, and her reaction to Gaear Grimsrud isn't one of moral outrage; when she encounters the first crime scene (which, it's easy to forget, begins with the murder of a fellow officer), she treats it with all the gravity she would a stolen bicycle.

Does this make her a bad person? Certainly not. In fact, it's perfectly normal — which is, in fact, the point. Marge isn't a heroine. She isn't a special person at all. She's resolutely normal, bland: boring. She is a very conventional, and in some ways small, woman who we are tricked into thinking is exceptional because her banality is on a different moral level than that of the other banal characters in the film. She is not someone who grows over the course of the film, who develops or transcends — and that is perhaps the greatest reason to believe that the film doesn't think much of her. The Coens, as they are about most things, have been tight-lipped about this, aside from their usual talk of how they don't seek to cause the same sort of reactions in their audience that most actors do, or how people react badly to films where the main character isn't "sympathetic in a Hollywood formula way." But the evidence is there on the screen for those who care to look for it.

And now, you will tell me why I have my head up my ass. (I trust you won't take the tack of a friend of mine, who insisted the Coens must have thought highly of Marge, since Joel Coen wouldn't have cast his wife in an unsympathetic role. I figure he must never have seen Raising Arizona.)

PHIL NUGENT: Leonard, first, let me just say that I would never imply that you have your head up your ass because of your take on Marge Gunderson. However, your suggestion that Pan's Labyrinth is overrated proves that you need professional help. I actually like the idea that Marge is sort of the butt of the movie. So far as theories that seem to me to be unsupported by the movies themselves, it may be second only to the idea that everything that happens in Minority Report after Tom Cruise is locked away in suspended animation is his dream of the what should happen while he actually remains locked away and unavenged. The fact that I have trouble buying it has nothing to do with any deep attachment I have to the idea of Marge Gunderson, Superstar. Rather, it's about what kind of filmmakers the Coens are. I wonder if, maybe out of some insistence on seeing Fargo as a hipper or more complex movie than it really is, you might not be overthinking this a little. Me, I tend to think of the Coens as surface guys who put an incredible amount of conscious planning into the physical details of their movies, and who are inhumanly aware of how they expect both critics and audiences to respond to their cleverness. It might sound as if I'm one of those people who sometimes badmouth the Coens for being 'merely' clever, but cleverness is something I'm all for; at the very least, it sure beats lack of imagination. But I do think that these guys have traditionally done their best work as flashy, surreal comedians — cartoonists, in fact — in such films as Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the underrated Intolerable Cruelty, which is the one movie where I think they actually achieved satire, a sometimes ruthlessly biting satire on the possibility that genuine romantic love might not exist as anything more than a crippling delusion. Fargo is a smart, impressive movie, but it is also a movie outside what I think of as their best range, and a movie that I think they made for the outside world, a movie pitched at the mainstream. I think that it was built to serve two purposes. One was to save their career after The Hudsucker Proxy, a movie closer to their best range, and a movie altogether less successful in every way than Fargo but, overall, I think, more interesting. It features several amazing set pieces that could only have been the work of the Coens, tucked inside a structure that's a bit of a train wreck. I don't think there's any question that Fargo was successful in that and its other goal, which was to give Frances MacDormand a juicy sort-of-leading role that would make her beloved, win her some great reviews and maybe an award or two, and take her career to another level, as a much-sought-after character lead just when she was about to reach an age when good actresses who haven't achieved more than McDormand had achieved before Fargo start to find themselves dropping off the map.

This may sound a little cold, and a lot less cool than the idea that the Coens made the movie to dump on the boring "ordinariness" of the frozen Midwest, but the Coens are very smart guys, who understand the movie business very well, and I see no reason why they shouldn't take these kind of calculations into effect while making the best movie they can, within the terms they set. After all, if they hadn't had their big mainstream success with Fargo they wouldn't have been able to make my beloved The Big Lebowski —a movie that, long before it was enshrined as an acknowledged modern classic, was initially written off as a disappointment by people like The New Yorker's Daphne Merkin because it lacked the "heart" that so many detected in Fargo. That heart pretty much comes down to McDormand, and while it was be a delicious joke if it was something that the squares were projecting onto a blank screen, I do think that the Coens mean for us to find it there, to the extremely limited degree that they mean to instill some kind of feeling in their work at all. Looking at the bill of indictment — all the specifics you cite as reason for judging Marge as, not even a "bad person" but disappointingly "ordinary" — I can't say that it seems like much of a put-down portrait to me. Is it really such a dreary thing for someone to say that they can't understand why somebody, even Peter Stormare, would kill a woman and feed someone, even Steve Buscemi, into a wood chipper? Or that, whether or not they understand this werewolf, they brought him in partly through luck? So long as he's not standing in line behind me at Wendy's, I'd be delighted if he were locked up based on a tip some cop read in his horoscope that morning. No, she doesn't like to be taken out of her comfort zone, but who does? (Extreme sports athletes and professional mercenaries may lead more physically exciting lives than some of us, but talk to some of them for five minutes and you may conclude that, rather than being driven by some wild man need to test themselves, some people just happen to have a comfort zone that includes traveling upside-down through the air at great speeds or being shot at by the last defenders of the presidential palace.)

For all her "ordinariness," Marge still manages to slap the cuffs on Dracula, and she does it while hugely pregnant and while being as gentle as possible with the crazy man in the restaurant and offering tender moral support to her husband, played by the actor who David Fincher recently fingered as the Zodiac killer. The movie gives her a well-timed entrance — we don't get to meet her until after the action has already reached a level of cutthroat scuzziness that encourages the audience to cling to her as a welcome, warm rock — and if she doesn't come across as Sherlock Holmes at first glance, by the end she seems to be solidly in the familiar mold of fictional detectives who use a mask of thick-witted blandness to throw their prey off the scent, and also to make it that much more satisfying to the audience when justice triumphs and the unassuming flatfoot proves his, or her, mettle. More than anything, though, I do think that Marge is shaped so that McDormand can win over the audience and walk off with the movie. Sure, the Coens could write an unflattering role for her; they did it years later in The Man Who Wasn't There, after this movie had done its job and McDormand, her career securely on the upswing, must have gotten a kick out of playing a femme fatale. But as Marge, she's allowed to envelope the character in a homey glow that I don't think the Coens would have tolerated if they meant for the character to inspire anything but uncomplicated love in the viewer. Ordinary, maybe. But definitely special.

LEONARD PIERCE: Like Hannibal Lecter, I must begin with first principles: if Marge Gunderson isn't the butt of Fargo, then who is? Carl Showalter? Shep Proudfoot? The Coens aren't above making even the most seemingly sympathetic characters in their films the targets of their sharpest barbs (or the least sympathetic the subject of unusual tenderness or depth — witness McDormand's role in The Man Who Wasn't There, or for a real treat, ask me about my pet theory that Eddie Dane is the moral center of Miller's Crossing.)

As for the question of what kind of filmmakers the Coens are, that's a bit beyond our jurisdiction here, but you're right that it's a central component of how to read the character of Marge Gunderson. I agree that they put tremendous amounts of planning and detail-work into their films, and that they're hyper-aware of the reaction they're likely to get from their audience — but to me, this argues in favor of my point, and against the idea that I'm reading to much into the depiction of Marge. The Coens are amongst the most economic filmmakers I can think of; at their best, hardly a frame is wasted. It's hard for me to believe that these little moments where Marge Gunderson comes across as small or unsympathetic are accidental, given the care with which her creators have approached everything else they've ever done.

Beyond that, it's hardly a secret that the Coens like fucking with their audiences, whether that means moviegoers or critics or even studio executives (for a sterling example of this, check out the uncomprehending foreword to the published screenplay of The Hudsucker Proxy, by a clueless producer who laments the deranged casting choices offered up by the brothers, clearly not realizing he was being had). Fargo is rife with this sort of thing from its very conception — it goes out of its way to draw attention right off the bat to its alleged based-on-a-true-story nature, after which it presents us with a story that is clearly anything but true. Given the level of high-stakes game-playing Joel and Ethan Coen have engaged in before, it doesn't strike me as implausible that Marge Gunderson was meant to be something more than Oscar bait, career padding, or a warm-gooey-nougat-center of "uncomplicated love" for the mainstream audience to chew on.

And while I've tried to keep this discussion civil, by gad, sir, I will not have my sanity called into question by a man who calls Intolerable Cruelty underrated.

PHIL NUGENT: I don't know that I can discuss something like this without addressing what kinds of filmmakers the Coens are. And despite your saying that the topic is "outside our jurisdiction," I think you're making your own assumptions about that when you ask who, if not Marge, is the butt of Fargo. If the film were credited to someone less famed for being knowing and sarcastic, you might not approach it with the sense that it must be meant as a joke at somebody's expense. Because the Coens are hip, it might seem fair to assume that they must be inclined to stick it to the most unhip person on the screen.

But working in the movie industry does strange things to you, especially if you're intelligent enough, as the Coens surely are, to be appalled by how much intelligence and skill go into shaping formula crap aimed at the lowest common denominator. And if you look at the Coens' work as a whole, it seems clear to me that they've never reserved their greatest contempt for well-meaning, good-hearted dummies: time and time again, in Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother Where Art Thou? and, yes, Fargo, that's the model for their heroes. With all due respect for your weird man-crush on the Dane, I think the most likable character in Miller's Crossing is the Albert Finney character, who thinks he's on top of things but who doesn't really know the score and has to be protected by the friend who's cuckolding him with his fiancée. Even Jeff Lebowski, a verbally adroit hero who has his erudite moments and has inspired something of a minor philosophic movement, appears to have read great swatches of his how-to-be-a-detective manual with the book held upside-down.

So who, traditionally, have the Coens had it in for? From the start, guys who think they're smart but have no moral compass, like M. Emmet Walsh and Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple, and Billy Bob Thornton and his pretentious windbag lawyer in The Man Who Wasn't There, and just about all the important male characters in Fargo, who at their most advanced suggest some exotic form of insect life. The all-time champion whipping boy for the Coens, even more than the William H. Macy character here who shrieks and whimpers when prevented from escaping through the bathroom window while in his underwear, may be Barton Fink, the self admiring blocked playwright who doesn't listen, who lacks the professional discipline to hack out a B-movie script, and who in the end is denied even the minor dignity that might have come with being a true victim: instead, his uselessness may have inspired the aggrieved representative of dark forces to murder his family, just to get his attention. I don't think this is the kind of cynical, sucking-up to the 'average people' in the mass audience that you see in a shitheap like Forrest Gump. Coming from guys who have had to deal with charges of being 'merely clever' since they first emerged as filmmakers in their late twenties, it smacks of self-examination, and it may be the single most striking and attractive thing I know about the Coens.

The Coens, indefatigable entertainers and reflexive smart-asses that they are, may have laid the tracks for people to suspect that Marge can't be meant to be taken straight by setting her down in a Middle America snowscape where people talk as if they're making fun of the guys in Pepperidge Farms commercials, and I think that they may have intended a corrective to that in No Country for Old Men, where a guy who's not as smart as he thinks he is but who's basically decent is pitted against an abomination, with a guy who's thoroughly decent but not as quick as he used to be as moral referee, in a Texas that never threatens to turn into Blood Simple/Raising Arizona-ville. Fargo is probably still the Coens' biggest mainstream success — however well No Country does on the year-end critics' lists, I suspect it's too cold to supplant or even join the earlier film in the popular consciousness — and that means that its fan base includes a lot of people who the Coens' real fans must hate to find themselves agreeing with about anything. It may be hard for us to believe that guys like this could come up with someone like Marge — good, competent, caring, and utterly, conventionally square — without intending for her to be snickered at. But maybe that says more about us than it does about them.

Hair Today, Coen Tomorrow

Peter Smith — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

But the people who've been waiting these past months for the movie to open so they could weigh in on it have no intention of being left out. Paste magazine calls the character "splendidly coiffed", but that's either sarcasm or the minority opinion weighing in. More typically, Dana Stevens of Slate calls him "a bob-haired golem," while Jan Stuart of Newsday refers to his "forklift mop of hair." Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post, Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club, and David Edelstein of New York magazine have all invoked Prince Valiant, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir thought Bardem looked more like Ringo Starr. In the Village Voice, Scott Foundas invoked Cousin Itt. (New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, a man with a literary background who understands the value of understatement, simply described Chigurh as "a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.")

This is hardly the first time that a Coen brothers movie has attracted attention of a tonsorial nature. The corny-surreal tone of Raising Arizona was quickly established by Nicolas Cage's haircut, which suggested an attempted imitation of Kevin Bacon's tastefully spiky 'do as executed by an epileptic barber with the blind staggers. As the title character of Barton Fink, a leftist playwright who seemed to be a cartoon of Clifford Odets, John Turturro wore a pop-top hairdo that actually made him look more like George S. Kauffman by way of Eraserhead. We may never know for sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to make the Odets-like character seem more "universal" or if the hairdresser on the picture was working from a miscaptioned photograph. In The Big Lebowski, all the political and cultural battles of the 1960s seemed to have come down, decades later, to an uneasy truce between Jeff Bridges' hippie-burnout look and the squared-off cropping of Walter, the reactionary Vietnam vet played by John Goodman [and inspired by John Milius! — ed.], who looks like a cinder block wearing tinted shades. "I'm a hair actor and proud of it!" George Clooney once insisted, and maybe the Coens wish there were more performers out there willing to define their characters somewhere above their eyebrows. After all, it was the Coens who, in O Brother Where Art Thou?, established that George Clooney isn't just a fine actor, a major star, and the unashamed voice of show business liberalism: he's a Dapper Dan man! — Phil Nugent