Coen Brothers
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Cannes Film Festival 2013
For American independents, this year’s Cannes Film Festival felt like the end of an era, especially with the high-profile premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s final film, Behind the Candelabra, playing two decades after sex, lies, and videotape seemed to promise the emergence of a vital American independent film culture. These questions re-emerged not just because Soderbergh has announced that he is retiring from filmmaking, but also because he has been widely critical of a film industry that is increasingly focused on international blockbusters. But the events at this year’s Cannes also raised a number of questions about the role of the […]
by Chuck Tryon on Jul 18, 2013 -
Cannes 2013: Jodorowsky’s Dune and Inside Llewyn Davis
“I wanted to make something sacred and free,” says Alejandro Jorodowsky about his planned adapation of Frank Herbert’s science-fiction classic, Dune. Indeed, Dune will be more than just a movie, argue the director and his collaborators in Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary that premiered Saturday in the Directors Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival. Says Jodorowsky in the film, “Dune will be the coming of a god.” There are several documentaries about nightmare shoots and even unmade films — Lost in La Mancha comes to mind — but Jodorowsky’s Dune is the only documentary I can think of […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 20, 2013 -
CINEMA’S INVISIBLE ART
Over at the website for Cambridge’s famed literary journal Granta, Jeremy Sheldon has a remarkable post about screenwriting titled Cinema’s Invisible Art. In it he discusses the often overlooked literary qualities of screenwriting. While writing scripts is more commonly referred to as a craft than it is an art, for Mr. Sheldon deftly written descriptive scene action has literary qualities very few people give proper acknowledgement to. Despite the prevalence of accepted screenwriting truisms like “show, don’t tell” and “Film is a visual medium”, Mr. Sheldon celebrates stylish, rule breaking screenwriters from the Coen Brothers to Shane Black and indentifies […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 25, 2010 -
“NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN”
Few films have had an effect of making people think differently about the world, or at least confirming their worst instincts about it. No Country For Old Men is one of those films. Set against the arid backdrop and sparsely populated tableau of West Texas, Joel and Ethan Coen paint a bleak depiction of human nature in which there is no country for good men, who are helpless to stop the evil men. Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, an ex-Vietnam vet who, while hunting antelope, stumbles upon a drug-deal gone wrong (so wrong, that not only have all the pushers […]
by Rupert Chiarella on Mar 10, 2008 -
John Turturro, Romance & Cigarettes
CHRISTOPHER WALKEN IN JOHN TURTURRO’S ROMANCE & CIGARETTES. COURTESY UNITED ARTISTS. John Turturro has the distinction of being both a director’s actor and an actor’s director. A favorite of both Spike Lee and the Coen brothers, over the past 20 years Turturro has marked himself out as one of the most interesting and talented actors in film, and whether it is a blocked writer (Barton Fink), a socially-awkward chess master (The Luzhin Defense) or a grief-stricken widower (Fear X), he adds a depth and humanity to the characters he inhabits. In 1992, he directed his first film, Mac, about three […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 7, 2007
