Tag: Raising Arizona

When They’ve Raised Hell, You’ll Know It.

“So, to quote J. K. Simmons in his magisterially wicked coda to Burn After Reading, ‘What did we learn, Palmer?’ Well, for my part, I learned a few things…More significantly, I learned — or rather re-learned — that the Coens have made an awful lot of really good movies. Out of all 16 features, I enjoyed re-watching all but two: The Ladykillers, which I have always considered their worst effort by orders of magnitude; and, somewhat to my surprise, The Hudsucker Proxy, which I’d always placed in their bottom tier, but which I had looked forward to giving another try.”

On the thirtieth anniversary of Blood Simple — and as we all await Hail Caesar! — The Atlantic‘s Chris Orr has revisited and ranked all sixteen Coen films in sixteen days. I’d quibble with some of the rankings of course — Lebowski and A Serious Man are top-shelf, imo, and Intolerable Cruelty is oft-overlooked — but anybody who has Miller’s Crossing atop their list is my kinda people. Character. Ethics.

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism…

“I’m talkin’ about friendship. I’m talkin’ about character. I’m talkin’ about – hell, Leo, I ain’t embarrassed to use the word – I’m talkin’ about ethics.” If you’re a cinephile of any sort, The House Next Door is probably already (or should be) on your reading list. Still in case it isn’t, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a particularly intriguing essay on the Coens’ view of morality last week (which you absolutely should NOT read until after seeing No Country for Old Men — it gives away the whole game.) “Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens’ body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema. To some extent, all of their movies poses questions that supposedly deeper filmmakers have broached time and time again: if we cannot be certain of God’s existence; if there is a possibility that no one’s watching what we do; if, to reference Johnny Caspar in Miller’s Crossing, ‘morality and ethics’ are agreed-upon lies…then what’s the point of being good? Just because.” Update: Also via THND, the Chicago Sun-Times‘s Jim Emerson offers up another quality dissection of No Country.