I think Burn is great and hilarious but really, In the Loop is on an entirely different level.
Barton Fink was critically important to me when I was making my bitter solipsistic game about how bitter I felt about this game I was making that turned out to be a very important thing in my life. And I love it
The other top 3’s are Serious Man and Lebowski.
It’s the more refined post-No Country work that I have trouble getting into; they feel so much more refined and classical that I can’t find purchase on them.
It came across to me as both sidesing the politics it depicts at best and I think these kinds of satires of capitalism hardly ever end up being very useful. I don’t think the average person is going to come away thinking “gee eddie mannix was a bad guy.” and making your main character based on this actual fixer guy, but not making him a wife beater like the real guy, but giving him the exact same name instead of a made up name, and putting him in a wacky screwball comedy, feels a little suspect to me.
yeah i dunno, you’re probably right that it doesn’t work as political critique but for me at least it definitely works on the level of ‘catholic guilt is hilarious’
also i guess i’m a bad socialist but i thought it was kind of funny to portray 1950’s screenwriters as both literal communists and also kind of pseudo intellectual blowhards who are mainly just upset about not getting royalties
I can’t see the Coens ever portraying an idealist as anything but a doomed idiot or a cynic wearing a mask, so I find their take on something like this funny rather than politically ugly.
As long as there’s a truth in their skew (and there’s a lot of truth in questioning the leftist bonafides of middle class professionals) it works for me.
I mean the entirety of barton fink is about an upper class professional talking over a working class man and disregarding his humanity even as he pats himself on the back for his good politics
I probably need to watch Hail Caesar again, I have a tendency to find cultural Catholicism totally inscrutable (which has always amused me as both my mother and my wife were raised Catholic, though they went in completely opposite directions from there) and at this point I confuse what I got out of watching the movie with what I’ve been told about it
Hail Caesar is the movie that the people who made A Serious Man make when they try to reckon with movies and the system that enables them as the God in their lives.
I think there’s an argument that it’s overly misanthropic in places. I mean, the contrast between that and Francis McDermott’s character is obviously the point, but most of the other characters feel pathetic and one-note. If I watch that movie in certain frames of mind I find most of it unbearably sad.
Apparently I should watch Raising Arizona; pretty high on most lists here and I still haven’t seen it.
I rewatched A Serious Man a couple weeks ago with a buddy and I still really like that movie.
