Search results for ""Author Joel Coen"

Gangster movie, Western, film noir, rom com, screwball, musical, even the Biblical epic... There are few genres left untouched and untwisted by sibling visionaries Joel and Ethan Coen. Since 1984''s Blood Simple, the inscrutable brothers have effortlessly forged their own cinematic path, avoiding prevailing trends while crafting bold, stylish and witty movies that feel fresh and distinctive despite being deeply rooted in their creators'' filmic passion and knowledge.This is a definitive guide to that path, bringing the reader through Joel and Ethan''s 20 features (not counting the mezzanine) and exploring thethemes, the tropes, the gags, the familiar faces - while also taking in all the Coen curios that litter this quirkily winding byway.From Texas to Minnesota, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Bluegrass to Busby Berkeley, from wrestling to bowling, from lost hats to severed toes, this book covers everything that one might reasonably consider (to use a wor

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From such cult hits as Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) to major critical darlings Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Ethan and Joel Coen have cultivated a bleakly comical, instantly recognizable voice in modern American cinema. In The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together, film critic Adam Nayman carefully sifts through their complex cinematic universe in an effort to plot, as he puts it, “some Grand Unified Theory of Coen-ness.” The book combines critical text—biography, close film analysis, and enlightening interviews with key Coen collaborators—with a visual aesthetic that honors the Coens’ singular mix of darkness and levity. Featuring film stills, beautiful and evocative illustrations, punchy infographics, and hard insight, this book will be the definitive exploration of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre.

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The films of the Coen brothers have become a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Highly acclaimed and commercially successful, over the years their movies have attracted increasingly larger audiences and spawned a subculture of dedicated fans. Shunning fame and celebrity, Ethan and Joel Coen remain maverick filmmakers, producing and directing independent films outside the Hollywood mainstream in a unique style combining classic genres like film noir with black comedy to tell off-beat stories about America and the American Dream. This study surveys Oscar-winning films, such as Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), as well as cult favorites, including O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Big Lebowski (1998). Beginning with Blood Simple (1984), it examines major themes and generic constructs and offers diverse approaches to the Coens' enigmatic films. Pointing to the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler, the study appreciates the postmodern aesthetics of the Coens' intertextual creativity.

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The Big Lebowski is a razor-sharp comedy thriller of mistaken identity, gangsters, bowling, kidnapping, and money gone astray, written by the Coens, directed by Joel Coen, and produced by Ethan Coen. In addition to Jeff Bridges, whose portrayal of The Dude has become iconic, and John Goodman, his bowling buddy, the film stars Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Willem Dafoe, Sam Elliot, and Ben Gazzara. Not given to talking publicly about their work, the Coens gave access to Tricia Cooke and William Preston Robertson to interview the cast and crew. In a prose style that complements the Coens’ filmic one, the book discusses the Coens’ oeuvre, the themes of their films, their atypical brand of humor, their craft, and their artistic vision. Several scenes of The Big Lebowski are examined closely to see how the movie goes from idea to reality, making this an ideal book for fans, filmmakers, and filmmaking students.

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Death is always the issue-in life, and in the Western. Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a movie of six Western stories. In each, our common destination is approached by a different road. Through each, diverse characters hurry for their final appointment: Oregon Trail-travelers, a gold prospector, a motley crew of stagecoach passengers, a high-plains drifting bank robber, even a singing cowboy. These six stories escort them with a care that either respects, or mocks, the dignity of all.The film stars Tom Waits, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tim Bake Nelson and Zoe Kazan and is shot with the harsh grandeur of the classic John Ford westerns.

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Ethan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski was released in 1998 to general bafflement. A decade on, it had become a cult classic and remains so over 20 years later, inspiring a thriving circuit of 'Lebowski Fests' during which costumed devotees gather at bowling alleys and guzzle White Russians. Beyond its superabundance of deliciously quotable lines, how has the movie inspired such remarkable affection? And why does its critical stock continue to rise? The film's unlikely anchor is Jeff Bridges' career-best performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a fully-baked 1960s radical turned Venice Beach drop-out known to his friends as 'the Dude'. Mistaken for an identically-named grandee whose young trophy wife is in trouble, the Dude finds himself embroiled in an impossibly convoluted kidnap plot involving pornographers, nihilists and threats to his 'johnson'. Worst of all, it conflicts with his bowling commitments. In part an irreverent pastiche of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (as filmed by Howard Hawks), The Big Lebowski is also a jukebox of film history, littered with playful references to everything from Hitchcock and Altman to Busby Berkeley. This riot of addled quotations reflects the film's Los Angeles setting, a discombobulated world inhabited by flakes, phonies and poseurs with put-on identities. Like many Coen films, the movie plays havoc with the conventions of the crime genre and the absurdities of classical American 'heroism'. But it's also that rare thing: a comedy that gets richer, funnier and more affecting with each viewing. Beneath its breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed ribaldry, the Dude's story offers disarmingly humane lessons in the value of simple things: friendship, laughter and bowling. In their foreword to this new edition, the authors reflect on Lebowski's cult status and its contemporary resonances as a film about gentle non-conformity and friendship in an increasingly polarized world. The new edition also includes an interview with the Coens, revealing the origins of the name 'Jeffrey Lebowski'.

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This superb collection presents more than forty incisive portraits of leading Jewish thinkers, artists, scientists, and other public figures of the last hundred years who, in their own unique ways, engaged with and helped shape the modern world. Makers of Jewish Modernity features entries on political figures such as Walther Rathenau, Rosa Luxemburg, and David Ben-Gurion; philosophers and critics such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler; and artists such as Mark Rothko. The book provides fresh insights into the lives and careers of novelists like Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen; social scientists such as Sigmund Freud; religious leaders and thinkers such as Avraham Kook and Martin Buber; and many others. Written by a diverse group of leading contemporary scholars from around the world, these vibrant and frequently surprising portraits offer a global perspective that highlights the multiplicity of Jewish experience and thought. A reference book like no other, Makers of Jewish Modernity includes an informative general introduction that situates its subjects within the broader context of Jewish modernity as well as a rich selection of photos.

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The screenplay to another offbeat movie by the Academy Award-winning Coen brothers. As a result of a case of mistaken identity, Jeffrey Lebowski - alias The Dude - finds himself entangled in a kidnapping caper as a bag man - a situation that goes from bad to even worse due to the interference of his hapless bowling partners.

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This is a study of US independent films marginalised in and by the rise of 'indie' culture. In contemporary film and popular culture the terms 'independent' and 'indie' hold instant recognition and considerable cultural cachet. As both a brand of American filmmaking and a keynote of critical film discourse, indie denotes specific textual, industrial and reception practices that have been enthusiastically cultivated across the last decade of the 20th century and the first of the 21st. Underpinning this cultural category is a canon of highly visible films and filmmakers whose 'maverick' personas and self aware stylisation have successfully sold 'indie' as a quality, alternative worldview - figures like Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Kevin Smith and Wes Anderson, and films like Slacker, Memento, Happiness and Juno. US Independent Filmmaking After 1989: Possible Films reframes this dominant 'indie' canon by attending to a group of films that have not been so fully subsumed by its critical and promotional rhetoric. In 20 close analyses, a diverse range of leading film scholars and commentators allow the contours of the indie sensibility to emerge in and through their individual experiences of a single film that has not received the sustained critical acclaim of more popular titles. With particular representation from female directors - who are almost wholly excluded from the dominant 'indie' canon - these idiosyncratic films are shown to demonstrate central tenets of 'indie' scholarship and simultaneously emphasise the classifying processes that obscure them. It provides 20 textual studies of under evaluated US 'indie' films. It develops an expanded understanding of US 'indie' film culture. It also identifies the contribution of a community of US 'indie' filmmakers and actors, with a particular emphasis on women practitioners.

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Hail, Caesar! is the story of Eddie Mannix, tireless pursuer of the interests of fictional Capitol Pictures, circa 1951. He is the ultimate studio fixer and---since the studio is his world---the ultimate earthly one. There is no star scandal he cannot cover up, no studio misstep he cannot repair, no sin he cannot make right. His powers are tested, though, when production on the studio's most expensive picture ever---biblical epic Hail, Caesar!---is halted by the kidnapping of its star. The kidnappers are a mysterious gaggle seeking not just ransom but the destruction of everything Eddie Mannix lives for, and everything he lives by. . .

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Inside Llewyn Davis chronicles a struggling young folk singer, played by Oscar Isaacs, who arrives in Manhattan in 1961 and tries to navigate the treacherous waters of the the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, as well as having to deal with a disaffected girlfriend, his father's dementia, the suicide of his musical partner, and the loss of his friend's cat . . .Suffused with the music of the time, the film is an emotional journey inside the soul of Llewyn Davis.

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