Posts Tagged ‘Ethan Coen’

Picturenose abides

How quickly the years roll by. Picturenose began, officially, on 15 August 2007, and here we are, two superb hook-ups with Expatica.com and European Film Awards Reviews and 400 posts later, still loving what we do. It all started, has as already been well documented, with two film heads, Colin Moors (CM) and myself, James Drew (JD), deciding to turn their seemingly incessant public-bars film chats into something more lasting, yet it has been some time (apart from our recent interview with Alex Cox) since we collaborated on an actual review. And what better film is there, both to mark our fourth century and a return to side-by-side reviewing, than Joel and Ethan Coen’s sublime mixture of Chandler and ten-pin bowling, The Big Lebowski (1998)? Those who know anything about this greatest of films (and ‘sports’) may point out that this appreciation should in fact have been our 300th post, and well done, but be warned – you’re in for the long haul with this one. Of all the films we’ve ever discussed, this takes the prize for being the most eminently quotable and, perhaps, the funniest. To all our faithful readers, with thanks – we only hope it’s a strike.

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It’s academic

Following three years of me deriding James and poking him with a big stick on account of his truly average attempts at picking the Oscar winners, he finally snapped and said “if you can do better, please be my guest”. That was the gist of it anyway, but I do remember the sentence being somewhat shorter.

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Fink’s a lot

Saturday afternoon, nothing worth watching on telly, so what better than to slip a silver disc into the player and enjoy an  hour or two of cinematic wonder. That’s what I thought, anyway. The chosen movie (Barton Fink (1991)) divided the camp somewhat. I found it a thought-provoking, gorgeous piece of cinema. The Divine P (my good lady) thought it was ‘a bloody weird movie’.  She has a point, although were I to use her critique, it wouldn’t occupy a lot of space.

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Intelligence overload

They have been with us from as far back as Blood Simple (1984) and, following their Oscar-winning epiphany with the overrated No Country for Old Men (2007) (which should never have taken Best Film and Best Director away from Paul Thomas Anderson’s sublime There Will Be Blood (2007)), Ethan and Joel Coen return with a largely good-natured romp – one with more than a few echoes of what is les freres Coen’s actual masterpiece, The Big Lebowski (1998).

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