Word is George Clooney is set to reunite with the Coens for Burn After Reading, which is presumably their next film after Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. “Production Weekly says the Coen Bros. script is loosely based on the novel ‘Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence,’ by Admiral Stansfield Turner, who served as director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981. The contemporary East Coast caper is about a CIA agent who is writing a book and he loses the disc. Clooney wouldn’t play the agent, but instead a killer.” Well, ok then. But what happened to Hail Caesar! (or, for that matter, Clooney directing the Coens’ Suburbicon)?
Tag: The Coens
Country Time.
Woody and Milton, meet Walter and the Dude: Woody Harrelson and Stephen Root join No Country for Old Men, the forthcoming Coen flick starring Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem.
Suburban Warrior.
After Good Night & Good Luck and Syriana, how can George Clooney continue his hot streak? Easy…direct a Coen brothers script. Upon wrapping Stephen Soderbergh’s The Good German, Clooney will take a swing at Suburbicon, a Coen project that’s been in mothballs.
Et Tu, Goodman?
George Clooney tells Vogue he’s reuniting with the Coens for Hail, Caesar!, the third in their “idiot trilogy,” about a 1920’s version of the Shakespeare play. Sounds like a toga party, Coen-style.
Eternal Crossing of the Spotless Fink.
In between film projects, the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman have teamed up for Carter Burwell’s Theater of the New Ear, a pair of radio plays recently performed at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The cast includes Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, and Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Coen’s “Sawbones,” and Meryl Streep, Hope Davis, and Peter Dinklage (taking time off from Lassie, I presume) in Kaufman’s “Hope Leaves the Theater.” (These apparently were also performed in Brooklyn two weeks ago, but tickets were hard to come by.)
Seein’ all the angles.
By way of Lots of Co (and Triptych Cryptic), and in honor of the new no late fee policy at Blockbuster, here’s the Online Film Critics Society’s “Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s“. I have no clue how Mystery Men, Sneakers or The Ref snuck on here, but any list that puts Miller’s Crossing at #1 is alright by me.
Nihilists, Dude.
Perhaps John Woo can take a cue from the Coens…By way of Quiddity, it’s Masters of the Universe meets The Big Lebowski, and it appears Skeletor was a founding member of Autobahn. Pretty profane, Dude, and unsafe for work.
A Good man, and thorough.
“The Coens turned down requests to be interviewed about the cult of ‘The Big Lebowski,’ which is frankly infuriating: I did not watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to be blown off by too-cool, insular, press-shunning elitists.” Via All About George, David Edelstein checks in on The Dude, in anticipation of this weekend’s Lebowskifest. Edelstein, you are entering a world of pain.
Lady and the Tramp.
Well, a swing-and-a-miss by the Coen brothers is still more entertaining than a lot of movies out there…nevertheless, The Ladykillers is something of a disappointment. I was amused by the film throughout, and particularly in the early minutes at the sheriff’s office, but, frankly, Ladykillers never really takes off. In fact, given how thinly conceived and surprisingly one-dimensional all of the supporting characters turn out to be, you often get the sense the brothers are slumming it. (Jokes about Irritable Bowel Syndrome? C’mon, y’all…you’re the Coens, not the Farrellys.)
Perhaps most disappointing about The Ladykillers is the realization that Tom Hanks, an actor I normally root for, hasn’t quite found his rhythm in Coenland quite yet. While I’m not quite sure how it could have come off differently, his turn as Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, PhD doesn’t really work here…he’s more distracting than anything else. (I think there’s hope for Hanks, though…George Clooney seemed much more at ease in Intolerable Cruelty than he did in O Brother.) And as for the lady in question, Irma P. Hall is fun for the most part, but she too could have benefited from better material from the Coens – once the gang of thieves shows up in her root cellar, she has little to do but act affronted. A relatively amusing time at the cinema, to be sure, and particularly if you’re already sold on their sense of humor, but all in all this is a hiccup for the brothers Coen. Here’s hoping next time around is a little more satisfying.
Ogres and Coens.
Some stirrings on the film front: Dreamworks releases the first trailer for Shrek 2 (Looks like more of the same, but it should make for a fun afternoon.) And, speaking of fun, Latino Review posts the one-sheet for The Ladykillers. The Coens have yet to let me down, and given how amusing I found the teaser for this one, I highly doubt they’ll start now.