On Monday, July 26, 2004 at 7:25:01 PM UTC-7, brigit bardot brigade wrote:

what is this? marijuanoir?
i love the coen's o brother where art thou. i respect barton fink and
fargo though don't much like them. i grudginly like man who wasn't
there; it was derivative but it really had a core.
anyway, what's most irritating about coens is the first sense i get
from their movies is they've seen ALOT of movies. coens are more postmodernist interior decorators than real artists. sometimes they
do it astonishingly well or with genuine brilliance but more often
than not, they strike me as tim burton for the arthouse crowd.
o brother was an exception because its primary sources of inspiration
were music, discarded junkpile of forgotten americana, and whatnot.
it fed on the past but it wasn't cinema cannibalizing cinema.
like tarantino, coens are always mixing everything, like filmmaking is
like shaking up a cocktail drink. hardly surprising that jeff bridges
keeps mixing drinks in the movie. though set in contemporary times,
you have a mix-n-match of 30s style screwball comedy, 40s style noir,
70s style counterculture, and 90s style slickness. sometimes it's the
styles, sometimes the characterizations or the plots, or genre
convetions that are being jumbled together; the only constant is the inconstant. so a polish-catholic is a jew. and he confuses vietnam
with everything. a rich guy is really not so rich. the kidnapped
woman wasn't kidnapped. criminals are really disgrunted rock
musicians. etc, etc. but not surprisingly, juliann moore showed her
skanky buff again. someone stop this woman.
well, this sort of thing would be funny for a 10 min skit. as a 2 hr
movie, it's tiresome. try stretching any SNL parody skit into a movie
and you get the point. i don't mind a 2 hr comedy, but a movie where
nothing holds together and everything exists only to be sent up?
flush it. and it's not like Airplane which was consistently zany.
coens give us a character who's reasonably realistic and genuinely
likable so when the world around him is just a cheap carnival act that
grows dumber, more ludicrous, and staler by the minute, what's the
point?
it had some laughs. and the musical numbers were clever but, again,
too derivative. okay, so coens have seen all the noirs. they've seen
all the musicals and etc etc etc. I DON'T CARE. show me something i
haven't seen before. is that too much to ask?
no, as after lebowski, they made their greatest movie, a real
masterpiece with o brother where art thou?
we need REAL originality. no more postmodernischtick please.

https://newrepublic.com/article/147341/film-critics-blind-big-lebowskis-brilliance

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