Thursday, September 18, 2025

Intolerable Cruelty - ...

I’ve been dreading this one. Not because I dislike it, but because I couldn’t imagine I’d have much to say about it…and I was right.

Intolerable Cruelty isn’t a bad film, and it’s not even a Coen-for-hire film (which it sometimes gets saddled with), but it’s just not my thing. I can appreciate the acting, the comedy, and some of the weird Coen touches, but I just don’t enjoy this one all that much, and I don’t plan on ever watching it again. 


It all comes down to comedic taste, and I am not a screwball comedy guy and, despite this being one of the only Coen films to take place in the present, this is a straight up 1930s/40s screwball comedy. It’s the type of comedy I can appreciate but doesn’t make me laugh. The interaction about Kirshner, the “have you sat before her before?” scene, the silly names, etc. It’s all very amusing, but I find it more tiring than funny. Once again, this is just my taste in comedy; I can understand plenty of people finding this to be their most underappreciated film.


I truly have nothing else to add beyond some DVD special feature stuff and random thoughts, so I’m not going to make myself pad this out to a thousand words when a couple hundred will do it. Intolerable Cruelty just isn’t for me.


DVD Special Features


This is a relatively bare bones release featuring standard making-of doc, which was interesting just because it mentions that the Coens weren’t originally going to direct but it just somehow happened. 


There’s a short segment on the fashion of the film. Okay.


Then there are the “Filmmaker Approved and Arranged” deleted scenes and outtakes. By far the most interesting aspect of the release. Not because the scenes are interesting, but because of the ones the Coens apparently approved. First up is a supercut of Paul Adelstein saying “Everyone eats berries.” Then a George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones outtake compilation. And, finally, the train footage Rex Rexroth watched while bouncing around with women. This was definitely them just fucking with the DVD people when they came to them for input.


Random Thoughts 


Were pool guys just plowing through Hollywood housewives in the ‘90s and early ‘00s? Between this and Airheads and Extract (just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are a lot more), it seems like more of a common problem than it probably really was.


“That's my Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement Award!”


The “gizmo,” or “Intruder” has to be a predecessor for Clooney's device in Burn After Reading.


“When Marilyn and I first met, we were crazy about each other. Not emotionally, of course.”


I want a subscription to Living Without Intestines Magazine.


The senior partner is easily the most Coen element in the movie.


Billy Bob Thornton is playing such a wildly different character than he did in the Coens’ previous film. It's funny that he went from a character who barely talked to one who wouldn't shut up. I'm sure the casting was a little in-joke for them.


Sunday, September 7, 2025

The Man Who Wasn't There - The One and Only Coen Commentary


I own almost every Coen Brothers movie on physical media, and something that is immediately clear is that they are not very interested in talking about their movies. They show up for the occasional special feature interview (mostly for the Criterion releases of their films [Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men, and Inside Llewyn Davis]), but for the most part, they leave their movies to the viewers. So a director’s commentary is most likely out of the question. In fact, it’s so abhorrent to them that for the DVD release of Blood Simple they made up a film historian character and wrote a script for him for the commentary. That’s a lot of work to get around having to talk about your own movie. After that, there’s just the Roger Deakins commentary on the Fargo disc. So imagine my shock when I saw that there was a commentary for The Man Who Wasn’t There featuring Joel and Ethan and star Billy Bob Thornton. To date, it’s their only commentary. So I felt it necessary to check out, along with the other special features, and report on. But before I get into that, I wanted to share my personal interpretation of this forgotten, beautiful Coen Brothers film.

UFOs and Gullibility


Thornton’s Ed Crane is one of the quietest characters in film history. Without his narration, he comes across as nearly mute. Silent characters, and people in general, are sometimes perceived as smarter than the “gabbers” (as Ed calls chatty people). But I’ve always taken issue with this. It’s an asset to hold your tongue when you don’t have anything to say, sure, but that doesn’t mean you’re automatically some deep, philosophical type. Ed, however, fancies himself as such. But I disagree.


While Ed might seem to be a bit smarter than all the people chattering away around him, he actually buys into a lot of bullshit and makes plenty of mistakes. In his defense, everything he does is part of his quest to find meaning in life, but he’s too gullible about it. 


Ed buying into the dry cleaning scheme sets everything in motion. Jon Polito isn’t even selling him on it that hard. He’s just another customer gabbing away during a haircut. But something about this futuristic new laundry method sparks something in Ed. Knowing his wife, Doris, was cheating on him didn’t spark anything, but dry cleaning did. 


It’s impossible to know if the dry cleaning investment was a scam since Big Dave killed Polito. But regardless of that, it’s still a foolhardy investment that upends Ed’s world all done over a traveling salesman’s soft pitch in a barber’s chair. 


The events set in motion by that investment through blackmailing lead to Ed killing Dave, and Doris killing herself in jail. But none of this brings him meaning, and he seems to just be drifting through everything. Two things snap him out of it: Birdy (Scarlett Johansson) and Ann Nirdlinger (Katherin Borowitz). 


Birdy playing the piano skillfully sparks something again in Ed. He thinks he’s witnessing a prodigy that her drunk father (a great Richard Jenkins) is oblivious to. Ed takes it upon himself to take Birdy to music teacher, who breaks Ed’s spirit by explaining that Birdy is certainly capable, but she lacks the heart to make a musician. Ed is further crestfallen when Birdy admits that she doesn’t even care that much about music, and things literally spiral out of control when Birdy misinterprets Ed’s attention as sexual in nature and attempts to give him blowjob on the ride home, leading to a car wreck.



After the car crashes, a hubcap that looks like a flying saucer rolls along the road, bringing us to Ed’s final attempt to find meaning. The UFO stuff can appear as some Coen randomness on a first watch, but of course it’s more than that. It’s first brought to Ed’s attention when Ann, looking straight out of Plan 9 from Outer Space, shows up to tell Ed that she knows Dave’s death was all about an alien encounter they had while camping a year before. At first, Ed, rightfully, thinks Ann is having a breakdown over Dave’s death, but the seed is planted.


Once Ed is put on death row, his need for meaning brings back the UFOs. He has a dream in prison in which a UFO shows up. He goes out into the yard, sees the spotlight of the UFO, then it just leaves him there rather than saving him from prison and showing him another world than the one he knows. Ed then goes to his death, staring at haircuts and wondering what will come next, if anything. If not for Ann, he wouldn’t have even considered the possibility of aliens. 


Just before his death, however, there is a seemingly mundane flashback. A tarmacadam salesman (Shooter McGavin himself, Christopher McDonald) approaches Ed, going into his spiel. Ed doesn’t seem too interested, but he’s also not getting rid of the guy. Then Doris pulls up, immediately rips up the salesman’s pamphlet and sends him on his way. As she walks past Ed, she seems disgusted that he had let the salesman get that far. Inside, they sit silently until Ed starts to try to say something, and Doris stops him. This is their marriage, and this is how Ed has been kept in check all these years. 


This scene, or variations of it, has probably happened dozens of times in their marriage. Some salesman or con artist approaches silent Ed, then Doris swoops in to stop it. Without Doris to stop Ed with the dry cleaning plan, everything fell apart. Doris knew that Ed was gullible and couldn’t help himself when someone approached him with something new and seemingly meaningful.


Ed is definitely a deep thinker, as evidenced by the hilarious “You ever wonder about it?” conversation he attempts to have about how hair just keeps growing. But as Freddy Reidenschneider (the always great Tony Shalhoub) points out, paraphrasing Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “The more you look, the less you really know.”


Trying to find meaning in life may seem like the smart thing to do, especially in the face of constant nonsensical chatter. But the more you search for meaning, the less you find as you miss what’s right in front of you. I’m not saying the film is suggesting that Ed just needed to pay more attention to his wife (though that would have prevented a few deaths). But it’s certainly suggesting that searching for meaning is pointless and, in fact, destructive, especially when you’re gullible enough to try to find meaning anytime someone approaches you with something as banal as dry cleaning. 



Special Features


Aside from the commentary, there are deleted scenes, an extended interview with Roger Deakins, and a behind-the-scenes featurette.


The deleted scenes are hilarious. One is just Shalhoub’s opening argument minus the Thornton narration.


The rest are three haircuts given their own listing as a “scene”: the Timberline, the Duck Butt, and the Alpine Rope Toss. Literally each one is a three second shot of a haircut.


Then there's the pivotal “Doris’ [sic] Salad,” which is a shot of a wedge salad being placed on a plate. 


When shit like this happens on one of their physical releases, I assume it's a joke, then there’s this line from the behind the scenes featurette from Ethan Coen: “The whole barber thing was really just a backdrop. The story didn't sort of catch fire [Joel starts laughing next to him] until we added the dry-cleaning to the mix. Then we knew we had something we could take and pitch to all the studios.”


These guys will do interviews and whatnot, but they’re going to drop in some deadpan jokes like that.



The One and Only Commentary


It’s shocking how normal of a commentary it is. Though it does have the rare problem of the film being a little too loud making it hard to hear the commentary at times. I was hoping for a full on performance featuring clearly made up stories and jokes. But it’s pretty straightforward. It is nice to watch a movie along with them, because you hear them crack up at their own movie, and it’s infectious. Watching this with the commentary definitely made me see this as more of a comedy. Aside from that, here are some highlights I came across:


Billy Bob Thornton claims he was smoking real unfiltered cigarettes during the shoot, then he would go to his trailer and smoke more, and he even smoked while doing the voiceover sessions. He claims this experience helped make him quit smoking. Though I don’t know it it stuck or not.


They joke about making an Ed Crane talk show 


The soldier being eaten by the Japanese story came from Barry Sonnenfeld's dad. No telling how long they were sitting on that one. 


“I love the dialogue you guys wrote for this movie.” - Billy Bob

“None of it for you!” - Joel, I think


Good for Billy Bob remembering that Abraham Benrubi was also in U Turn.


There was a deleted scene (unfilmed) in which Ed, the night he kills Dave, wakes up to a flying saucer being outside and tiny ant-like aliens come out. They opted for the Ann UFO story. If they had gone with this route, then my gullibility theory goes right out the window. Its existence even as a deleted scene still messes with it, I guess, but I’ve always found that movies can have multiple interpretations, so I’m sticking with it.


Ethan says they did a take of the police officers telling Ed about Doris being arrested in which “Ed fled the interview.” I just like that he used the same terminology as in Fargo.


This commentary was recorded on January 8, 2002. I know this because Thornton mentions that Dave Thomas died that morning.


Thornton fluffed his pants up to make it look like he had an erection while watching Birdy play the piano.


The commentary loses some steam in the back half, with multiple moments of them just watching the movie. You even hear them shuffling around in their seats during these quiet moments.


But it picks up during the credits with Billy Bob claiming he met Roderick Jaynes, the Coens’ fake editor. The Coens play along, referring to Jaynes as kind of a rough character.


They finish talking about a dude interviewing them at Cannes named Guy Pines, but “Pines” is pronounced “penis,” and how ridiculous it is to go with that pronunciation.


Tuesday, September 2, 2025

O Brother, Where Art Thou? - "I Don't Want Fop!"

 


Teaching The Odyssey

I was an English teacher for nearly a decade, and for freshman English in Indiana, The Odyssey was part of the reading list (i.e. it was in the textbook). I was always looking for an excuse to show movies (only partly because of occasional hangovers) in class, but I always wanted it to be interesting so the kids had something to write about when the movie was over. If an adaptation was too faithful, there just wasn’t much for a bunch of freshmen to write about. Basically, it was better to show them Mean Girls instead of the Marlon Brando Julius Caesar or the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet or Great Gatsby as opposed to the more standard versions. 


For The Odyssey, there was the kind of shitty TV version starring Armand Assante which featured distractingly bad early CG, or there was O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Time will tell if Nolan’s Odyssey becomes a better option, but I don’t teach anymore, so I don’t really care.) 


The Coens famously claim to have never read The Odyssey, and I think they’re just fucking with us, but it’s possible they really never read it and only gleaned bits and pieces through the years. Regardless, this means they aren’t concerned with making a faithful adaptation. Yeah, there’s a cyclops and a lot of names and events match up, but a lot of stuff doesn’t fit into a neat box. This made my job so much easier. I was able to tell the less imaginative students to simply write an essay explaining in what ways it was a good adaptation and a bad adaptation. 


Because of my use of the film in the classroom, this is probably my most watched Coen film after The Big Lebowski. But since I no longer teach, I had not watched this in years because I was burned out with it. It was nice to revisit it and just enjoy it, as it’s up there with Arizona when it comes to pure enjoyability. 


That’s the other reason it’s such a good adaptation: you can parse through it looking for connections or just sit back and enjoy it. It’s not like a homework assignment, which is why most of my students truly enjoyed watching it compared to more stuffy adaptations of other works I tried over the years (and they definitely enjoyed all the cussing). 


The Soundtrack Fooled Me


Looking up the box office ($45 million domestic and $71 worldwide) and Academy Award noms (two: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography), I was surprised. My memory of this movie is that it was a massive hit and though it didn’t win anything it was at least nominated in every major category. To find out it was a minor hit critically and financially was very confusing. This movie was a big deal, right?


It turns out, I was equating the soundtrack’s success with the film’s success. Those songs were so ubiquitous at the time, I guess I just assumed the film was a cultural phenomenon (I was in high school at the time and wasn’t checking box office returns as religiously as I do these days). Using it as a teaching tool for years may have played a factor, as well. Showing this to a new class of students each year as an example of a great adaptation made me build up the legend of the film even more.


Instead, this is actually an underrated movie in their filmography at this point, but it wasn’t for me, and it probably never will be. 




Technically My First Coen Movie in Theaters


I contributed to that $45 million domestic haul for O Brother, but I didn’t actually watch it. (Thinking back, it turns out The Ladykillers is the first Coen film I watched in a theater.) The Malco theater in Owensboro, Kentucky (the closest multiplex in my area of southern Indiana) was strict about selling R-rated tickets to underage movie-goers. In March of 2001, I was 15, but a group of classmates wanted to go check out Blow, starring Johnny Depp. 


A few people in the group were old enough to buy tickets, but the rest of us had to buy O Brother tickets and sneak into Blow. For the first forty-five minutes, everything was fine. Then some do-gooder theater employee decided to do a head count during a fucking weekday matinee screening of Blow (we were there for a matinee because we had a half-day of school that day; I wasn’t cool enough to skip school to watch a cocaine movie). So I got kicked out. 


I think I walked into the O Brother theater for a minute, but then thought “Fuck this,” and just left. Because of this, I’ve always been a bit harsh when it comes to Blow. And when I finally watched O Brother for real, I wished that had been the movie we went to see all along. I’m glad I at least contributed to it financially. But I did get a memorable moment out of it as it was the only time I had ever been kicked out of a movie theater.


Random Thoughts


Turturro is unhinged in this, and I love it. His line reading of “I’m gonna KILL you!” is an all-timer.


As is, “That don’t make no sense!”


“Well, ain’t this place a geographical oddity? Two weeks from everywhere!”


It’s hard to see Krueger from Seinfeld in a menacing manner. “Cougar! My son tells me your business stinks!”


I’ve seen thousands of digital gunshots inflicted on human beings in movies, and not a single one has yet to disturb me a fraction as much as the cow getting peppered with bullets in this.


I know Everett didn’t order corn on the cob for lunch (all I caught was steak, gratin potatoes, and a couple leaves of cabbage [presumably for toad-Pete]), but cinematically it is the perfect to be eating when getting hit in the face with a large tree branch.