Catching Up

Well, the move to the city is complete. I'm sitting here at the public library wifi-ing this installment of the director's club. I decided not to go with an ISP until I'd gotten back into writing mode. The internet is like heroin - it can take over your life before you realize it's happened.

This week I'm nominating two guys, the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen. Between the two they've worn several hats on almost every film they've become involved in, including writers (both screenplay & original story), directors, & producers. Sometimes they went off on their own, and sometimes they used other's material. I haven't done a study of them or their work but it deserves notice. Four Oscars and a hundred or so other awards speaks for itself.

They have a tendency to be drawn to stories about extraordinarily bad acters (not actors) and an odd sense of karmic justice. Tom Hanks played a grifter in one movie, The Lady Killers, who got his come-up-ence. My GF hated the movie (I loved it) but had to admit it captured the essence of the Deep South as seen from a poor Southerner's perspective. That's another one of the brothers' trademarks. They have a unique ability to see people for the sum of their non-didactic idiosyncrocies. In Oh Brother Where Art Thou? George Clooney and John Tuturro are brilliantly cast as stereotypical West Virginia mountain people, in Fargo, it's Frances McDermand and William H. Macy as North Dakotans on opposite sides of an unraveling mystery, you betcha. (my GF loved it, I hated it.) In their latest, it's Harvard educated Tommy Lee Jones doing what he does best, potraying a throwback Texas lawman facing a cold-blooded killer in No Country for Old Men.

Remember the premise for the Director's Club? If you like the movie search for other movies by that director. You won't be disappointed... at least one of you won't be that is.