Cinema Basement

 A review by Brooks Rich I'm not going to beat around the bush. Fargo is one of my favorite films of all time and my favorite film of the '90s. I think this is the Coen Brothers' untouchable masterpiece. Fargo is essentially a battle between good versus evil. A kind-hearted pregnant chief of police named Marge investigates a triple murder that leads her to a kidnapping plot that was almost doomed from the start. We see the kidnapping and murders play out and then watch as Marge closes in. There are no criminal masterminds in Fargo. The so-called ringleader of the plot is a hapless schmuck who can't do anything right. The men he hires to kidnap his wife are so insane it's a wonder they even get the kidnapping done.  Even though the film is called Fargo it mostly takes place in Minnesota, in the cities Brainerd and Minneapolis. The setting is almost a character itself. The snowy bleak landscape and that overtly exaggerated niceness of the characters, which oppresses t...

 A review by Brooks Rich This is the film that was the shot across the bow for the Coen Brothers. Blood Simple made people pay attention but Raising Arizona showed that these guys were something special. It is them at their genre-jumping best. The Coen's have this inane ability to switch genres from one film to the next. For example, they follow up Blood Simple, a dark and gritty Texas-based noir, with a borderline goofy comedy like Raising Arizona.  Raising Arizona is one of their masterpieces. The story of an ex-con and his police photographer wife who decide to steal a baby after they can't conceive is a delightfully poetic screwball comedy. The writing in this is some of the Coens best. There's comedic poetry to the writing. Lines like, but the doctor said that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase, just flow beautifully throughout the film. It's helped that Nicolas Cage gives maybe his best performance here as the loveable H.I. McDunno...

 A review by Brooks Rich The Coen Brothers debuted in 1984 with the bleak and gritty Texas noir, Blood Simple. A rich man hires a private investigator to kill his wife and nothing goes right. A lot of the elements the Coens would come to be known for are in this film, most importantly the simple crime going wrong in almost every conceivable way. The husband character is the framework for Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo, even though Jerry is more a hapless loser than the cold-hearted bastard the husband is in Blood Simple.  There's a strange sense of morality in the Coen's films. Crimes aren't always solved or avenged in the legal sense unless it's a full-on battle between good and evil like in Fargo, but the wicked are often punished. For example, the killer in True Grit is not brought to trial and hanged but he is killed, punished for his sin of murder. The same is true for Blood Simple. No one faces justice from the police or courts but rather justice in a more cosmic sense...

 A review by Brooks Rich I separate the Coen's filmography into three categories. The films that are the least of their works for one reason or the other. Just something about them doesn't work. Films like Intolerable Cruelty, Hudsucker Proxy, and Ladykillers. Then there are the good to great films, the ones that are really good but aren't their best. Films like No Country For Old Men, Blood Simple, Barton Fink, and True Grit. Then there are the masterpieces. The best they have to offer. The ones that define who they are. Films like Fargo, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and this. Inside Llewyn Davis is a masterpiece.  It's hard to describe the plot of this film. Essentially it's a week in the life of a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village in February of 1961. He has been in a low spot since his folk partner killed himself. Oscar Isaac imbues Davis with a real-world cynicism. He is kind of an asshole but we understand why he is. Everything goes wrong for h...

 A review by Brooks Rich This is a forgotten gem from the '80s that has gained cult status over the years. I think it's somewhat back in the mainstream after there was a maze at Halloween Horror Nights for it last year. So it's on it's way to being a classic but it's firmly in the cult film category.  The plot is simple. Aliens that look like clowns and have a carnival based race land on Earth and begin harvesting humans from their blood. Their mothership looks like a circus tent. It's up to a ragtag group of '80s teenagers played by twenty-somethings to save the day. Let's go.  This is not high cinema here. This is a campy fun comedy horror film. But it works. The clowns are legit threats and the kills are goofy and brutal at the same time. The comedy works and the characters are likable enough. If you go into this film expecting something a little tongue in cheek, Killer Klowns is going to win you over. This is also a good entry point for people lookin...

 A review by Brooks Rich Only the second animated film covered on the blog. For the most part, animated films are made for kids and I tend to judge them differently from other films. It takes a lot for an animated film to really stand out to me. The ones I sill like are the ones I watched as a kid, Iron Giant, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Secret of Nihm, and generally, I like any original Pixar property. But two animated films in the past five years really blew me away. Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse and today's film, a wonderful and sadly forgotten film from 2016 called Kubo and the Two Strings.  Kubo is a young one-eyed boy growing up just outside of a small village. Every day he goes into the village and dazzles the locals with his magical shamisen, a Japanese stringed instrument. Kubo tells stories and uses the instrument to animate paper. But he never finishes his stories as he has to be home before dark. When his village is attacked by the evil for...

 A review by Brooks Rich This film was originally supposed to be an anthology show with the Coen's as showrunners. But things happened as they often do in Hollywood and it became their first Netflix exclusive film with six vignettes, all stylized in different forms of the western. Some are straight westerns with gunfights and old western towns. Others are more in the vein of the frontier westerns, which take place in the wilderness.  The titular segment is about the best gunfighter and singer in the west. The second segment, Near Algodones, is about a hapless bank robber. The third, Meal Ticket, is about two men with a traveling show. The fourth, All Gold Canyon, is about a prospector searching for gold in the untouched wilderness. The fifth, The Gal Who Got Rattled, is about a young woman traveling along the Oregon Trail. The sixth and final segment, The Mortal Remains, is about a stagecoach full of people who are discussing mortality.  All of them concern the ...

A review by Brooks Rich I was originally going to cover this film for a classic film Saturday but I think it qualifies as a forgotten gem. Not enough people know this brilliant thriller from 1944 directed by George Cukor, who also directed My Fair Lady and The Philadelphia Story.  Ingrid Bergman, one of Hollywood's all-time greats, plays a newlywed who begins to suspect odd things are going on at her house. Her husband, a sinister but charming Charles Boyer, assures her everything is ok and even convinces her she might be going mad.  The film is called Gaslight so something must be going on besides what Bergman thinks. Cukor does a great job convincing the audience that Bergman might be confused about certain events, certain aspects Of her life within the house. Boyer is perfectly condescending as the husband who is caring but also expects his wife to be a good little girl and not act so crazy. Bergman and Boyer have great chemistry together and this film doesn't work without ...

 A review by Brooks Rich Let's make one thing clear. The classic western ended in 1992 with Unforgiven, a deconstruction of the western hero that explored the darker aspects of the gunslinger, the morality of it all. The '90s brought throwback westerns, films that were in line with the good versus evil westerns of early Hollywood. Eventually, though westerns went more towards what Unforgiven was doing, morally gray films where there's not much difference between the heroes and villains.  The Coen's first western is a remake of a John Wayne film, about a young girl hiring a US marshal to track down her father's killer. The John Wayne is very much a standard western, good guys versus bad guys, the wicked must be punished, justice must be served. The Coen's remake is much darker. Justice isn't enough for Maddie, our vengeful daughter. Her father's killer must understand he is being punished for what he has done to her father. Only death will suffice. She mu...

 A review by Brooks Rich This is the Coen's weirdest film hands down. It's a bizarre film about the struggles of the writer, set against an old Hollywood backdrop. This has always felt like an outlier in their filmography. There's not really another one of their films I can compare it to. It is the closest they have ever come to making a surreal horror film. John Turturro plays the titular character, a successful New York playwright who in 1941 accepts a contract to write for a Hollywood studio. Barton moves to Los Angeles and checks into the Hotel Earle, a bizarre run down creepy hotel. There Barton meets his odd neighbor Charlie Meadows and suffers from writer's block as he struggles to write a wrestling picture. That's all I can about Barton Fink without spoiling it.  Barton Fink is a film both about the struggles of the artist and what happens when an artist tries to change what they do. Barton's attempt to move from the stage to screen causes not only profe...

A review by Brooks Rich I'm going to start at the film I think is a bridge between two differ eras of the Coen Brothers. O Brother, Where Art Thou is in my opinion the end of the classic Coen Brothers films. From there their films get slightly more cynical, especially films like The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country For Old Men and True Grit. They also twice tried to revitalize the screwball comedy with the two films considered their weakest, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. O Brother brings an end to their main run that started their career, going from Blood Simple and ending with O Brother. In 1937 rural Mississippi three men escape from a chain gain. The leader of the group, Everett, played by George Clooney in his first of four films with the Coen's, is trying to get home to win back his wife and daughters. As he and his friends travel across the country they encounter various odd characters and try to stay one step ahead of a posse led by a frightening man wit...

This is a month I have been looking forward to since the blog started. For the month of August we will be covering two of the most important American filmmakers of all time. The Coen's, Joel and Ethan, first broke onto the film scene in 1984 with the gritty Texas based Neo-noir Blood Simple. They would follow that up in 1987 with the comedic baby napping film Raising Arizona. From there the Coen Brothers became genre jumpers, each subsequent film different from the next but all tied together by similar themes. This month we will be exploring those themes and identifying what makes a Coen Brothers film a Coen Brothers film. We'll dive into not only their most well known films but also some of their obscure outings.