SERIOUS FILMMAKING: A Coen Brothers Retrospective
From their electrifying debut with BLOOD SIMPLE in 1984 to their Academy Award-winning triumph NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN in 2007 and the recent masterpiece A SERIOUS MAN, brothers Ethan and Joel Coen have established themselves as a formidable creative force. Join us at both the Aero and Egyptian Theatres for triple features of the Coens' best films, movies that traverse the worlds of comedy, film noir, and domestic melodrama with immense wit and style. One admission price for all 3 films. Coen Bros Triple FeaturesMonday, December 14, 2009 - 5:30 PM at the Egyptian5:30 PM: RAISING ARIZONA at the Aero Theatre, 1987, 20th Century Fox, 94 min. Dir. Joel Coen. This staggeringly hilarious chronicle of the romance between inept bad boy Nicolas Cage and straight arrow cop Holly Hunter was an unexpected follow up to the Coen Bros.' chilling BLOOD SIMPLE. The kidnap scheme that follows when the loving couple learn they can't conceive kids is guaranteed to provoke more laughs per minute than any American comedy since the heyday of 1930's screwball cinema.
7:30 PM: A SERIOUS MAN at the Aero Theatre, 2009, Focus Features, 105 min. Dir. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Jewish physics professor Larry Gropnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can't catch a break: his wife (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce, his malady-laden brother (Richard Kind) is living on his couch, and his tenure is endangered by a small misunderstanding that snowballs into a fiasco. Only the Coen brothers could make such a modern-day Job's plight so painfully hilarious; their return to the world of Minnesota academia in which they grew up yields one of their richest, most personal films to date.
9:30 PM BLOOD SIMPLE at the Aero Theatre 1984, MGM Repertory, 99 min. Joel and Ethan Coen's first feature film is one of the most assured moviemaking debuts in recen
t history. Hangdog Texas bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires a corrupt and corpulent detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill Abby, his unfaithful wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz). Winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-Dramatic.
"...it's the noir-style humor, not the violence, that makes this tribute to James M. Cain and Alfred Hitchcock so good." - Desson Thomson, The Washington Post;
"Grisly, stylish and often weirdly funny, BLOOD SIMPLE is a reminder of how rarely an original artistic sensibility is announced to the world and how much better movies are when that sensibility is allowed to keep going its own way." - Anne Hornaday, The Baltimore Sun
Egyptian Theatre Details
Tuesday, December 15 - 5:30 PM
5:30 PM
FARGO at the Egyptian Theatre
1996, MGM Repertory, 98 min. One of Joel and Ethan Coen's most acclaimed films, winning their first Oscars (Screenplay) as well as a Frances McDormand victory for best actress. Cool, calm, collected (and pregnant!) policewoman Marge (McDormand) tracks the kidnappers of a used car salesman's wife in North Dakota's snow-covered wasteland. Salesman Jerry's (William H. Macy) inept plot to get out of debt by staging the hoax unravels in gory fashion when his two bizarrely mismatched henchmen (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) have a falling out
. That hulking Stormare's nonchalant, bloodcurdling use of a woodchipper at the limax emerges as both chilling and hilarious testifies to the Coen's complete mastery of tone in the filmmaking process. "...an illuminating amalgam of emotion and thought. It glimpses into the heart of man and unearths a blackly comic nature, hellishly mercurial and selfish, yet strangely innocent. If it weren't so funny, it would be unbearably disturbing." - Arnold Wayne Jones, The Dallas Observer "A crime gem that is darkly funny even when it's chilling - and certain to become a classic." - Peter Stack, The San Francisco Chronicle
7:30 PM
A SERIOUS MAN at the Egyptian Theatre
2009, Focus Features, 105 min. Dir. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Jewish physics professor Larry Gropnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can't catch a break: his wife (Sari Lennick) wants a divorce, his malady-laden brother (Richard Kind) is living on his couch, and his tenure is endangered by a small misunderstanding that snowballs into a fiasco. Only the Coen brothers could make such a modern-day Job's plight so painfully hilarious; their return to the world of Minnesota academia in which they grew up yields one of their richest, most personal films to date.
9:30 PM: BARTON FINK at the Egyptian Theatre
1991, 20th Century Fox, 116 min. Winner of best director, best actor and a Unanimous winner of the.Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. In the Depression Era, naïve and ridiculously idealistic New York playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro, in a tour-de-force performance) is brought out to tinseltown by an egocentric movie mogul (hilarious Michael Lerner) to write a "wrestling picture for Wallace Beery." Joel and Ethan Coen engineer an escalating case of existential dread for Fink in his quiet hotel room when he is afflicted with a terrifying case of writer's block. The few people Fink meets fuel his mushrooming paranoia: a William Faulkner-type writer (John Mahoney) too drunk to work, the writer's tragic mistress (Judy Davis) and last, but not least, the only guy he's been able to make friends with - a sweet-natured traveling salesman (John Goodman) from next door who may just turn out to be the notorious serial killer, Madman Muntz. "What RAISING ARIZONA was to baby lust, BARTON FINK is to writer's block -- a rapturously funny, strangely bittersweet, moderately horrifying and, yes, truly apt description of the condition and its symptoms." - Rita Kempley, The Washington Post
Aero Theatre Details
It's not every day that a new film written by Tennessee Williams is released. William's 1957 screenplay for THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND was supposed to be his third collaboration with director Elia Kazan (after Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire), but when plans to make the film fell through, the screenplay was lost and forgotten -- until young, Memphis-born director Jodie Markell recently picked it up.
Chris Evans and Bryce Dallas Howard in THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND
