-
Via Brahsome, we learned about The Big Lebowski as written by William Shakespeare. This massive and completely necessary task was undertaken by Super-Achiever Adam Bertocci. How do some of the classic Big Lebowski lines translate?
Jesus Quintana: You said it, man. Nobody f---s with the Jesus.
QUINCE: Thou speakest rightly, sir. No man misdeals with Joshua Quince, by Jesu.
------
The Dude: Hey, careful, man, there's a beverage here!
THE KNAVE: I beseech ye, there is a beverage here.
------
Walter Sobchak: You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me.
The Dude: Yeah, but Walter...
Walter Sobchak: Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish. These f--king amateurs...
THE KNAVE: And where might a man fetch a toe?
WALTER:
O toe!
Thou wouldst have a toe? A toe can be obtain'd.
Ways are known, Knave. Thou wilt not like to hear.
I'll have a toe for thee this afternoon
Ere singeth cockerel at three o'clock.
These amateurs would have us soil'd with fear.
Got a couple of hours? Read the entire script, Shakespeare style.
Posted 01.07.10 by reelz -
The Hurt Locker was the big winner when the National Society of Film Critics announced their awards for the movies of 2009. The Iraq War drama took home Best Picture, Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, and Best Actor for Jeremy Renner, who plays a soldier addicted to the adrenaline rush of disarming landmines.
If history is any indication, this may be bad news for the movie's Oscar chances. In 40-plus years, the only movies that have ever won Best Picture from both the NSFC and the Academy are Annie Hall, Unforgiven, Schindler's List, and Million Dollar Baby. The match-up is better, however, for the director and actor categories, so Bigelow and Renner may be soild contenders when the Oscar nominations are announced on February 2.
The Best Actress award went to Yolande Moreau for her performance as French artist Séraphine Louis in the biopic Seraphine. Christoph Waltz and Paul Schneider split the Best Supporting Actor award for their work in Inglourious Basterds and Bright Star, respectively. Mo'Nique took home Best Supporting Actress for Precious, while Joel Coen and Ethan Coen received Best Screenplay honors for A Serious Man.
Posted 01.05.10 by reelz -
Variety reports that Josh Brolin and Matt Damon are looking to re-team with Joel and Ethan Coen for their upcoming "adaptation" of True Grit.
OK, so Damon has never worked with the Coens before, but he did have a small scene in Finding Forrester, which starred Sean Connery who was in The Rock with Nicolas Cage, who starred in Raising Arizona, so it's practically a return. Brolin is certainly returning, having worked with the Coens on their award-winning No Country For Old Men.
Damon is in talks to play a lawman who teams up with U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges stepping in for the late John Wayne) and a 14-year-old girl that head into Native American territory to find the murderer of the girl's father. Brolin is negotiating to play the killer.
The Coens are directing and producing True Grit from their script, which will follow the original Charles Portis novel that inspired the 1969 movie that garnered Wayne an Oscar. True Grit will start production next March and open in late 2010.
The Coens' latest, A Serious Man, received strong reviews and is in theaters now.
Posted 10.27.09 by Ryan -
A Serious Man, the newest offering from Joel and Ethan Coen, comes out today, and Cinema Blend recently caught up with the pair to chat with them about the unusual comedy.
Its story takes place in a Jewish suburb of Minneapolis during 1967 and involves a professor who undergoes an existential crisis when his wife contemplates ditching him for another man and his children steal money for marijuana and plastic surgery. The movie apparently weaves together themes of Jewish life in the Midwest with the changing social landscape of the late 60s. The soundtrack, which contains both religious and secular music, plays a large part in communicating the atmosphere, as Joel highlighted in the conversation.
We thought it would be interesting to do something set in 1967 in that community, because that was such an interesting point in our own childhood. And part of it came from thinking about the music of that period, the combination of Jewish liturgical music and cantorial music and Jefferson Airplane. Just a bunch of different things.
The brothers also mentioned that they wanted to get across the different feel of the Jewish communities of the Midwest as compared to those of New York or Los Angeles. Along those lines, they used a cast of mostly local unknowns. As Ethan pointed out, they also occassionally needed advisors.
We didn't do any research per se. Once the script was written and we actually started making the movie, there were a couple of people who were our Jew technical advisors, helping us with the language and the liturgical stuff for the service or whatever. And of course, we got a raft of translators for the Yiddish beginning of the movie. A raft of dueling Yiddishists. Everyone had an opinion about what form of Yiddish we should use.
The Coens also discussed their own upbringing amongst these Jewish communities, reminiscing about their Bar Mitzvahs, among other experiences. When asked about whether the movie will help audiences understand this particular Jewish experience, they said that their goal wasn't about understanding, but about getting the specificity right so that details could provide a successful backdrop for the story.
Posted 10.02.09 by reelz -
Critics are going crazy for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, some even calling it their best movie. That's a bold statement, considering they made Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Oh, and 2007 Best Picture winner No Country For Old Men.
Today it opens in just six theaters:
* Pacific ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood, Hollywood
* The Landmark, Los Angeles
* Landmark Uptown Theater, Minneapolis
* Clearview @ 1st and 62, New York
* Landmark Sunshine Cinema, New York
* Lincoln Plaza Cinema 6, New York
Check the Focus Features site to see if and when it will be expanding near you.
"Like many Coen films, it has a huge streak of shaggy dog to it — working far better as thematic exploration than as a movie unto itself — but you sense how deeply and profoundly it all matters to the duo (something they haven't always displayed with other films)."
— Rob Vaux, filmcritic.com
"Joel and Ethan Coen mine their adolescences in the mid-1960s Midwest and strike blackly comic Jewish gold with one of their finest films..."
— Lou Lumenick, New York Post
"Are the Coens jokers who tread on despair, or tragedians with a penchant for death's-head humor? Either way, Serious Man is their bleakest comedy. Its spiraling slapstick cruelty encompasses elements from both the lugubrious No Country for Old Men and the antic Burn After Reading, yet it easily outclasses both by endowing the put-upon puppet with a human dimension so that laughter is caught in our throats."
— Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine
"A Serious Man is a wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film. Underlying the grim humor are serious questions about faith, family, mortality and misfortune."
— Claudia Puig, USA Today
Posted 10.02.09 by reelz -
She calls it "Cousin It."
To stay in character for a scene in the Coen brothers '60s-era comedy A Serious Man, Amy Landecker, who plays the protagonist's stoned and free-spirited neighbor, had to put on a wig — and not much else. As she told New York magazine, the scene called for nudity but her bikini wax seemed out of place for the times. Enter the merkin, a "niche" wig used, in this case at least, to help re-create the more filled-out look of an earlier era. While Landecker still seems fairly amused by the whole idea (she keeps a picture of Cousin It on her iPhone), she says she is now quite happy to have it gone.
Incidentally, she is by no means the only actress to have faced this problem in recent times. Kate Winslet also needed an assist from a merkin for her nude scenes in the WWII-era movie The Reader. No word, though, on whether she gave hers a nickname.
Posted 09.29.09 by reelz -
"No Jews were hurt in the making of this motion picture," reads the disclaimer at the end of the Coen brothers' new feature A Serious Man.
Tell that to Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) who, like his biblical predecessor Job, finds himself beset by a series of misfortunes he certainly doesn't seem to deserve. His family and professional life are coming apart at the seams for no apparent reason. Although he has a hard time appreciating it, the comedy comes from the contrast between his painfully serious persona and the sheer absurdity of everything that is thrown at him (a son addicted to pot and F-Troop, anonymous attacks on his job from a poison-pen letter writer, etc., etc.).
Ultimately though, it was not God who designed all the indignities he faces. It was the directors. And they apparently had a good time doing it. Ethan Cohen confesses to the New York Times that:
For us, the fun was inventing new ways to torment Larry.
So, what this serious man gets for all his troubles is not so much answers, but a divine sense of humor.
Posted 09.28.09 by reelz -
The basic theme of the Coen brothers' A Serious Man is universal: An ordinary man in a settled life finds that everything he has taken for granted is coming apart at the seams. His wife is leaving, his children aren't living up to expectations, and he is facing mysterious troubles at work. But it's not just any time and place. It's 1967 Minneapolis and the times they are a changing.
One sign of the changing times, with a prominent place in the movie, is Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love." The Cohen brothers explained to the New York Times that the song spoke to their own experiences growing up in the Midwest and provided just the right counterpoint to the more traditional elements of the suburban Jewish community where the movie takes place.
It came early on. It was in the script.... Jefferson Airplane in general, that song in particular ... says the period loud and clear in a very specific way ... the contrast of that music, which seemed so sort of evocative of that particular time ... the intersection of that with Jewish cantorial music was interesting to us because that's part of what we remember all getting mixed together from that time period. And that seemed like a particularly potent mix, Grace Slick and that sort of Jewish cantorial liturgy.
Posted 09.17.09 by reelz -
Joel and Ethan Coen's next movie, the black comedy A Serious Man, opens October 2, but their follow-up to that, True Grit, seems like an unusual choice for the genre-hopping duo. Both Coens maintain that their version won't be a traditional remake of the John Wayne Western of the same name.
"It's not really a remake, it's an adaptation," Ethan told ComingSoon. The Coens explained that they are returning to the original source material, the novel by Charles Portis, rather than rely on the 1969 feature. While Wayne won an Oscar for his performance in it, True Grit is rarely considered his best movie. The Coens agree:
"We did see it as kids. I don't know if Joel's seen it since," said Ethan. "It made very little impression on me, the movie. We subsequently both read the book and the book made a huge impression and I guess that's kind of why we're interested in doing the movie."
"It's not a great movie but it is a great book, actually," agreed Joel.
The Coens are hoping to make Grit next, though it's not certain. Likewise, Jeff Bridges is rumored to be up for the Wayne role, but The Coens wouldn't confirm the casting, only commenting that they're "talking to somebody."
Posted 09.15.09 by Ryan -
Not only are Joel Coen and Ethan Coen remaking the 1969 Western True Grit, but The Dude may be cast in the role originally played by The Duke.
Variety reports that Jeff Bridges, who played El Duderino in the Coens' The Big Lebowski, is in talks to star as U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, the role that won John Wayne an Oscar in the original. In the story, Cogburn aids a young girl in search of the man who killed her father. While the original movie was more focused on Cogburn's point of view, the Coens' take will apparently focus more on the girl, which is more in keeping with the novel of same name by Charles Portis.
The thought of remaking a Wayne movie with another actor in his role may seem like blasphemy, but hopefully we can trust the Coens to come up with a reimagining, not a rehash. And we imagine Bridges would make the role his own and not simply imitate all the trademark Wayne mannerisms.
No other details about the cast have leaked yet as the movie's still a long way from release. As of now, it's currently expected for 2011.
Posted 09.11.09 by reelz