f13.net

Just re-watched this on DVD, brilliant movie. If somehow you haven't seen this I recommend it to anyone.

I'm a George Clooney hater but this is a good movie.  Clooney breaks character from his mono-character he normally plays and John Goodman puts in a great appearance. Awesome music too.

We have the soundtrack on high rotation in the car, being a favourite of the Mrs and the daughter.  It's even knocked ABBA out of rotation (thank god for that!).  Very funny to hear a 4 year old ask for down by the river or rock candy mountain. 

This is definitely in my top 5 for the decade.  The people that don't seem to care much for this are those that have trouble understanding the accents.

A very good film - I'd have to call myself a fan of the Coen brothers' movies. I don't think they've made a true dud yet although I wasn't crazy about The Ladykillers remake, perhaps because I love the original. Even with Hanks, there was no danger of out-casting the original.

O Brother is a high point for Clooney, but not I think for the Coens. The soundtrack is memorable, but its the unforced humor of the film and the inspired caricatures that really deliver. The Coens take Preston Sturges' allegory and playfully marry it to Homer's Odyssey and while we are in tears from the brilliant comedy they remind us of the social injustices of depression-era America. Quite exceptional on many levels.

"O Brother, Where Art Thou? is going to be the greatest tragedy ever made! The world will weep! Humanity will sob!"

... with joy.

Bravo!

Aye, this is a great movie.

Good movie and sound track

This made me a Clooney fan, period. This is a high point, I agree, but I can't help but laugh with the guy all the time now. In ER, he was kind of cold (for the most part), but he's been pretty funny in movies.

[edit] His humor is a lot like Johnny Depp's actually. He's not as weird or anything. But they both have the same exaggerated/cartoonish facial expressions. I'm surprised that anyone takes him seriously anymore.

This is definitely one of my favs.

Pete: You miserable little snake! You stole from my kin!
Ulysses Everett McGill: Who was fixin' to betray us.
Pete: You didn't know that at the time.
Ulysses Everett McGill: So I borrowed it until I did know.
Pete: That don't make no sense!
Ulysses Everett McGill: Pete, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.

One of my all time favourite films, for sure. And no, piss off Firefox, I am spelling favourite correctly thanks. In fact, added to dictionary. Hah take that! OK, adding "Hah" too.

Mrs. Hogwallop up and R-U-N-N-O-F-T.

Absolutely one of my all time favorite movies.  And I really have to thank the soundtrack for opening up my horizons to 'old-timey bluegrass'.  I have 5 Dr. Ralph Stanley discs now.

/metoo

Also this movie gave me one of my frequently-used lines: "...with the midget and the broom and whatnot" which has shortened into my ubiquitous  "...and whatnot."  Other ones I like to use include "Is you is or is you ain't my constichency?!" and "I'm with you fellers."

I'm partial to "dumber than two bags of hammers."

My favorite actor in here though is Goodman (really, in every Coen's flick, I guess). He's fucking brutal.

To frogs at least.

Too many good lines.  "He's bona-fide!"

My dad's absolute favorite movie. He pulls it out anytime someone gives him an opportunity to demonstrate the surround sound system he set up in his livingroom. Something about the sequence at the river and you being able to hear it flowing through the room.

Also, he likes southern country/bluegrass tpye music, so that could be a factor.

A great film although only about #4 on my Coen brothers list which just shows how great their catalog truly is.

I've taken to using the term pater familias since that film.

#1 is Miller's Crossing. Right? Right?

Personally, I'd put Lebowski at the top of the list. I haven't seen Burn After Reading though.

Fargo would be my number one Coen brothers film. Or No Country For Old Men. Or The Big Lebowski. Maybe Miller's Crossing. Blood Simple is pretty awesome too. Oh sod it, I couldn't pick a number one.

Yes, although Lebowski is 1a.

I didnt like No Country For Old Men.

Didnt like that the girl was killed at the end or that the evil bastard lived.
If you have witnessed enough evil IRL you dont need to be reminded of it nearly always winning while watching a movie.

But having every single film that comes out of Hollywood have a happy ending is what gives us stupid shit like I Am Legend - actually a good film with the "alternate ending", heap of shite with the re-shot ending after test audiences didn't like the first one.

Studio execs demanding feelgood factor and test audiences reacting negatively to anything other than boy-gets-girl-evil-person-gets-comeuppance have been ruining films since 1956 (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and personally I think it's important that directors have some options open to them in how their films end.

All the Coen brothers movies are pretty awesome(though I personally don't feel the need to watch The Man Who Wasn't There or Intolerable Cruelty again), but my favorite remains Raising Arizona.  Yodas 'n shit.

Ha ha, great minds think alike? Miller's Crossing is criminally underrated. Man, the "Look into your heart" scene still gets me.

For a while years ago I went around asking people "What's the rumpus?" but I got so many blank looks I stopped. I do still use "giving me the high hat" in moments of exasperation though.

Albert Finney shooting the guys up in his bathrobe and slippers and Danny Boy playing is one of my all time favorite scenes in film. My favorite part being him taking the cigar out of his pocket at the end. Great movie.

True story, one that I am continually ashamed of: I have not yet seen Miller's Crossing.  It's not out of no interest, but merely one of those movies that just slips off your radar.  All this talk seriously makes me want to watch it right this moment, though.

You definitely should. One thing to be warned about though is that the plot is very difficult to follow the first time you watch it. It took me three times to really figure out what was going on on every level. Maybe I'm a dope but it's pretty complex and a lot of plot is revealed in short dialogue.  Didn't impact my enjoyment the first time around but my enjoyment of it has gotten deeper over the multiple viewings.

My Dad actually took me to it when I was 11 or so. I didn't understand a thing. But I've seen it plenty of times since.

You can never be disappointed by Albert Finney by the way.

But that would be like killing off the point of the movie entirely. The evil bastard lives at the end, because he is the only person in the movie who has a moral code and sticks to it.

Without that the film would lose its element of irony. Every other person in No country for old men who dies, gets killed because they lose track of their own moral code, does something bad and that deed comes back to him at the end.

So the irony is the ending of the movie because the only one still alive is the one who stuck to his principles even if they are twisted and crazy and he is a evil bastard.

Ahhh! Gotcha. I actually hadnt caught on to that. Okay so how did the girl screw up and break her moral code?
(PS- This still doesnt make me like it anymore.)

She didn't, and neither did the gent that got stopped by Chigurh on the road and got his head poked.

Chigurh is just batshit insane, as exhibited:

Okay but how does that jive with what Jeff Kelly posted?

Because part of his code is based upon leaving things to chance.  Listen to his conversation with the clerk.  If she would have called the coin correctly she probably would have lived.

Oh yeah I forgot he gave her the coin as well, as he did the shop clerk.

The coin doesn't matter, it's still his decision.  If he doesn't want to kill her, there's no reason to even be at her house.  There no reason to flip the coin at the "annoying" shop clerk unless you really want to kill him.  The coin and code are just a check on a complete disregard for life and perhaps a compulsive to kill.  He never flips the coin for his employers that he murders, the Mexicans he kills, Woody, or the various law enforcement.  They were just in his way or perceived as such.

The coin is just a way to personally absolve himself from killing people that in now way meet his eternal criteria for a quick shotgunning to the chest.

I disagree with that.  He doesn't need personal absolution as he is a psychopath.

Maybe absolve is a poor choice of words.  The coin is just there to compensate with whatever problem he has with just offing people that don't meet his already loose criteria for offing.  There's no reason to go back and kill her, it's resolved.  He knows that, so he just doesn't kill her right off the bat. 

She actually calls him on his bullshit.  And.. he has to wipe off his boots when leaving the house.

No Country is the worst Coen brothers film I've seen. O Brother is quite enjoyable though.

Except that he promised Llewelyn that if made a particular choice that even if Chigurh got the money back she would be dead. Now that I think about it, it's not so much chance as determinism. The coin is just means of the expression of the determinism. 

I'm not really arguing that fact.  Maybe you're misunderstanding my point.  Doesn't matter really.  :|  Carson Well's description of him fits. Carla nails him at the end as well, and that's pretty much my basis for my characterization of him. Again, doesn't matter. Glad a movie made me think and didn't end in a stupid hollywood way.

As far as O'Brother.. one of my favorites.  Lebowski is my favorite of theirs', but I did a paper on the character of Odysseus so I'm a bit partial to the material.  Still odd that they claim they've never read the Odyssey.  They did it might fine.

I wouldn't take that seriously. It's like the "true story" statement at the beginning of Fargo. They aren't above fudging to heighten aspects of their work.

I'd say it's probably not that hard to have a pretty good understanding of the Odyssey without actually having read the exact text, it gets around all sorts of parts.

Heightening is wrong!

(http://www.seinfeld-fan.net/pictures/cards/card_mickey_f.gif)

Their references demonstrate that they have a very good understanding of the Odyssey - more than a passing familiarity. I'm pretty certain that they've admitted that "Of course they read it" but what they did was read it, put it down and not read it again after they started writing the screenplay.  Like Abagadro says, they claimed Fargo was a true story when it blatantly wasn't.  If you look at the credits of the film (by which I mean actually watch the film, not look it up on IMDB), you'll also see that The Artist Formerly Known As "Prince" was credited as the victim in the field but it wasn't.  It's just something they do.

I've never read the Odyssey, but I instantly knew what this was, and all of the references. So I could believe that, I guess. There's the Odyssey, and then there's the popular highlights that have seeped into the public consciousness. This movie seems to touch only on the latter version.

So you admit that you've never read the Odyssey but you know that you got all the references. If you're only aware of the popular highlights, how do you know you haven't missed other stuff that may have been in the film?  I'll admit that maybe some of the stuff that I thought maybe obscure like Menelaus, the Lotophagi and the killing of the cows is actually part of these popular highlights but most people I know of only really know about Polyphemus the Cyclops, the Sirens, perhaps Syclla and Charybdis and the general theme of returning home to his wife Penelope.

Doh, yeah. Fair point. It just seems like I've seen many of the things here. Same goes for the Americana references... kind of a popular highlight of things many people tend to think of with that. Cool Hand Luke, Baby Face Nelson, Robert Johnson, the KKK, black acapella grave diggers, Bible salesmen. Heh

The KKK were sheep.

 :awesome_for_real: