Bloodless Coup

No Lebowski for you!? For shame.

This is an interesting challenge, because with the Coen's there's the question of pure enjoyment, which might elevate Raising Arizona and / or O Brother into the top 5 for me, or artistic flooredness, which almost certainly pushes RA out, and makes O Brother trickier. In the end, I'm going for a combination of the two, a highly unscientific method:

Lebowski
No Country for Old Men
Miller's Crossing / Fargo (tie)
Barton Fink / O Brother (tie)

I know, I cheated to get a sixth in there, but it's the truth!

And holy shit! In checking the ouevre on imdb, I see they've got five (!!!) in production, including their adaption of the Yiddish Policemen's Union. Shit, now I guess I'm going to have to read it (I've sort of tired of Chabon). And make sure I see Burn After Reading in the theatre.

Yeah, I really need to find time for Burn. And you should find time for the Yiddish Policeman's Union - it's very good. Sure, there's some typical Chabon in there (not that that's bad) - but throwing it into that imagined world ... hey, I like it.

As to Lebowski - I think the degree to such it's become a constant cultural refrain limits my ranking of it. Same thing with Raising Arizona. I'm sort of worn out by all that - and don't think the love for 'em is quite warranted. Maybe it's unfair to the films, but there it is. And I don't remember Miller's Crossing that well. I'd say that I think my #1 and #2 are super (if not perfect), #3 is almost there (I think like Barton Fink it trails off ever so slightly toward the end - though not at the very end), and #4 and #5 are my personal favorites of the their many oddities that are good - but also somewhat more uneven.

I also have never seen the Man Who Wasn't There. Or maybe -- I have a brief inkling, far short of a memory -- I did and slept through a bunch of it. I feel like I remember having it on my DVR, and there's no way I would have deleted it without tryint to watch it, and yet I have no meaningful memory of it at all, and what I have might have been cobbled together from trailers and such.

I stand by Lebowski, despite its teeth-gritting universality. I loved it before it morphed into a classic and for the same reasons I do know: the absolutely fantastically bizarre writing, like the Coens were slowly assembling all of their weirdest jokes in a backroom somewhere until they realized they cohered perfectly into this new project; the literally breath-taking performances by Bridges and (to only a slightly lesser extent) Goodman and Buscemi; the deeply philosophical undertones (to that end, as a matter of both comedy and contemplation, there's something stunning about the ash-scattering scene); the dream sequence.

And as for Miller's crossing, go back, watch it again. Within their genre send-up sub-category of work, I honestly think it's their best, because it somehow manages to be perfectly deadpan while winking all the while. Granted, that can be said of a couple of their movies, but Miller's is the one most biased toward deadpan, such that each wink is like a playful tickle rather than an elbow in the ribs.

Perhaps because I've seen Lebowski so many times, MC is probably the one, of the entire corpus, that I'm most likely to get sucked into mid-stream when it's on TV and I've got nothing specific to do. It's happened several times in the last year alone.

Well my ranking of The Man Who Wasn't There is likely unusually high. Perhaps I liked it more than it warrants - and it's not great or anything. But it clicked the right switches for me - though not quite as well as Hudsucker.