What's A Coen Without A Brother? Nothing But 'Drive-Away Dolls'
#261: "Drive-Away Dolls," "Sunderland 'Till I Die," "Tokyo Vice," "Navalny," "Plus One"
Edition 261:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: A new movie from Ethan Coen let’s us once and for all judge the famous brothers on their own merits. Then I’ve got some quick thoughts about the landscape before diving into TV recommendations, a streaming rec based on current events and a hidden gem starring your new favorite actress. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” video game adaptations are already wearing on my nerves.
Drive-Away Dolls
The Coen brothers are my all-time favorite filmmakers. This entire newsletter is named after one of their movies, for crying out loud.
Obviously, we know it’s the synergy between the two that creates the magic of Fargo, The Big Lebowski or Inside Llewyn Davis, but it’s tempting with all successful collaborations to try to read between the lines and figure out what each member is contributing to the overall product. What was Brady and what was Belichick? Was the real genius Lennon or McCartney?
Now that the Coens have split and each made a solo project, that picture has become far more clear. It’s hard to think of any more opposite projects than Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls. On one hand, a black-and-white prestige adaptation of Shakespeare starring Denzel Washington. On the other….a screwball lesbian sex comedy.
To paint with a broad brush, Joel is the pretentious artist and Ethan is the sardonic prankster — the type of guy who once wrote a poem called “I Stubbed My Toe” that was just the F-word written 25 times and the final line, “that really hurt.”
Early in their careers it’s easy to see how they toggled between the two modes, drama and comedy, from one project to the next. As they went along, the elements started to blend together, and in No Content For Old Men for example you can have both “what’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss” and “mind ridin’ bitch?” That’s what makes me and so many others love them.
Having now seen what each brother did separately, it’s sad to realize how much each one needs the other. The Tragedy of Macbeth was too stilted and stylish, trying too hard. And Drive-Away Dolls is all over the place, the cinematic equivalent of dumping out all your legos onto the floor. It’s got gonzo psychedelic dream sequences, a la The Big Lebowski, and bumbling thugs like Fargo, and like a thousand other little details that are fantastically clever and specific when taken individually but don’t fit together in the aggregate.
One big difference between the two is that Ethan’s solo project looks like it was made for about $27. That’s not exactly a surprise. About two years ago, I remember reading a working script for this movie (I had a friend who worked for an agency and knew I loved the Coens, so he snuck it to me) and thinking there’s no way anyone makes this, it has zero commercial upside. Apparently the executives agreed with me.
It helps, in the final product, to have your characters filled out by Margaret Qualley — who I continue to insist is a rising movie star — and Geraldine Viswanathan, a reliable if uncomplicated presence. Because so many people want to work with the Coens (or at least one Coen), Beanie Feldstein lends her comic chops, and we get bit parts from no less than Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, and Colman Domingo. Never for a second do you believe these characters are real people, because they’re so ridiculous, but they are undoubtedly fun to watch on screen.
Everyone else appears to be played by a non-actor (I know for a fact they did a lot of open casting calls), and the production, aside from a few cool shots, is mostly the type of coverage you find on Sundance-level movies. It’s not meant to wow you with its visuals, and I’d even go so far as to call it an incredibly verbose movie. They cram a ton of dialogue into the zippy 85-minute runtime. It comes and goes at such a pace that there’s hardly a breath to digest anything that’s actually funny.
I know, deep down, that I’m judging this movie more harshly than if an unknown director had made some road trip comedy starring two likable young actors for a small budget. But I also think that’s fair, for a guy who has won four Oscars and made a half-dozen all-time classics.
Let me rephrase that. A guy who has collaborated on a half-dozen classics. The brothers are not the same without each other, and sadly it seems each is developing their own projects again a second time. I can only hope that some streaming service will be wise enough to offer them a gigantic bag of money to eventually re-team. I mean shoot, we even got a new song with Lennon and McCartney together in 2023, so anything is possible.
Random Thoughts
How does an utter and total disaster like Madame Web happen? Well Sony is contractually required to make a steady stream of Spider-Man related content, otherwise its rights to the character revert to Disney. So it’s all gas and no break, throwing together a prequel to a background character with a nonsense plot and stitching together the pieces with a bunch of ADR voiceover. It’s one of the worst major studio movies…ever?
Last week I talked about how the failure of Argylle could signal a potential turning point in my crusade against meta, ironic, so-bad-it’s-good movies. Then I see this week that Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper, an absolutely ludicrous shoot-em-up with enough lines in its trailer alone to fill the irony quota, is crushing it at the box office. It’s the highest-grossing movie in the world so far in 2024. **heavy sigh**
I don’t really understand why people aren’t projecting Dune 2 to be a humongous world-conquering hit. All the box office experts are capping it out around $400 million worldwide, with the most recent reason I heard being that it’s “too niche sci-fi.” Sci-fi didn’t exact limit the audience for little film called Star Wars, last time I checked. Everyone who’s seen this movie already has said it’s a masterpiece, the hype machine has been building for two-plus years, and it’s got basically every major movie star under 30 in it. With zero competition at the box office! I don’t see how it doesn’t make a roughly six bajillion dollars.
Sam Mendes (Skyfall, 1917) has the full life and music rights to make four separate biopics on each of the members of The Beatles, which will all be released theatrically in 2027. As if the lines between movies and TV weren’t blurred enough, this is literally a mini-series that we’re going to have to pay four different times to see. And we will!
Something New
Sunderland ‘Till I Die S3 (Netflix): There’s a million sports documentaries on Netflix these days — ones covering F1, tennis, golf, the NFL and soon to come the NBA too. But the series that came first, and to me still the BEST ongoing sports documentaries out there, is the one about a soccer (football!) club in the northeast of England. It’s about a downtrodden, blue collar town that lives and breathes with the team, and yet time and time again suffers humiliation and heartbreak. It’s the only example of an all-access style show when things aren’t going well, giving incredible insight into the players, coaches and executives as they try to correct course.
After a couple season break, the show just dropped a new batch of three episodes that left me actually emotional after I finished. Whether you’re into soccer, or sports in general, the human drama simply does not get better than this series.
Tokyo Vice S2 (Max): This idea originally started as a feature for legendary director Michael Mann, but was eventually adapted into a mini series in 2022 with Mann directing the pilot. I didn’t really expect a second season, but I’m more happy to jump back into this Japanese underworld where a foreign reporter (Ansel Elgort) tries to bring to justice the Yakuza with the help of a detective (the one and only Ken Watanabe).
The style of the show is incredibly cinematic, but the mode of storytelling is unlike anything else in movies or on TV. It’s meticulous, almost pondering. Instead of whisking a viewer from one exciting event to the next, it poses a series of very difficult situations and then dares the viewer to try to untangle them alongside our hero. It is, for me, an incredibly satisfying thought exercise to work through while also exploring the dark corners of an interesting city and culture.
Something Old
Navalny (2022, Max): Alexei Navalny died this week at a penal colony in Siberia at the age of 47. I’m breaking from my usual +20 years format just to highlight what was not only one of my favorite documentaries, but one of my top five movies full stop in 2022 (FULL REVIEW). His death was, sadly, predictable after seeing how this film ends with him being arrested and imprisoned unjustly for the crime of being Putin’s political rival.
The documentary follows Navalny as he sets out to investigate a previous assassination attempt against his life, trying to connect it to Putin, in what turns out to be almost like a spy thriller. Politics aside, this is one of the most thrilling movies you’ll ever see, reaching that rarified air of “I can’t believe I’m watching this” that really only exists for non-fiction storytelling. If you’re interested in learning more about the guy from the news, this is one of my highest recommendations.
Something to Stream
Plus One (Netflix): If you loved Maya Erskine in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and thought to yourself…what else has she been in?…well, you’re not alone. This week I found a very good romantic comedy she starred in with Jack Quaid (“The Boys”), about a pair of friends who are sick of going to all their other friends’ weddings solo and decide to be each other’s plus-ones, so they can each wingman the other. Until, of course, they fall in love.
This movie easily passes my One Criteria Rom-Com standard — great chemistry between the romantic leads — and it’s writing manages to be silly and fun without being too ridiculous or veer into B-movie schlock territory. Erskine, as we now know, brings a really unique comedic energy to her performances that is surprising and also allows for moments of sincerity. She’s great, and the movie is very very good.
Trailer Watch: Borderlands
The video game movies are coming, folks. Big, dumb, ridiculous video game movies. I never played “Borderlands,” so I have no frame of reference for this trailer, which looks like if Mad Max Fury Road all-of-a-sudden tried to be a children’s movie by glitter-bombing everything and adding a million exasperated quips. I can pretty much tell you that I’m going to hate it from these two minutes. But anyone who has played the actual game, I’d love to hear from you. Does Cate Blanchett in an orange wig stir your childhood nostalgia?!?!