The Coen Brothers unit was by far my favorite one yet this year. I had never seen Fargo or Raising Arizona and I liked them both, even though the accents in Fargo were a bit much. The Coen Brothers do a lot of different things with their film making keeping the audience involved throughout the movie. One of my favorite things that the Coen Brothers did with their movies is the way that an "ultimate evil" was always portrayed in the movie. It took different forms in the movies, the big Swedish guy in Fargo, and Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, but it was always present and was always a focal point of the movie. The Coen Bros. always seemed to play off of the fact that the main characters had to battle this "ultimate evil" and the struggle was shown throughout the movie. The way I see it is that the Coen Bros. are trying to show you the true side of life that no one looks at and the way that ordinary good people have to confront it. It makes the audience think about how they would confront such a evil if they were in the situation that the characters were in.
The Coen Brothers also loved to play off the accents that people have in the places that their movies were set. Who knows why the accents they use are so over exaggerated but I think it is because they make fun of the people that are in the movies. It gives them a flaw, humanizing them, even making them seem less likely to be in such extraordinary situations and excel, even though they do. Along with the accents the Coen Bros. used desolate settings in the movies they created. This gives the feeling of such and isolated, hopeless feeling that the movies sometimes feel doomed, or at least that's how I felt. All in all I liked the Coen Bros. movies and liked how they created their films too.
2 comments:
wow you made some good observations jonathon. I like how you thought they tried to make the characters more ordinary with the accents, that made a lot of sense to me and i see why the coen's would do that. also i like how you mention desolate locations, also a key tool used by Ethan and Joel.
I think they use accents that are so exaggerated to make a point. That it is not how you say something, but what you say. It also shows that people in that certain region they are making fun of, can have the same problems as where the people are viewing the film. You also forgot to mention Leonard Smalls, who is also pure evil. I love you!
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