Repost: Inside Llewyn Davis (April 8th at the CWRU Film Society Strosacker Auditorium)

[INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS screens Saturday April 8th at 7:00 pm and 9:00 pm at the CWRU Film Society Strosacker Auditorium.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“The film doesn't really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that's why we threw the cat in.”

That's what Joel Coen, one-half of the Coen brothers, has said about their latest offering, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. It's the kind of dismissive statement we've come to expect in Coen Land, where deep analysis is considered laughable. In 2001, I wrote in a profile of Ethan Coen:

With the Coens, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overanalysis. They long ago confessed their infatuation with the novels of James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett, but Ethan says critics overestimate their literary influences. 'They read too much into it,” he says. 'We’re presumably these movie brats. They mention movies that we’re supposed to be influenced by, which we haven’t seen.' No doubt that’s because the Coens’ movies revisit and reinterpret a wide range of popular film styles. 'To be fair, we seem to invite that kind of exegesis, especially with Barton Fink. But you do stuff because it feels good for the story. There’s no code.

Suffragette

Review by Pamela Zoslov

In 1912 London, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) leads a life of unrelenting drabness. She works in a hot, steamy laundry in Bethnal Green, where she and other women workers suffer burns, chest coughs, leg ulcers and sexual molestation by the boss, all for 13 shillings a week. David Lloyd George (David Schiller), Chancellor of the Exchequer and future prime minister, asks the soft-spoken young woman — who's been suddenly pressed into speaking at Parliament on behalf of women's suffrage — “What does the vote mean to you?” “I thought,” she responds thoughtfully, “there is another way of living this life.”

Inside Llewyn Davis

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“The film doesn't really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that's why we threw the cat in.”

That's what Joel Coen, one-half of the Coen brothers, has said about their latest offering, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. It's the kind of dismissive statement we've come to expect in Coen Land, where deep analysis is considered laughable. In 2001, I wrote in a profile of Ethan Coen:

With the Coens, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overanalysis. They long ago confessed their infatuation with the novels of James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett, but Ethan says critics overestimate their literary influences. 'They read too much into it,” he says. 'We’re presumably these movie brats. They mention movies that we’re supposed to be influenced by, which we haven’t seen.' No doubt that’s because the Coens’ movies revisit and reinterpret a wide range of popular film styles. 'To be fair, we seem to invite that kind of exegesis, especially with Barton Fink. But you do stuff because it feels good for the story. There’s no code.

The Great Gatsby

Review by Pamela Zoslov

The news that Australian director Baz Luhrmann was making yet another adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY raised a familiar dread. What would the tasteless showman responsible for MOULIN ROUGE do to Fitzgerald's slender, elegiac Jazz Age novel? The trailer for the film, a high-decibel mash-up featuring a robotic version of that well known 1920s ditty “So Happy Together” by the Turtles, did little to reassure me about what would certainly be an ugly assault on literature – “The Great Ghastly.” And in 3D, no less.

It's easy to feel protective about Fitzgerald, a writer too fragile to live very long. I was dismayed in 2008 that a delicate short story like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” had been inflated by David Fincher into a massive special-effects epic. Gatsby occupies an even more special place in American literature. Familiar to every schoolchild, it has been called the “great” novel everyone has read, in comparison to Ulysses, the “great” novel no one has read.