awagner

I would have enjoyed this a lot more had greater things not been looming in my head the whole time: Hopkins and Oldman (whose appearance, for me, was a sort of masterpiece of a thing that I couldn't help finding adorable in some strange way, though I presume it was supposed to be gruesome...) anyway, Hopkins and Oldman pulled some pretty impressive comedy out of their cheesy material...endearing them to me even further...I don't know how the two villians of a movie could have gotten any more loveable...and it could have been a successful comedy, were it not for the serious interruptions of Moore and Giannini (the detective Pazzi character.)

During the great scenes in Florence, Giannini and even Moore could have taken this in an even better direction, turning it into a wonderfully suspenseful, dark, and ligitimately scary thriller/cat-and-mouse thing, but that gets interrupted by the Oldman character and the absurdity of the gore.

I could have even settled for a pure gore flick, but ignoring its rediculous circumstances, the gore is mostly a little too realistic for me to find funny--not on the same level as say Army of Darkness or Dusk til Dawn or Troma stuff.

Of course, Scott has the visual bit down (though I seem to remember some cool flying dirt in the preview that didn't make it to the final cut)...lots of emphasis on current architectural discussion about media integrated into our environment, with projections on buildings and people reflected in multiple panes of glass and all...but with a sort of wild inconsistency in tone, I'm left wondering what the thread is that holds this together--is there a point, besides recreating the characters from Silence? Some muddled thing with the opening scene regarding race and class crime expectations? Well I don't see it, and I hate to be a prude, but if I were to employ federal pornography standards in judging this film, I would have to think long and hard on whether this appeals to anything but the violent equivalent of the "prurient interest." A big budget and the occasional chuckle do not artistic merit make.

Which brings me to the final "greater thing" looming in my head: Requiem for a Dream. Not that the two films are similar, but having discussed Requiem just before entering the theatre, I couldn't stop thinking of the travesty that Requiem, as the greatest and most potent anti-drug movie I've ever seen, containing a relative lack of violence and nothing but consensual (if somewhat irregular) sex, should be given an NC-17, and Hannibal can swing an R. So in conclusion...the MPAA can bite me.

As Barton Fink is, on certain days, my favorite movie of all time, I've been doing some research: The Coens, usually closed-mouthed about any aspect of their films which breaks through the surface plot, freely admit to being influenced by Polanski's The Tenant and Repulsion in the making of Fink. So to shed some light on things, you might try watching these, as well as Luis Bunuel's earlier Belle De Jour, which contains the same actress as Repulsion in a startlingly similar scenario. Only in Belle De Jour, the slipping into insanity and loss of distinction between reality and dream world for the viewer is all the more clear, all the more nuanced, and all the more ground-breaking. So I think what you will draw from these other films is the conclusion that, yes, as has been suggested, a good part of this may or may not have happened, up to and including the whole damn thing. As a last note, I feel there is also some clarity about the film to be gained by watching The Seventh Seal. We have a similarity of images where the waves break on the rock, we have a confusion of the roles of devil-like and religious or god-like characters...among other things...but the most important connection is that we have two films here which are self-referential in their exploration of the making of performed art. Fink is a movie about writing a movie...for the common man. I think the biggest irony of Barton Fink is the nature of the Coen's films to be both violent and a little childish, borrowing from b-movie conventions, and then to add high-falutin' theoretical subtexts and what-have-you, making them, literally, art films for the common man. They can be enjoyed on both levels. What better film to reference in this context, then, than Bergman's Seventh Seal, which was THE movie which first established film as an art form instead of merely a lowely entertainment.

Well, I watched this again after seeing Russell Crowe in The Insider.

THE reason to watch this movie, in my mind, is the last five minutes. If you've read the title, I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that it's the sort of poetically cataclysmic ending you'd expect from the best of film noir...bringing to mind a vague connection with Kiss Me Deadly...and the only way to end any good road movie. That said, the rest of the movie is pure B...true to the noir roots...and whether or not the mistranslations and boom mike shadows were intentional is somewhat irrelevant. You may laugh, you may not, but at worst it's a quirky, passably interesting vehicle to the "good" part.

As for Crowe, well, fans may enjoy, but no one's really given enough time or lines to shine in this movie. Or establish believable relationships for that matter. They're grim characters on a silent march to their doom, leaving a path of carnage and (I must insist quite relevant) dead bystanders in their wake.