Two Cents
Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
What we really need is a Two Cents of the common people, you know what I mean? Oh, hello there Cinaps-letariats, and welcome to yet another thrilling installment of our weekly film discussion column, Two Cents. This week we are examining the enigmatic Coen Bros’ film Barton Fink. For many, this film was the first introduction to the Coens, and what a unique one it is. Barton Fink is somehow rooted in a classic LA while also feeling like an impossible dream, a nightmare scenario that we cannot escape from. It also manages somehow to be hilarious.
Did you get a chance to watch along with us this week? Want to recommend a great (or not so great) film for the whole gang to cover? Comment below or post on our Facebook or hit us up on Twitter!
Next Week’s Pick:
Next week’s pick is Mystic Pizza from 1988, a quintessential coming of age movie. Watch as three teenage girls learn about life and love while working in a pizza joint in Connecticut. Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co!
The Team
Brendan:A fever dream of creation. Barton Fink belongs to that category of Coen Bros. film where they submerge you into a completely alien world from the very first frame and let you linger there for the entire running time. You may mistake Fink for a period piece, but don’t be fooled. This movie owes no more to the past than Star Wars. Instead, the Coens threw together iconography of early Hollywood and World War 2-era America, tossed in their own creative woes (abstracted into nightmare), put it all in a blender and hit frappe.
People will waste time trying to determine what is ‘real’ and what is ‘dream’ in this film, and certainly there are various demarcation points where a viewer could say, “Aha! Everything after this moment is in Barton’s head!” but that misses the sublime pleasure of the film. It’s all dream, it’s all nightmare, it’s all a maddening loop concocted in the mind of a fraying man. Turturro makes that man, pretentious rat though he is, strangely lovable, and Goodman manages to maintain audience sympathy even as he’s giddily sing-songing “Heil Hitler.”
A strange movie, this, but a brilliant one.( @TheTrueBrendanF)
Liam:Barton Fink has always been one of my favorite Coen Brothers films. It is a bit off the hinges, with over the top characters, and a reality bending style. I find it fascinating and hilarious, but also menacing at times in a really powerful way.
This time though, I found it depressing.
The artist, detached from reality, unable to see the world around him and the rich stories it holds? The writer struggling to find his voice, but really so caught up in larger meta-textual ideas that he can’t see the value of a good story? The coward, who allows his interest to keep him from living, let alone seeing and feeling for those around him?
Barton is a caricature of all these things, but he is them as well. Strange, how such an insane film can remind us of some basic things. This watch was fun in its own way, but it was also a reminder of the ways I can be like Barton. Worse, because I have not even had one successful thing, and nobody wants me in pictures.
A classic film which never quite touches the real, yet reverberates with certain truth. (@liamrulz)
Austin:The Coen Bros films that I adore — The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? — I really, really love. But neither was a home run – they had to round the bases over time and grow on me. So when upon my first-time watch of Barton Fink I say that I didn’t particularly care for it, that’s with the realization that I might come around to it later, as has been the case for most of the Coen films I’ve seen.
The film is a feverish nightmare with self-centered characters who don’t merit much of the audience’s patience or empathy. And while others are able to find the comedy, to me the whole thing’s just steeped in darkness. Barton Fink is not a bad movie, but it’s often an unpleasant one, and while I respect it, I didn’t savor the experience.
Or maybe I just didn’t like it because I prefer to think I can make it as a screenwriter. (@VforVashaw)
Ryan: It’s always nice to see an old-fashioned, optimistic film about Hollywood, huh? But seriously, folks, what a great flick! It’s almost impossible (for me, anyway) to nail down a central message or point for such a non-standard script, and this quality is as exciting as it is irritating. This is the kind of puzzle you joyfully fail at solving. I think we can all agree that Mr. Goodman is playing some sort of… I would rather not spoil it… and that by the film’s end, we can’t be certain if his authority reaches as far as the studio that tapped Fink for a screenplay. What we do know, is that once Michael Lerner has donned that military uniform, the hell Barton thought he was in back at the hotel wasn’t just a nightmare. He no longer has any artistic freedom, and he is doomed to an indefinite period of service. With performances and images this powerful, it’s alarming to realize this was only the fourth film completely under the control of the mighty brothers Coen. This was a year before Fargo. Hell, it was 15 years before No Country For Old Men! Hats off to these master filmmakers. (@RyanUCM)
Our Guest
Charlie Derry:Great to see a young John Turturro, and John Goodman gives a great performance. The story is interesting and it’s a brilliantly complex yet simple story from the Coen Brothers.
Something about it reminds me of Brazil, I guess it was all the surrealism, symbolism and references that get into your head whilst at the same time you’re thinking that not a lot is happening. (@charliederry)
Our guest Charlie Derry is a film/TV/lit blogger for sites like Filmoria, HeyUGuys, and Beamly!
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