Live and Learn

One of my favorite exchanges, from the otherwise largely forgettable Burn After Reading:

GARDNER CHUBB (CONT'D)
… What did we learn, Palmer.

PALMER
I don't know, sir.

GARDNER CHUBB
I don't fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

PALMER
Yes sir.

GARDNER CHUBB
Although I'm fucked if I know what we did.

PALMER
Yes sir. Hard to say.

Comments

[BrotherMovesOn]

"You think that's a Schwinn?"

[Stephen Lathrop]

Maybe forgettable because the gun play does not work out the way a pro-gun advocate imagines it should?

[ravenshrike]

Or because everything except the central premise was boring as fuck. The idea, that a drunkard CIA agent writes a memoir that at some point everyone else thinks contains secrets, has potential. The execution however was dull as ditchwater.

[Bob from Ohio]

Sounds like Hopscotch from 1980.

[grb]

I think it's the only Coen Brothers film I hadn't seen - and that includes Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers.

Is Burn really that bad?

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

It wasn't one of their best, but I thought it was pretty good. I wasn't crazy about Intolerable Cruelty, I thought that was their worst film. They've made so many great films, they are entitled to a stinker or two.

[LawTalkingGuy]

I liked it a lot. And I don't think I've heard it really panned by anyone? Like some people might say its not their favorite, but I've never heard it's "very bad."

[grb]

On the other hand, I think Millers Crossing is my favorite.

[Frank Drackman]

any one of Clint Eastwoods grunts in "Dirty Hairy" is more interesting,

[Frank Drackman]

OK, didn't realize BP was in it, but any of Tyler Durden's throwaway lines from "Fight Club" is better...

"It could be worse. A woman could cut off your penis while you're sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car."

[Dan Schiavetta]

This more or less describes the situation when I got fired from my first law firm job. They don’t tell you s**t.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

My recollection -- from hundreds of annual (or sometimes more frequent) reviews of associates and partners -- is that they were often quite detailed.

Well, maybe not for the guy who was fired before he could sit down when he returned to his office after a remarkable performance at his first administrative hearing (he thought we were assembled in his office to congratulate him, unaware that the hearing examiner had already called the firm to provide an account of the performance).

[Dan Schiavetta]

That was not my experience.

This is what happened.

I had been working there maybe six months, nobody complaining about my work. An announcement went out that they were getting a big insurance coverage account and were forming a "team" of associates. I went to one of the partners and said, "How can I prepare for this team?" He went to his bookshelf and picked out what he called "the standard treatise". I went through it, separated out and updated all the cases in our state, then printed it out for him. It ran to 112 pages (I still have it). He congratulated me on "a massive amount of work".

Meanwhile I noticed I was getting less and less work. Some days, I was hard put to bill even two hours. Then the senior partner called me in and fired me. He cited instances of "mistakes" which I later realized were not really mistakes.

Needless to say I didn't get put on the "team".

The standard way of firing an attorney is to say, "Clean out your desk by the end of the day." So I was doing that when another partner, whom I had been drafting a motion for on a big case, called and asked when my last day was. I said, "Today [Friday]". He said, "I want you to finish that motion. Stay until Tuesday."

I still don't know what happened. Though I did learn a lot about insurance coverage issues which helped me get my next job.

[kotodama]

I thought it (BAR) was pretty solid, but the seething misanthropy was a little hard to take; it gets kind of draining by the end. Likewise, there's no protagonist you really want to root for. And the storyline is idiosyncratic so that not everyone is going to appreciate it. But the individual performances, like Pitt, McDormand, and Malkovich were all excellent.

[kotodama]

Too bad there's no edit function. Overall, I'd put BAR in the top half of Coen Brothers' movies, although I haven't seen them all, especially the more recent ones.

[BrotherMovesOn]

Kotodama, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a must see.

[kotodama]

Will check it out, thanks!

[loki13]

Burn is quite good. Not in the top tier of Coen Brothers movies, but certainly not the bottom tier.

Rankings, worst to best-

Bottom Tier (Worst of the worst)
18. The Ladykillers. Just ... never worked.
17. Intolerable Cruelty. A few decent moments, but pretty meh.

Okay (Would be great for any other director, but mediocre Coen)
16. Blood Simple. I will get a lot of pushback on this, but they were still finding their way.
15. Inside Llewyn Davis. It's perfectly cromulent.
14. True Grit. It's a fine movie- but not a GREAT Coen Brothers movie.

The Comedies (Mid-tier comedies)
13. Hudsucker Proxy. You know, for kids!
12. Burn After Reading. Exposing the vapidness that we live in.
11. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Makes you want them to do more vignettes.

The lower part of the top 10
10. Hail, Caesar! A little inside Hollywood, but so good.
9. The Man Who Wasn't There. More powerful the more you think about it.
8. A Serious Man. I love, love, love this movie.
7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? If you're too lazy to read the Odyssey, this will do you one better.
6. Fargo. Are you shocked this didn't make it to the top 10? Me too! And yet ...

The Top 5
5. Raising Arizona. Any other director would name this their best comedy. But for the, it's number 2. Also? NIC CAGE!
4. Miller's Crossing. Some days I love this film, and some days I really love this film.
3. The Big Lebowski. The Dude Abides, and this is their best comedy.
2. No Country For Old Men. Perfection.
1. Barton Fink. Controversial choice, I know, but this is to movies what Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment is to poetry.

[Ridgeway]

I love NCfOM, but I am not sure how much credit the Coens should get, compared with some of their other great movies.

The book reads just like a screenplay -- I believe it was originally written as a screenplay -- and the movie tracks it almost word for word.

The casting was just about perfect, but Tommy Lee Jones was kind of a no-brainer.

With all that in place, the movie almost makes itself. To the Coens' credit, though, they didn't do anything to screw it up (I'm looking at you Coppola, and your version of the Outsiders).

[loki13]

I think that far too often, we view a movie that we think is a masterful adaptation of the source material (or is "just like it") and don't realize how much translation that actually required.

In other words- think of all the bad versions of books. Think of all the bad casting. That this movie turned out perfect is a true tribute to the Coens.

[Ridgeway]

Generally speaking, I agree, but have you read the novel of No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)? You feel like you are reading the screenplay to the movie.

I have another pet theory that mediocre novels make better movies -- think Jaws or the Godfather. Movies based on great novels tend to be frustrating, for the reason you point out: it is incredibly hard to capture the "magic" of a great novel.

[loki13]

Yes.

But again, when was the last time you read a great novel and then later seen the movie and thought, "Yes, this is exactly what the book was."

I would say that it wasn't*- instead, the movie was so good, it subtly changed the way you remembered the text (which was also so good), so that the two became inseparable.

*Because it can't be.

[Ridgeway]

How many great novels were turned into great movies? Seriously, don't know if I can think of any.

All the great movies bases on novels I can think of were based on mediocre to good novels. For example (from older to newer off the top of my head): Gone with the Wind, The Thin Man, Big Sleep, Maltese Falcon, From Here to Eternity, Manchurian Candidate, Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Rosemary's Baby, Friends of Eddie Coyle, Godfather, Goodfellas, Shawshank Redemption, LA Confidential, No Country for Old Men.

Some might say the Lord of the Rings, but I would rate both the books and movies as good to very good, not great.