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Barton Fink >> Some parts were hard to distinguish between what is real. The dialogue is funny and engaging.

Hannah and Her Sisters >> Classic Woody Allen.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire >> The third is so far my favorite. This one seemed tiresome.

Pan's Labyrinth >> Beautiful, imaginative, and dark. The best kind of fairy tale.

Epic Movie >> The worst kind of comedy. The kind that is not funny. And stupid to kick.

'Barton Fink'
Joel & Ethan Coen, 1991

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Ill review later...

A writer with a writer's block. A hotel with the tagline 'a day or a lifetime'. A mad killer on the loose. The Coen Brothers' Barton Fink sounds - and sometimes looks - like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining but in spirit it is more like Roman Polanski's The Tenant. No wonder, Polanksi as the jury head handed over the Palme d'Or as well as the Best Director and Best Actor awards to Barton Fink, making it the first film ever to win all three at Cannes.
At a time when the world is celebrating the Coens for No Country for Old Men, it's not a bad idea to revisit the brilliance of Joel and Ethan's fourth film. The story is about a proletariat playwright named Barton Fink (John Turturro) who is invited to Hollywood to write a B-movie on wrestling. Naturally, he struggles to be the voice of every man and finds a friend in his hotel's neighbour Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), a man who sells fire insurance.
Masters of exploiting and taking digs at pop culture, the Coens not only base the main players on real people who existed - William Mayhew is a take-off on William Faukner, Jack Lipnick of Capitol Pictures is MGM's Louis B. Mayer - they also put in many in-jokes about the way Hollywood operated in the 1930s. The film is laced with symbolism, working on different levels. Some are physical like the way the heat peels off the hotel's wallpapers just like pus starts dripping down Charlie's ears.
And then, of course, the whole film as an allegory on the rise and course of Nazism during the 1940s. Barton wants to write about the common man but he himself cannot connect to anybody except the picture on the wall of a girl sitting on the shore. Charlie on the other hand meets common people everyday and he wants to help them in his own way. The modus operandi of this helping is the big twist which turns the film on its head.
It is the characterisations which make the Coen films so very good. Every character, whether it is the lead or someone with just two scenes, is so well written and so perfectly cast, that characters are established in minimal scenes and scenes are conquered with minimal lines. And what lines: "You ain't no writer, Fink, you're a goddamn write-off."
You just can't imagine anyone else but Coen favourites Turturro (with his Eraserhead hairstyle) and Goodman (with his ear-to-ear grin) playing Barton and Charlie. Not only are they diametrically opposite to each other physically, Charlie is clearly the emotional anti-thesis of Barton. In an early scene, the two men realise they are in each other's shoes. Much later we know why.

The Coen's focus mainly on groups of people in movies and when they focus on singular characters they work even better. Barton Fink, made the same year as my birth, is about a writer of the same name who moves to Hollywood to make his mark on the writers world, but he's got Writer's Block inside the Earle hotel. He meets his neighbor, Charlie Meadows. It features in that one weird haircut and a mesmerizing performance from Coen regular John Tuturro. It's a satire of Hollywood during the Golden Era but in closer detail it is a detailed and atmospheric attack on that Era being heavily influenced by Citizen Kane, Frederico Fellini human explorations and Ingar Bergman. Written by The Coen's they put their own lives of Writer's Block into an envy of frustration with an incredible twists of fate and human psychology. Hiring the very best of talent with the Prince of Cinematography Roger Deakins taking surrealism to a new limit. It has themes, a solid script, inspiring characters and enough allegorical meaning to leave the audience flabbergasted. What a film.

After watching Cohens in "No Country For Old Men" I really into their movies. I do not like thrillers/suspense movies much before. Ofcourse, I have not watched much of that kind of movies though, so I can not really say they are the ONLY people who can make make. But definitely they are THE BEST to make movies of this kind. A compelling and its enough justification for their academy awards.

So I added this movie into my Blockbuster account. When it arrived, I immediately put it into my DVD player and with coffee and biscotti, the Movie session went well.

In a typical cohens way the movie unfolds beautifully. John Turturro plays as writer and he is struggling to get out of writers block. The events flows perfectly and this young hollywood writer struggles to write a script and often interrupted by his next door neighbor. The neighbor turns out to be a important character in the movie.

Characters live in the movie and their behavior is well established with in few scenes. The studio owner character, the serial killer as next door neighbor, alcoholic famous-struggling old writer, his secretary, and the John turturros own character all that makes this movie a wonderful one to watch.

And the way in which Cohens portrays the fear / bravery of the characters is also amazing. When the fire engulfs the hotel, the serial killer opens his room normally and enters into it. In a way, director tells Johns fear is with the serial killer and not with fire and the serial killer is not at all bothered about John and not even with FBI agents but only with his own personality.

Sometime back - tamil writer Sujatha remarked, all the characters in thriller movie should be shown within 10mins of the movie and movie should revolve around them. It makes sense, I want the main character of thrillers well ahead and so that plot is maintained in logical way. I do not want some character popping up in the last minute to claim some credit. Cohens are master in that.

What else can I add? It's a Coen film. Interesting to watch to be sure (flamboyant 40's visuals, a fuzzy-headed John Turturro baring teeth, an incredible performance by John Goodman), but the accounting and dialogue felt a bit strained.

Still, it was funny to see how Barton, desperate to create theater for the common man then thrusted into creating a B-formula screenplay, couldn't be bothered to listen to a common man. Then, of course, that common man (Goodman) turned out to be a maniac. Even the writer/novelist he so admired turned out to be a drunken fraud. Finally, Barton's high regard of his own work and writing is brought to a vulgar halt by Jack Lipnick.

Not my favorite Coen piece, but still worth a viewing.

Barton Fink is a promise of standards set by the Coen Brothers. Holding one of the best cast ensembles to fit the tone, style, and theme with near perfection. Giving characters the correct stereotypes which works to bring more out of the film's humor. The time period so laid-out and enriched with important details without over-exaggerating. Each actor brings out his or her potential. I mean, damn.. this is one hell of a movie just to experience. And, just to think... The Coen Brothers wrote this movie during a writers' block.

Which is part of the problem (the only problem of this movie, mind you). Barton Fink provides a thorough enough conclusion but solves little. A complete enough character analyzation is given with some ambiguity on the side. The ambiguous content near the end could lead to a more elaborate self-discovery, but that's an interpretation I could not find. No way at all does this ruin the film though. It's simply the conclusion to a story that has no choice but to conclude. Just like any story. The character has been built to a considerable point and then flattens out to have the audience turn around and see the climb it took to get there.



Convenient, adding the hot hot summer into the setting. Boiling intensity to mimic the blood boiling inside Barton's veins. Events of this time period only comparing to John Goodman's inevitable apocalyptic showdown, the producer's undermining reluctance to join the war effort, W.P.'s great secrets, and so on. Seems like an obvious way to try and enhance the events around the characters, but the Coen's direct its influence intelligently. Wallpaper peeling like a banana and seeping like a tree, the soft murmur of a fan on the desk, even just the lighting and colors of every room give the impression of an uncomfortable heat glooming around Barton. An unsettling quality of events emerging and to come.

I didn't quite get the ending of this film from the first viewing. But, the second finally settled everything down in my head. Nevertheless, Barton Fink joins the ranks of The Fountain and Atonement as damn near perfect films in my mind. The entertainment value is top notch. Each motif ringing true to an underlying theme to the certain involving character(s) on screen. Barton Fink is a representation of stunning filmmaking where all the elements connect and deliver down to the finest detail. A remarkable feat. One that I don't believe even No Country For Old Men held up to as thoroughly.