esrosedotblog

TODAY'S MOVIE

BARTON FINK (1991); NYTimes1176Best; the brothers Coen; Odets lookalike (one play/one movie) goes to Hollywood and enters art deco hell, sells out, gets writer's block, and ends up as just another casualty of the powers that control the vast.........wait a minute. It is a Coen brothers' picture, full of visual fun, comic performance, over the top cinematic dancing, overwrought story, and good plain fun if I want to meet them half way. In this case, I did.

Turturro, Goodman, Davis, Lerner, Mahoney, Buscemi, and Shalhoub are all great and John Polito (77 credits) is the perfect studio toady. These are many of the Coen stable of actors and they are able to swim with the material. I liked it. I would not want to watch it again, though; it is a lot of work and I bet it does not withstand scrutiny.

Oh, yeh, there are symbols of fascism and furnaces and power out of control and all that; but it is more of an exercise than a serious examination. Selling out is sort of basic and not really the result of uber-dictator-mogul-manipulation. It is selling out. A 3 out of a Netflix5.