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Tag: Ethan Coen

  • Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley on How They Shaped ‘Honey Don’t!’ Characters

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    Writer-director Ethan Coen has a reputation for not wanting actors to change the dialogue in his films.

    But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t open to collaborating with the stars in his latest movie with wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at a New York screening of Honey Dont! earlier this month, Aubrey Plaza, Margaret Qualley and Charlie Day all detailed how they helped shape their distinctive characters in the neo-noir dark comedy detective movie.

    Plaza, who plays Qualley’s character’s love interest MG Falcone, praised Coen and Cooke for being “very collaborative” and said that though she’d heard of Coen not wanting to alter lines, “He did a little bit on this one, which I thought was cool because he wanted to be open to all ideas.”

    Once Plaza was cast, her character changed in a “subtle” way, she recalled.

    “I think once Margaret and I started rehearsing and got into a rhythm there were just certain power dynamics that we wanted to address and make sure to dial them in — make sure the nuance and tiny changes along the way all made sense,” she said. “And I think Margaret and I are really open and willing to play around.”

    Qualley, meanwhile, said she was eager to work with Coen and Cooke again after starring in the first film in their self-proclaimed lesbian B-movie trilogy, Drive-Away Dolls, because of her experience working with them on their “fun set.”

    “I love learning from them and collaborating with them,” she said. And on this project, Qualley, who plays the film’s eponymous small-town private investigator, Honey O’Donahue, and studied classic noir films and books, indicated she played around with altering her voice to make it sound more like honey.

    “I tried to sound a little bit like Lauren Bacall or Humphrey Bogart,” Qualley said. “I read Lauren Bacall’s autobiography and she talked about lowering her voice. And she said that she would climb a mountain and just scream until she lost her voice. I didn’t exactly do that but I tried it.”

    Coen, it seems, has been influenced by both Qualley and Plaza, with the filmmaker saying meeting Qualley on Drive-Away Dolls was key for this film.

    “She was so right for this,” he said. “The obvious way that [Drive-Away Dolls] informed this one and the big way that it informed this one is Margaret.”

    And Plaza recalls Coen saying, when she wrapped Honey Don’t!, that he wrote the off-Broadway play she’s set to star in with her in mind.

    “When I wrapped Honey Don’t, Ethan came into my trailer and said, ‘I wrote this play and I think I wrote it for you and I didn’t even realize it. Would you do it?’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything you ask me to do, basically.’ I loved working with him. So I’d like to continue that creative collaboration,” she said.

    And Day, who was eager to learn from Coen and Cooke, maintained that he “didn’t change a comma” but appreciated the “loose” vibe on set.

    “They really know what they want so it’s just a matter of feeling that as long as I deliver what was scripted, we’ll be in good shape,” he said. “But it’s a loose set; it’s very happy-go-lucky and a lot of good energy.”

    Coen and Cooke previously said they weren’t sure if there would indeed be a third film in their genre trilogy, and they remained noncommittal at the Honey Don’t! screening.

    “I don’t know. There may well be. Actually, we’re working on a couple of things, the third one being one of them. You work on movies and see what happens next,” he said.

    Cooke joked that she has an easy way to complete the trilogy.

    “We’ll just call whatever movie comes next the third one,” she said.

    Focus Features’ Honey Don’t!, also starring Chris Evans and Billy Eichner, is now in theaters.

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    Hilary Lewis

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  • Reviews For The Easily Distracted: Honey Don’t!

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    Title: Honey Don’t!

    Describe This Movie Using One Simpsons Quote:

    HOMER: This lesbian bar doesn’t have a fire exit! Enjoy your death trap, ladies.
    WOMAN: What was her problem?

    Brief Plot Synopsis: Bakersfield has a surprisingly high murder rate.

    Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 rosary beads out of 5.

    click to enlarge

    Tagline: “She only has two desires, and one of them is justice.”

    Better Tagline: “The other? Proper adult toy hygiene.”

    Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Bakersfield, CA private detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) has no reason to suspect foul play when a potential client dies in a seemingly innocuous traffic accident, but the more she digs, the more reasons for suspicion she finds. What was the deceased’s relationship to the charismatic Reverend Devlin (Chris Evans)? Will her nosing around threaten her budding relationship with BPD officer MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza)? And does anyone in town know what’s up with that French chick on the moped?
    “Critical” Analysis: Honey Don’t! is the second solo directorial feature for Ethan Coen, following Drive Away Dolls (also starring Qualley), and the middle entry in what he and co-writer Tricia Cooke envision as a trilogy of “lesbian B-movies.” Their first entry had more of an absurdist caper sensibility to it, but both movies aren’t kidding around with the lesbian part.

    Honey, it must be said, is a much cooler customer than Dolls’ Jamie, and Coen and Qualley continue to demonstrate quite the rapport. She glides through HD!’s occasionally uneven storyline with an aplomb at odds with the, frankly, Coen-esque supporting characters around her and the washed out environs of Bakersfield.

    Ethan Coen and brother Joel, after all, are no stranger to noir (Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, The Man Who Wasn’t There). They just refuse to set them in the expected Gotham surroundings. Honey Don’t! is no different, with the blinding sun and exaggerated(?) grime of California’s Central Valley serving as backdrop for the unsavory shenanigans.

    And it has an unreal and almost anachronistic quality to it. Yes, people carry smartphones, and yes, the niece’s asshole boyfriend has a MAGA sticker on his truck, but Qualley — despite her character being from Bakersfield — is like an alien walking about humans in stilettos and high-waisted slacks. Honey is what you’d get if Raymond Chandler wrote Philip Marlow as a “dame.” And hornier.

    click to enlarge

    What’s most interesting (and probably irritating to some) is how seemingly major plotlines are teased but ultimately dumped as unceremoniously as I usually was in high school. We know Devlin is mixed up with some French heavies, for example, but just when you think you see where it’s going, Coen and Cooke pull le tapis right out from under you.

    Speaking of that, it’s hard to believe Qualley and Plaza have never been in a movie together before. The latter tends to get shoehorned into roles that focus on her inscrutable expression and natural sarcasm. Falcone lets Plaza expand that palette a bit, and she provides an intriguing complement to Qualley’s deadpan demeanor.

    And as much as you may not want to hand it to a guy who looks like Chris Evans, he’s shown a great knack for playing scumbags (Knives Out, Red One, Pain Hustlers). Reverend Devlin continues that trend, further proving Evans’ ability to pivot from America’s Ass to simply an American ass.

    I did like Honey Don’t!, just not as much as I wanted to. Qualley is a force, but the end result of Honey and MG’s relationship comes out of nowhere, and Devlin makes for an unworthy adversary. Charlie Day’s doofus homicide detective is a bright spot, and Coen and Cooke don’t shy away from sex or gore. I just wish it stuck the landing better.

    Honey Don’t! is in theaters today.

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    Pete Vonder Haar

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  • ‘Honey Don’t!’ Filmmakers Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke On Detective Genre Gender Norms, Next Female Rowing Crew Pic & Potential Joel Coen Reteam – Crew Call Podcast

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    Why haven’t the Coen Brothers worked together for seven years?

    “He borrowed the lawnmower, brought it back and never cleaned the blades. This is bullsh*t!” jokes Ethan Coen. Joel and Ethan Coen’s last movie together was the Netflix multi-story feature, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which for the latter was an epic project to shoot up there with the scope of True Grit and No Country for Old Men.

    Actually, life is what happens when two brothers are making their own projects, separately. Actually, Ethan Coen nearly retired from the craft while Joel Coen continued on making movies like The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington. However, Ethan was then pulled back into filmmaking by his spouse and longtime Coen editor Tricia Cooke with the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. They tried to make the caper they co-penned, Drive Away Dolls (Ethan prefers the original title Drive Away Dikes), over 20 years ago with Gas Food Lodging filmmaker Allison Anders. Ultimately, husband and wife took on the production themselves.

    Honey Don’t! their second movie with Focus Features, reteams the duo with Drive Away Dolls‘ star Margaret Qualley. The comedy, which closed the Cannes Film Festival, hits theaters this Friday. Qualley plays lesbian private eye Honey O’Donahue, a small-town private investigator, who delves into a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church led by Chris Evans’ sex crazed preacher.

    “There aren’t enough lesbian genre movies,” says Cooke, who looked at Honey Don’t! as a way to “switch the gender norms” in the detective movie and have the lead be a “classic femme fatale, kind of sultry, very seductive detective. We wanted to do a butch femme thing playing around with the gender norms of classic detective stories.”

    Cooke and Ethan Coen have a third collaboration in the works which they’re penning: the ten-year reunion of a women’s crew team.

    Coen teases that the project is about “the wilderness of life, roll down the river, which is life — ya, get it?”

    “…meets horror film” adds Cooke.

    We also talk with the duo about their writing shorthand, the state of moviegoing and their approach to testing movies.

    And don’t worry, the Coen Brothers will assemble once again behind the camera.

    Says Ethan, “We’ve written one to do together. I’m sure we’ll do. We got to kind of get on the same schedule page again.”

    Our conversation can be heard here:

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    Anthonypauldalessandro

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  • M. Emmet Walsh, unforgettable character actor from ‘Blood Simple,’ ‘Blade Runner,’ dies at 88

    M. Emmet Walsh, unforgettable character actor from ‘Blood Simple,’ ‘Blade Runner,’ dies at 88

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    LOS ANGELES – M. Emmet Walsh, the character actor who brought his unmistakable face and unsettling presence to films including “Blood Simple” and “Blade Runner,” has died at age 88, his manager said Wednesday.

    Walsh died from cardiac arrest on Tuesday at a hospital in St. Albans, Vermont, his longtime manager Sandy Joseph said.

    The ham-faced, heavyset Walsh often played good old boys with bad intentions, as he did in one of his rare leading roles as a crooked Texas private detective in the Coen brothers’ first film, the 1984 neo-noir “Blood Simple.”

    Joel and Ethan Coen said they wrote the part for Walsh, who would win the first Film Independent Spirit Award for best male lead for the role.

    Critics and film geeks relished the moments when he showed up on screen.

    Roger Ebert once observed that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

    Walsh played a crazed sniper in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy “The Jerk” and a prostate-examining doctor in the 1985 Chevy Chase vehicle “Fletch.”

    In 1982’s gritty, “Blade Runner,” a film he said was grueling and difficult to make with perfectionist director Ridley Scott, Walsh plays a hard-nosed police captain who pulls Harrison Ford from retirement to hunt down cyborgs.

    Born Michael Emmet Walsh, his characters led people to believe he was from the American South, but he could hardly have been from any further north.

    Walsh was raised on Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vermont, just a few miles from the U.S.-Canadian border, where his grandfather, father and brother worked as customs officers.

    He went to a tiny local high school with a graduating class of 13, then to Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

    He acted exclusively on the stage, with no intention of doing otherwise, for a decade, working in summer stock and repertory companies.

    Walsh slowly started making film appearances in 1969 with a bit role in “Alice’s Restaurant,” and did not start playing prominent roles until nearly a decade after that when he was in his 40s, getting his breakthrough with 1978’s “Straight Time,” in which he played Dustin Hoffman’s smug, boorish parole officer.

    Walsh was shooting “Silkwood” with Meryl Streep in Dallas in the autumn of 1982 when he got the offer for “Blood Simple” from the Coen brothers, then-aspiring filmmakers who had seen and loved him in “Straight Time.”

    “My agent called with a script written by some kids for a low-budget movie,” Walsh told The Guardian in 2017. “It was a Sydney Greenstreet kind of role, with a Panama suit and the hat. I thought it was kinda fun and interesting. They were 100 miles away in Austin, so I went down there early one day before shooting.”

    Walsh said the filmmakers didn’t even have enough money left to fly him to New York for the opening, but he would be stunned that first-time filmmakers had produced something so good.

    “I saw it three or four days later when it opened in LA, and I was, like: Wow!” he said. “Suddenly my price went up five times. I was the guy everybody wanted.”

    In the film he plays Loren Visser, a detective asked to trail a man’s wife, then is paid to kill her and her lover.

    Visser also acts as narrator, and the opening monologue, delivered in a Texas drawl, included some of Walsh’s most memorable lines.

    “Now, in Russia they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway,” Visser says. “But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.”

    He was still working into his late 80s, making recent appearances on the TV series “The Righteous Gemstones” and “American Gigolo.”

    And his more than 100 film credits included director Rian Johnson’s 2019 family murder mystery, “Knives Out” and director Mario Van Peebles’ Western “Outlaw Posse,” released this year.

    Johnson was among those paying tribute to Walsh on social media.

    “Emmet came to set with 2 things: a copy of his credits, which was a small-type single spaced double column list of modern classics that filled a whole page, & two-dollar bills which he passed out to the entire crew,” Johnson tweeted. “’Don’t spend it and you’ll never be broke.’ Absolute legend.”

    Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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    Andrew Dalton, Associated Press

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  • ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Queer Road Trip Without Forward Motion

    ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Queer Road Trip Without Forward Motion

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    Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in Drive Away Dolls. Working Title/Focus Features

    Over the years, the Coen Brothers have developed a distinctive, compelling style of filmmaking, culminating in 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Since then the directors have gone their separate ways—artistically at least. Joel Coen helmed The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, an evocative, unsettling take on the iconic Shakespeare play. Drive-Away Dolls marks Ethan Coen’s debut solo feature (he also directed documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind in 2022), offering a glimpse into the filmmaker’s personal creative ambitions and inspirations. 

    DRIVE AWAY DOLLS ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars)
    Directed by: Ethan Coen
    Written by: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
    Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, Matt Damon
    Running time: 84 mins.

    The film, originally titled Drive-Away Dykes, a far better name for the resulting effort, is a collaboration between Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote and edited the movie. It’s got an intriguing premise, paying homage to B-movies from the 1960s and ‘70s, but the storytelling itself falters, often mired in shock value for the sake of shock value. Visually interesting with committed performances, it doesn’t quite stick the landing. 

    Geraldine Viswanathan plays Marian, a young lesbian with a dull job and an uptight demeanor. Her unlikely best friend Jamie, played by Margaret Qualley doing quite the accent, is the exact opposite, a sexed up live-wire who cheats on her cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) in the opening minutes of the film. The pair head out on a road trip to Tallahassee by borrowing a car from the local drive-away, which rents people cars if they relocate them for the owner. The girls accidentally end up with the wrong car, which holds a mysterious briefcase and the frozen head in the trunk. A group of criminals are hot on their tail, although they are none the wiser. 

    In theory, it’s a fun story. In execution, it’s a series of scenes and set pieces that never quite gel. Marian and Jamie stop at various locales along the way to Florida, with Jamie encouraging Marian to let down her hair and get laid. This results in hijinks like an all-girl make-out party in someone’s basement and Jamie saying “honey darling” in a Southern accent a lot. By the time they get to Tallahassee, having discovered the contents of their trunk, Jamie and Marian’s relationship shifts, inciting a romance that doesn’t feel earned or true. Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon play small roles, but despite Pascal’s high billing he is barely in the movie. Kudos to Coen, though, for a scene that recalls the actor’s most famous Game of Thrones moment. 

    Pedro Pascal in Drive Away Dolls. Wilson Webb/Working Title /Focus Features

    On the plus side, Drive-Away Dolls is extremely gay. There’s a lot of sex, all of it between women, and Coen never exploits the girl-on-girl action or makes it feel voyeuristic, although some of it is purposefully wild (see: shock value). Cooke identifies as queer, which clearly helped the film’s authenticity, and the film smartly doesn’t attempt represent all lesbian experiences or tastes. The tone is light-hearted (although critics in my press screening didn’t find the movie particularly funny), and Cooke has said she wanted to make a queer film that isn’t over serious or dramatic. It’s a great addition to the queer movie canon with actresses committed to telling the story. 

    Drive-Away Dolls never sets itself up to be realistic or grounded—the colorful psychedelic interludes add to this effect—but even in its own version of reality there’s just something missing. It’s stylish with witty dialogue, but for a road-trip movie there’s not much forward motion. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is just a whimsical trip with quirky characters and little depth. Maybe we’re never supposed to really understand or care about anyone’s motivation or background. There are great moments and a great idea here. Without that connective substance, though, the car gets stuck in neutral.

    Observer Reviews are regular assessments of new and noteworthy cinema.

    ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Queer Road Trip Without Forward Motion

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    Emily Zemler

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  • Ethan Coen teams up with wife Tricia Cooke for road trip comedy ‘Drive-Away Dolls’

    Ethan Coen teams up with wife Tricia Cooke for road trip comedy ‘Drive-Away Dolls’

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    click to enlarge

    Focus Features

    Margaret Qually and Geraldine Viswanathan eye the MacGuffin in the trunk.

    One of the many pleasures — and occasional frustrations — of the Coen Brothers is their predictable unpredictability. From the outset of their career — which began with the markedly dissimilar (and remarkably accomplished) quartet of Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Barton Fink — Joel and Ethan Coen have refused to conform to anyone’s expectations other than their own.

    That principle has long guided the Coens’ work: More than 25 years ago, when I attended the junket for The Big Lebowski, the brothers were asked whether they fretted about following up the relatively naturalistic Fargo and its multi-Oscar-winning bona fides with a project so wildly different in tone. Ethan blithely dismissed any anxiety: “It might be a worry if we worked consistently in one genre, made one specific kind of movie and then leaped to something else. But that’s not the case with us. We do different kinds of movies, to the extent that this might disappoint or please people who had seen our previous movies. It’s never really an issue. In our minds, they’re all just too different.”

    Given such a defiantly iconoclastic approach, Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls therefore shouldn’t surprise, but even dedicated Coen-heads can be forgiven if they’re a bit taken aback by the comic thriller’s queer content and playfully exuberant sex — neither of which is evident in the filmmaker’s previous work. Because I purposely chose not to read about Drive-Away Dolls in advance, I found the centrality of lesbian culture in the film entirely unexpected, and an uncomfortable thought kept intruding: Is the presumably hetero Coen really the appropriate director for this material?

    As it turns out, I needn’t have worried: Coen’s wife, Tricia Cooke, although only credited as co-writer and editor because of Directors Guild rules, actually served as the film’s co-director, and despite their longtime marriage, she continues to identify as queer. As the couple explained in a joint MovieMaker interview last year, Cooke told Coen that she was a lesbian when he first asked her out, but they eventually established a polyamorous relationship, with both having other partners. Normally, this gossipy backstory wouldn’t have relevance in a review, but knowing that Cooke was a primary driver of Drive-Away Dolls helped mitigate my concerns over Coen’s potentially leering male gaze and the authenticity of its portrayal of the queer experience.

    Of course, Drive-Away Dolls isn’t particularly concerned with realism in either its farcical plot or its colorful details. Early in the proceedings, a comically wall-mounted dildo clues us in to the film’s fantastical bent: The phallus makes for an undeniably funny (and prescient) gag, but — and I’m speculating here! — it would also seem somewhat, um, impractical.

    Proudly featuring a trash aesthetic, the film consciously emulates the exploitation films of the ’60s and ’70s, with Cooke and Coen citing the works of John Waters, Russ Meyer and nudie specialist Doris Wishman as inspirations. (The filmmakers’ preferred title, Drive-Away Dykes, further speaks to its transgressive spirit.) Cooke foregrounds the film’s deliberate cheesiness with outlandishly over-the-top editing transitions, and enigmatic flashbacks periodically interrupt the main storyline with tackily retro psychedelic imagery. There’s a clear risk that some of these devices will read as simple filmmaking ineptitude, but once we recognize their winking intent, they add to the film’s parodic fun, which includes nods to Tarantino’s signature car-trunk shots and to the mysterious briefcases in Kiss Me Deadly and Pulp Fiction.

    In fact, this film’s briefcase — whose contents I’ll resist revealing — is the engine propelling Drive-Away Dolls. When Jamie (Margaret Qualley), a talkative, carefree Texan, cheats on lover Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), a volatile cop, she’s booted to the street. The newly homeless Jamie opportunistically seizes on uptight lesbian friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and insists on accompanying her on a planned road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, Florida. Quickly finding a “drive-away” car bound for their exact destination, they sign on to pilot the vehicle south and hit the road, but their seeming good luck proves a case of mistaken identity: The actual intended drivers — a pair identified collectively in the credits as the Goons (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) — arrive shortly after to pick up the car only to find it already gone. Dispatched by their apoplectic boss (Colman Domingo) to track the women and recover the vehicle, which has the aforementioned briefcase stowed in its trunk, the amusingly squabbling Goons begin a pursuit complicated by Jamie’s highly indirect path to Florida — a circuitous route largely planned around visits to lesbian bars, with the goal of getting glum, sex-deprived Marian laid.

    Although Drive-Away Dolls is the first narrative film that Ethan Coen has made without his brother (he also directed the 2022 documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, which recently began streaming on Amazon Prime), the film’s mix of comedy and crime obviously recalls such previous collaborations as Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Ladykillers, and, especially, The Big Lebowski. Cooke’s influence, however, seems clear, not just in the queer subject matter but also in the film’s engaging looseness, its free-spirited lack of inhibition. In that respect, the film harks back to the Coens’ earliest films, shot by Barry Sonnenfeld, which delighted in pushing hard at extremes in their formal inventiveness.

    But as much as I appreciated many aspects of Drive-Away Dolls — including abbreviated appearances by Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, and an unbilled Miley Cyrus, and a droll performance by the seemingly ubiquitous and always exemplary Bill Camp — I ultimately found the film only fitfully funny. I did laugh uproariously at a confrontation between the Goons and a volcanically angry Sukie, who has no hesitation in narcing on her former girlfriend, but Drive-Away Dolls lacks the astonishingly sustained highs of the Coens’ best comedies (Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski), even if it avoids the lows of such misfires as Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. Given the highly personal nature of humor, your own laugh mileage may vary, but the ride provided by Drive-Away Dolls remains worth taking.

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    Cliff Froehlich

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  • The Coen Brothers Are Working on a New Project Together

    The Coen Brothers Are Working on a New Project Together

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    The Coen brothers are some of the best directors of the modern day. Their retirement (at least from making movies together) was kind of worrying. Luckily, it appears the whole thing was only temporary. The brothers have directed some of the biggest classics in modern cinema, from No Country For Old Men to The Big Lebowski.

    From what they’ve said in the past, it’s mostly been an issue of burnout. They didn’t find it fun making movies anymore. The whole studio production system was just something they had been through so many times, it didn’t feel worth the hassle anymore. Sometimes the compulsion to create art is stronger than anything else though.

    20th Century Fox

    READ MORE: Our Favorite Unconventional Movie Endings

    Ethan Coen’s been a lot more open about his time off than Joel, but he’s confirmed in an interview in the new Empire Magazine that the two brothers have begun development on a new collaboration.

    While the brothers spent time apart, Ethan Coen co-wrote and co-directed a new movie, Drive-Away Dolls, with his wife Tricia Cooke. The film is scheduled to open in theaters in September of 2023. The movie has actually been in the works since the early 2000s, but it was only thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic that Coen and Cooke actually got to work on it.

    As for the new movie that Ethan and Joel are working on, we really have no information. We’re just going to have to wait and see before we really know what it’ll look like. We’re just happy it’s happening.

    [H/T /Film]

    Movies That Changed Genres Halfway Through

    These movies looked like one thing — only to shift into a totally different genre in the middle.

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    Cody Mcintosh

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  • ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Trailer: Ethan Coen‘s First Solo Film

    ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Trailer: Ethan Coen‘s First Solo Film

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    Drive-Away Dolls is a road-trip comedy directed and written by Ethan Coen. While the future of the Coen brothers future in filmmaking seemed uncertain — the pair have not collaborated on a movie together since 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs — each has begun making films separately. Drive-Away Dolls is Ethan Coen’s first feature as a solo director. Apparently, he and his writing partner (and wife) Tricia Cooke, wrote the film over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    The film stars  Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, and Matt Damon. Take a look at the trailer below:

    READ MORE: Jeff Bridges Would Do a Big Lebowski Sequel – On One Condition

    The official synopsis of the film is as follows:

    Written by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, this comedy caper follows Jamie, an uninhibited free spirit bemoaning yet another breakup with a girlfriend, and her demure friend Marian who desperately needs to loosen up. In search of a fresh start, the two embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, but things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way.

    It seems that Jamie and Marian get a little bit more than they bargained for when they take their road trip. Unbeknownst to them, there were some valuable goods in the trunk of the car. Whoever owns that briefcase really wants to get their hands back on it. Unfortunately, most of the hired guns they send after the briefcase aren’t particularly skilled at their job.

    Drive-Away Dolls is scheduled to open in theaters on September 22.

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    Cody Mcintosh

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  • Family, fans bid adieu to music icon Jerry Lee Lewis

    Family, fans bid adieu to music icon Jerry Lee Lewis

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    FERRIDAY, La. — Family, friends and fans will gather Saturday to bid farewell to rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis at memorial services held in his north Louisiana home town.

    Lewis, known for hits such as “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” died Oct. 28 at his Mississippi home, south of Memphis, Tennessee. He was 87.

    Saturday’s funeral service is set for 11 a.m. at Young’s Funeral Home in Ferriday, the town where he was born, family members said. A private burial will follow. At 1 p.m., a celebration of life is planned at the Arcade Theater, also in Ferriday.

    Lewis, who called himself “The Killer,” was the last survivor of a generation of artists that rewrote music history, a group that included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

    After his personal life blew up in the late 1950s following news of his marriage to his cousin, 13-year-old — possibly even 12-year-old — Myra Gale Brown, while still married to his previous wife, the piano player and rock rebel was blacklisted from radio and his earnings dropped to virtually nothing. Over the following decades, Lewis struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, legal disputes and physical illness.

    In the 1960s, Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer and the music industry eventually forgave him. He had a run of top 10 country hits from 1967 to 1970, including “She Still Comes Around” and “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me).”

    Lewis was the cousin of TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and country star Mickey Gilley. Swaggart and Lewis released “The Boys From Ferriday,” a gospel album, earlier this year. Swaggart will officiate at his funeral service.

    In 1986, along with Elvis, Berry and others, he was in the inaugural class of inductees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and joined the Country Hall of Fame this year. His life and music was reintroduced to younger fans in the 1989 biopic “Great Balls of Fire,” starring Dennis Quaid, and Ethan Coen’s 2022 documentary “Trouble in Mind.”

    A 2010 Broadway music, “Million Dollar Quartet,” was inspired by a recording session that featured Lewis, Elvis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.

    Lewis won a Grammy in 1987 as part of an interview album that was cited for best spoken word recording, and he received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2005.

    The following year, “Whole Lotta Shakin’” was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, whose board praised the “propulsive boogie piano that was perfectly complemented by the drive of J.M. Van Eaton’s energetic drumming. The listeners to the recording, like Lewis himself, had a hard time remaining seated during the performance.”

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    Associated Press writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.

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