KWIF: Coens crazy

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Spent much of the week with my feet shuffling along the cement floors of Toronto Fan Expo and the asphalt road of the Canadian National Exhibition. My feet hurt. But you don't need feet to watch movies.

This Week:
Honey Don't (2025, d. Ethan Coen - in theatre)
The Big Lebowski (1998, d. Joel [and Ethan] Coen - DVD)

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Ethan Coen's two films sans his brother Joel have instead found him partnered with his editor/wife, Tricia Cooke, and the resulting Honey Don't  and Drive-Away Dolls before it are very much the result of that distinctive pairing. They are the first two entries of what they have informally described as "lesbian b-movie trilogy" (the film they co-directed prior to Drive-Away Dolls, the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind is not part of said trilogy). Cooke is queer and there is definitely both a queer and feminist agenda (in a good way, not in the toxic manosphere way) with the first two entries in the trilogy. 

They are crime films on the surface - Drive-Away Dolls is much more a wild road trip sex comedy, whereas Honey Don't is much more firmly dime-novel pulp and grindhouse with all the accoutrements that come with it (sex, nudity and brutal, thrilling, squick-inducing violence). But at their core, they are taking genres, subgenres and sub-sub-genres that have normally been manufactured by men, for men and making them very, very gay.

Honey Don't opens beautifully, with a mysterious French woman on a scooter coming across an overturned car in the remote Bakersfield dusty terrain. The woman double checks that the car's driver is dead then pilfers a ring. She then goes and takes a refreshing dip in a nearby stream before venturing back on her way in her leopard-print outfit. She looks remarkably like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and is styled like her too, hair and wardrobe. That should have itself been the tip-off to me of what this was going to be...a pastiche of a pastiche while forging its own paths off the trail.

The opening credits are fantastic... grainy footage of Bakersfield shot out the side of a moving car, with digitally enhanced moments where the footage pauses to reveal credits on billboards, signs, graphitti and other such locales. Underneath the images, dripping full 70's with a killer bass hook, and in full-blown rasp power vocals is Brittany Howard's "We Gotta Get Out of This Place"... it's an absolute killer.

The film introduces us to hardboiled P.I. Honey O'Donahue getting out of bed after a one-night stand that you know isn't going anywhere. She's brought onto the aforementioned crash site by Detective Marty Mekatawich (Charlie Day) who makes constant advances at Honey non-stop and is relentless in spite of her quite blunt and decisive rebuking. It's passed off as "good natured", and the sheer fact that it's Charlie Day means there's definitely a comedic (and non-threatening) edge to the delivery of his ineffective come-ons, but it's only funny if you don't realize how exhausting it obviously is for Honey to have to deal with. In spite of it, she kind of likes the guy... from a distance.

The person in the car is a client of Honey's, with connections to a local church, led by Chris Evans' egomaniacal cult leader Reverend Drew Devlin. He's in deep with some French investors, and the woman from the beginning, Chere (Lera Abova), is kind of the cleaner. Seems Devlin has found himself in a bit of a mess. Dealin is a guy who knows how pretty and charming he can be and he uses it to his every advantage at all times. Undernea big bright smile and beautiful physique is a vainglorious sociopath whose whole congregation is a front for drug running, and a vehicle to manipulate the women of his congregation into having kinky sex...err...congress with him.

We meet Honey's pregnant sister (Kristen Connelly) and her sprawling brood (she keeps admonishing Honey about judging her as a mother, and it's kind of clear she's got her own issues around it), including her niece Corrinne (Talia Ryder) who is seeing a dirtbag who turns out to be an abusive MAGA douche.

Lady Kent pointed out that the film is a "shaggy dog" story, the kind that is twisting and convoluted only to ultimately have a conclusion that negates or makes the story somewhat futile or irrelevant. The Big Lebowski is a shaggy dog story, and, having re-watched Lebowski days earlier, it's hard not to compare. But the tones are completely different.

With Honey Don't we're expecting a sort of detective noir caper, but it's not that. Honey investigates her client's death but only lightly. She has a client (Billy Eichner) who wants dirt on his boyfriend's infidelity, and she doesn't even manage to start that job before her Neice disappears, which then becomes her primary focus...outside of having frantic hook-upd with MG (Aubrey Plaza) from the police station.

Shaggy dog stories come together in ultimately unsatisfying ways, because they sort of mislead you into thinking everything you see matters, everything you see is connected. Well, it is...and it isn't. I am reminded, thought, that many a Coens film has taken multiple viewings before they click, and I can see that definitely happening with Honey Don't...it just might take a few more viewings then others.  There are definitely standout parts to the production, it's just hard to get a grasp on the tone its going for. I think the "lesbian b-movie trilogy" classification actually helps put it much more into perspective.

Much like in the first half of the Coens career where Joel was getting the director's credit and Ethan was listed as producer (due to Director's Guild b.s.) even though they were co-directing, I have to wonder if these films are co-directed by Ethan and Tricia Cooke. As much as there's a Coen-y vibe, there's also an un-Coen-y vibe that challenges what little expectations I have when approaching a Coen production. Cooke definitely has her hand in the editing, and there's a lot of choices made in the edits, some which are phenomenal and others which prove a little perplexing (at least upon first watch).

I'm keen to give this another watch with a little time a perspective. Right now it's pretty low on the overall Coen's ranking, but I do like it better than Drive-Away Dolls, which I still have yet to give a second viewing.

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What still needs to be said about The Big Lebowski that hasn't already been said? Not much I reckon, but here we go anyway. Sometimes you just gotta put one letter in front of the other and see what happens.

After Fargo became and immediate and beloved cinema classic and masterpiece, eyes were hotly attuned to the Coens' follow-up. I remember seeing The Big Lebowski in theatre and just. not. getting it. I don't exactly remember if I tried again later on DVD or just wrote it off as "not for me". It wasn't until meeting Lady Kent that I was encouraged to try it again. She was a big fan of the film, see, and, as she likes to remind me, got it all from the first viewing. 

By the time I rewatched Lebowski it was in its pop-culture ascendancy, it was only just starting to become part of early internet memes, and you would see Lebowski cosplay out in public on Halloween. Something about all that meme-ification did make it snap it place. It provides an incredible frame for which to display a lively painting of pure irreverence.

Fargo is a perfect movie, and Lebowski perhaps even more so. The intent put into every line, every beautifully constructed Roger Deakins frame, every accentuating needledrop, it's all so very, very precise. It is truly a comedy goldmine, each watch unveils new performance flourishes, or new intentions in dialogue, or new realizations...it's a movie that, in its byzantine shaggy dog construct, keeps giving back to its audience the more familiar they become with it.

This go around, it became so amusingly apparent that Walter (John Goodman), despite being a hair's breadth away from full-fledged lunatic conspiracy nut, is actually right about everything that's happening in the whole scenario the Dude has gotten involved in. Even though Walter can't help but mess everything up, he's got his eyes open, he just can't see past his own issues to bring any situation to resolution. It's like he's looking for conflict.

Jeff Bridges as The Dude is by no means an aspirational figure. He lives a slovenly simple life. He needs his pot, his drinks, his bowling and his car. Anything else, like friendship, or sex, or making money, is equal parts bonus and hassle. 

The concussion/roofie-induced acid trip flashbacks by way of musical montages are magnificent gateways into the way the Dude's mind works, and it's truly as uncomplicated on the inside as it appears on the outside.

Also on this rewatch it stood out to me seeing Carter Burwell's name on the title credits as composer (with T Bone Burnett listed as "musical archivist") since the soundtrack to The Big Lebowski is the first of its kind for the Coens, where it marries so much of its scenes to a song, much in the way Quentin Tarantino or Danny Boyle were doing at the time, and later Edgar Wright and James Gunn (and many other modern auters) would.  We don't see a lot of "various artists" soundtracks from Coens productions (it's something that again jumped out at me about Honey Don't, which along with the shaggy dog storytelling kind of marries the two films, if only a little bit). It's a remarkably successful attempt at the song-story coherence, it's truly a wonder why they really never did it more.

The Coens use, manipulate and subvert the conventions of Raymond Chandler, or so I'm told...I'm not well versed. The Coens love the classic detective noir writers and those seeds form the foundation of so much of their work. But they're still film guys, who have a ridiculously extensive knowledge of cinema, its tropes, and its uniqueness, and they will abuse those classic genre conventions like a chef making ramen noodles, twisting and slamming and dusting and manipulating until something ready for the pot results, and then it just becomes the centerpiece of the Coens' soup. Delicious delicious soup. I think it may be dinner time.