This might confound the cinematically literate or appear 'film schoolish' to the overliterate, but it's great if you've o.d.'ed on decades of narcotizing sameness. "
"Narcotizing sameness" is most definitely something the Coen brothers do not serve up. The brothers present an Orson Welles-like noir detective film in Blood Simple, and turn in a zany comedy about kidnapping in Raising Arizona. Then, just when reviewers thought they had the brothers pigeonholed, came their realistic mob movie, Miller's Crossing. A postmodern version of the madcap Hollywood comedy informs The Hudsucker Proxy, while Barton Fink presents a darker, more surreal story influenced by German Expressionism. With Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou" the Co ens charm with a quirkily humorous crime story and a musical comedy set in the Depression-era Deep South respectively, though both exhibit the edginess that is the signature of all the Coen's work.
Allusions also fuel their movies. As Adina Hoffman noted in the American Prospect, the Coens' work "is almost always constructed of nods to, or winks at, other movies, books, cultural fads." Hoffman observed that the two h ave paid tribute over the years to writers and filmmakers such as Dashiell Hammett, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler, Clifford Odets, Howard Hawkes, and Frank Capra.
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