Inside Llewyn Davis. Hoo boy. I am a rare instance of someone who doesn't expect much from the Coen brothers, so I wasn't exactly surprised by what an empty shell of a movie this is, but I at least expected it to be a fairly lively picture of a time and place. Pretty much a dud in that regard--the Greenwich Village scenes in I'm Not There were vastly more evocative. I have no idea what made the Coens think they had a movie here. They didn't have a story. They didn't have an interesting point-of-view character. It turns out that even if they did have feelings for the locale and period, they didn't have a way to put them on screen. And if they had a feeling for the best of the music that emerged from that scene, they did themselves a disservice by getting T-Bone "NPR-Ready" Burnett to orchestrate their simulacra, because the Dylan and Van Ronk songs that play over the end credits put to shame the pretty, anodyne tunelets that dominate the soundtrack. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would like this movie, or why it has a 95% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes?--Oh, wait, I know the answer to that last one: it's because it's the Coen brothers. No other answer is possible.
(Fairness Update: The best thing about the movie is the Olds. This is one thing the Coens are pretty good at: Gnarled, hard-boiled old fucks with no time for bullshit, played by weatherbeaten old character actors. John Goodman, F. Murray Abraham, and the cranky old maritime union guys are just about the only signs of life onscreen--in fact, any of 'em would have made a more compelling central character than what we got.)
