Justus’s Faculty Blog

Here’s the flyer, which you may have seen around campus:

I realized that after all the hype over the past couple months, I haven’t said a thing about the latest Coen brothers film since I saw it. I hate disappointing the three people who read this blog, but there’s no time for a full review… so you’ll have to settle for one in haiku:

Burn After Reading
Refers back to Blood Simple
Malkovich is great

Paul Newman died on Friday.

I know, I know: people die every day. And there’s something that seems a bit callous, as though we had misplaced priorities, when we choose to publicly grieve the deaths of artists and celebrities while keeping the grief we feel about the deaths of those close to us private.

But for all of the annoyance we might feel at the pettiness and irrelevance of contemporary celebrity culture, sharing our thoughts about the lives and deaths of people whose work we admire is one of the most effective ways we non-celebrities can connect with each other. If someone in my family dies, and someone in your family dies, we can perhaps get together and talk and share the experience–but only to a certain extent. Our experiences are similar, but they are separate. However, when Heath Ledger or David Foster Wallace or Paul Newman dies, and if you happen to also be an admirer of those people’s work, there is a shared experience of loss that makes it much easier to communicate with each other.

With that said…

I have a long list of favorite all-time films, and Newman starred in two of them: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke. I’ve never taught them in a film class, in part because I’ve never offered a class called “Films Justus Ballard Thinks Everyone Should Watch,” but they do make appearances in my WR262 screenwriting class. Newman had a good eye for solid scripts, and was rarely involved in a film with a lousy story.

The bicycle scene from Butch & Sundance

This is the first Newman film I consciously chose to watch, and it was all thanks to my grandpa. Every once in a while, in response to seemingly nothing at all, my grandpa would say, “Who are those guys?” and laugh to himself. Eventually, I would also laugh, but I had no idea why it was funny, other than my grandpa was apparently being comically perplexed by an invisible group of mysterious men. Finally, I had to ask him: “What guys?” At which point he looked at me sternly and said, “You don’t know Butch and Sundance?” And then, finding out I didn’t, he sat me down and made me watch the movie. And it was beautiful and charming and funny, and I developed a serious crush on Katherine Ross, and discovered Burt Bacharach, and it immediately became my new favorite film (displacing, if I recall correctly, Caddyshack). As a teenager in the early nineties, I found something magically nostalgic about a film made in the sixties about a couple of good-hearted outlaws from the old west. I don’t know if the filmmakers intended this to happen, but every time I see it (or hear “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”), I get this weird feeling of love for America…

And here’s a TV spot for Cool Hand Luke. You should take the time to check it out. Even if you’ve seen the film, and if only to marvel at how much film advertising has changed over the years.

I finally saw this film about five years ago, and I regret not having seen it sooner. Actually, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t see this film in high school. I had enough problems with authority as it was; I can only imagine the hours of detention I would’ve earned for saying “What we have here is failure to communicate.”

This post is already far too long, but I’ll leave you with the final quote from the NY Times obituary:

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

The Coen brothers’ new film, Burn After Reading, is due out on September 11.

You can see the trailer here.

You might as well go watch the trailer, because I have absolutely nothing of substance to say about the film at present. When you’re done, you can come back here and read the rest of this post.

Done? That was good, right? Brad Pitt playing his patented “half-crazy/half-dumb” character, John Malkovich playing an easily annoyed bad guy, George Clooney playing a lummox, Frances McDormand playing a desperate housewife, and even that one dude from the classic TV show Sledge Hammer. It’s nice to see he’s still getting work.

I’ve loved the Coen brothers ever since I saw Barton Fink at the one lonely run-down “art films” theater we had in Fresno, California at the time. I walked into the theater with absolutely no expectations (well, apart from expecting the seats to be uncomfortable–and that expectation was easily met) and walked out with an image of XXXX XXXXXXX bellowing XXXX the XXXXX of a XXXXXXX XXXXXXX burned forever on my brain. [See note.]

Since then, I’ve made a policy of never reading about upcoming Coen brothers projects. When I walk into the theater in September, I want to go in with as little information as possible, with an absolutely open mind. No reviews. No plot summaries. No gossip from the set. No promotional interviews. Nothing. I don’t even want to know what actors are involved (you’ll notice I’ve failed in that regard).

In the past, this has always been pretty easy to accomplish. The Coens are never very forthcoming about their projects, so the few articles written about their films were imminently avoidable.

It’s going to be a different story for this film. I’m in the middle of developing this year’s FA256: The Great Directors course, which focuses on the Coen brothers, and I’m reading every article I can find on the Internet. I’ve been lucky so far, but I don’t see that luck continuing in the next few weeks as the promotional blitz begins. Thanks to the success of No Country For Old Men, this film is going to get a lot of attention.

NOTE: Shortly after typing this, I realized that I was doing to you, reader, the very thing I’m trying to avoid. For those of you who’ve seen Barton Fink, well, maybe you can figure it out. For those of you who haven’t seen Barton Fink, please see the gratuitous product placement below.

Advertisement: The Chemeketa Film Arts course focusing on the films of the Coen brothers is due out on January 5. That’s five short months away, folks!

I’m incredibly pleased to end my summer blogging hiatus in order to bring you the following correction:

On page 25 of the brand new Fall Schedule of Classes, you’ll see a fine blurb about Film Arts 255: Understanding Movies. Almost everything in that blurb is correct… except for the fact that we’ll only be offering ONE day section (MWF 12:30-1:20, CRN 32237).

We now return to our previously scheduled blog silence.

Coming Soon: fascinating insights into my continuing work on this year’s courses in Film Arts, Advanced Screenwriting, and themed WR121s… plus a heaping helping of Building 45 promotion.

Now THAT sounds exciting. If I were you, I’d bookmark this blog and hit refresh every five minutes for the next two weeks.