COEN BROTHERS
                                                        Part 2

        As promised, here is a second helping of films from the wild and wonderful Coen Brothers.  As previously noted, they tend to hit it out of the park or pop up.
Let’s start with their mega-award winning feature, No Country For Old Men (2007). This very dark film captured Oscars starting with Javier Barden as the weirdest, scariest character in a while. Leaving a trail of corpses as he looks for the loot from a busted drug deal, he spares the life of a clueless filling station operator who correctly calls a coin toss. Barden copped the Best Supporting Actor award, the Coens scored for Best Director, Best Writer- and Best Movie. Josh Brolin portrays an antelope hunter who stumbles on a fortune from a drug deal gone real bad in the desert. He decides to keep it and hide it. Bad idea. Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson are along as mostly honest lawmen.  
Another excellent Coen outing is Bridge Of Spies (2015) based on the true story of the exchange of a Russian spy (portrayed for an Oscar by Mark Rylance) and American Francis Gary Powers. Tom Hanks plays an American attorney, recruited by the CIA and thrust into the middle of this and given the Herculean task of pulling off the switch. The suspenseful film received five other Oscar nominations.
I’m not a big fan of remakes for very good reasons- most are pale imitations of the original. But the Coens make the exception to the rule in their rendering of True Grit (2010). The original with John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn was quite wonderful and won him his only Oscar. But the Coens’ version with Jeff Bridges in the title role and Matt Damon as the tagalong lawman is just as good. Mattie Ross (Heilee Steinfeld) hires Rooster to hunt down her father’s killer (the delightfully bad Tom Chaney, played with evil glower by Josh Brolin).
On a considerably lighter note, there is 2007's Oh Brother Where Art Thou featuring three convicts escaped from a Mississippi chain gang who search for freedom and fortune, still in their prison stripes. John Torturo and Tim Blake Nelson combine with George Clooney for the trio. Clooney spend most of the film searching for an elusive brand of hair oil. The music by Tbone Burnett won awards. The movie won lots of laughs. 
Also on the good side of the ledger is the wacky Hail, Caesar! (2016). In this one George Clooney plays a really bad actor who is kidnaped by Communist screen-writers. Josh Brolin plays studio head Eddie Mannix who has to deal with the kidnapers, an unmarried actress who is pregnant, a comedy of manners with a cowboy star who can’t lose his accent, and other problems. It is complicated but very funny.
A couple of Coens near misses are The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (2018) and A Serious Man (2009). Suburbicon (2017) is just a mess.
All of the films in this arcticle are available on DVD. All are for adults.