Barton Fink

Starring:John Turturro, John Goodman, Judy Davis, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Tony Shalhoub, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi, David Warrilow, Richard Portnow, Christopher Murney, I.M. Hobson, Meagen Fay, Lance Davis, Harry Bugin, Anthony Gordon, Jack Denbo, Max GrodÃ©nchik, Robert Beecher, Darwyn Swalve
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Product Type: DVD

Description

Set in Hollywood during the 1940's, "Barton Fink" is a comic satire about creative egos, flashy moguls, a travelling salesman and a nasty case of writer's block. Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a New York playwright lured to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. It doesn't take long for Barton's life to erupt in complete chaos. His studio boss orders the serious-minded Barton to write a low budget wrestling movie. Deeply disappointed, Barton returns to his seedy hotel, types one sentence and then¿ nothing. To make matters worse, he is continually interrupted by Charlie (John Goodman), a chatty travelling insurance salesman who lives next door. Eventually they become friends and Charlie tries to help Barton by teaching him the finer points of wrestling. As the clock ticks away and the temperature climbs, Barton becomes more desperate as his life spins out of control.

Amazon.com essential video

A darkly comic ride, this intense and original 1991 offering from the Coen brothers (Fargo, Blood Simple) gleefully attacks the Hollywood system and those who seek to sell out to it, portraying the writer's suffering as a loony vision of hell. John Turturro (Miller's Crossing, Jungle Fever) plays the title character, a pretentious left-wing writer from New York City who is brought to 1930s Hollywood to write a script for a wrestling movie for palooka actor Wallace Beery. Fink thinks the job is beneath him, but his desire for acceptance gets the better of him, and he suddenly finds himself holed up in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles, where he is almost immediately afflicted with writer's block. Various distractions begin to enter his life, first in the form of a famous southern writer (John Mahoney) whom Fink idolizes, and then his neighbor in the hotel, a seemingly amiable salesman played by John Goodman (Sea of Love, Raising Arizona). The writer turns out to be a self-loathing drunk whose secretary (Judy Davis) is the one actually doing the writing. And the neighbor, the working-class hero who Fink made his reputation writing about, may have a horrifying secret of his own. Equal parts social commentary and hilarious farce, and winner of the Best Picture, Actor, and Director prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Barton Fink is a visionary and original comic masterpiece not to be missed. --Robert Lane

Customer Reviews:

Why Did I Wait So Long to Be So Disappointed . . . ?.......2007-07-03

This film had been recommended to me for some time, so I finally got around to renting it. Unfortunately, by the time it was over I just felt angry at how manipulated I felt. The Coens seem to take special glee in how "profound" they can appear by leaving the viewer in the dark as what the point of it all is. I believe the term is "intellectual masturbation."
To its credit, the production qualities are all first rate: production design, acting, music, and cinematography. The camera work, in particular, reminded me of a Kubrick film, with set pieces which must have taken several takes to get exactly right.
But in the end you feel cheated. The story requires too much patience to stick with in comparison to the payoff at the end, which is non-existent--Just the Coens snickering to themselves as they visually say, "See how cute and clever we are...?" And their point is...?
If you want to check out a Coen brothers film, rent or purchase Miller's Crossing. It is excellent!

Curiouser and curiouser.......2007-06-02

Barton Fink is a strange movie, even by the Coen brothers' standards. It's style is a blend of the two traditions the Coens normally alternate between in their movies: noir and screwball comedy. Set in the 1940s, Barton Fink is a nerdy Jewish playwright in the social realist mode, whose abiding ambition is to create a theatre for the common man. Enjoying success in his hometown, he is lured to Hollywood to script wrestling pictures for a wildly zany, enthusiastic producer - who gets some of the best lines in the film: 'You from New York? I'm from New York, well, Minsk if you go back far enough'. Checking into the delightfully seedy Hotel Earle (which is a character in itself with its gloopy, peeling wallpaper, cheap mysterious pictures of women on deserted beaches, and quaint, old timer lift operators) Barton suffers from writers block, unfamiliar with the popular wrestling genre, and hearing strange noises from the room next door.

A quarter of the way through, the plot is taught and suspense is great, Barton encounters his neighbour - the jovial insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, who is the epitome of the common man Fink aims to put into his art - 'you want some stories Barton, I'll tell you some stories'. Barton, however, goes badly awry, falling in with the Falkneresque writer Bill Mayhew, who is a prolific, avuncular Hollywood legend when sober but a violent, unstable bully when drunk. Barton tries to learn the secrets of wrestling pictures from Mayhew's wife, Audrey, who has a great 1940s look of the tough minded, caring wife, with pale skin and red hair, and he is mortified to discover that Audrey has ghostwritten much of Mayhew's work.

Instead of questions at the sinister, Shiningesque Hotel Earle resolving themselves, the film busts apart at the seams in the latter stages. Madness, slapstick and exaggerated horror prevail - two tough talking, anti-semitic cops ('I knew this dump wasn't restricted')arrive to investigate the strange death of Audrey, and decapitation of Mayhew. The ending is a lazy piece of overblown fire and fury, with Barton suffering from his hubris and a great many strands of the film frayed and unresolved.

I found Barton Fink to be ultimately unsatisfactory for this reason, though some of its parts - the skilled recreation of old Hollywood, the waspish portrayal of prevailing attitutes, the horned dilemma faced by the writers: maximum money for minimal originality, and the wild studio execs - does mean the movie as a visual spectacle is likely to remain lodged in your mind.

Barton Fink.......2007-01-04

Very dark but pretty good not one of my favorite of the Cohen Brothers movies.

Clifford Odetts=Barton Fink.......2006-07-11

This is a great movie which has as its theme the subversion of purpose by the Hollywood grist-mill and the trouble of screen adaptation from the writer's point of view. The character Barton Fink is based loosely upon the real-life difficulties of playwright Clifford Odets in the world of Hollywood. Jack Lipnick is Louis B. Mayer. W.P. "Bill" Mayhew is William Faulkner. The character of Audrey is most probably a melange of Howard Hawks's real-life script girl Meta Carpenter, with whom Faulkner carried on an intimate relationship, and Leigh Brackett who worked with Jules Furthman to adapt Faulkner's work/dialog for Hawks's movies. Great imagery (the sink drain leading to the drain pipe reminiscient of the flash-back transitions in Edgar Ulmer's "Detour"), damned fine acting and smart dialog as well. Definitely the best of the Coen's.

if clifford odets were not already dead, he would die now -- thank god!.......2006-06-04

i seem to be finally catching up with the coen brothers, and have no idea why i stayed away so long. john turturro (yay suny new paltz theater department!) as a pretentious playwright (he might have written "the hours" years later), modeled none too lovingly on clifford odets. i love the in-joke of naming john goodmans satan spoof "karl mundt" (a joke only political junkies will get), and john mahoney is neat as a pseudo fitzgerald washed up writer. if not quite great, you can certainly see where "fargo" sprang from.

Average customer rating:

Good overview, but not much more to offer

Performance Sea Kayaking
Starring: Wayne Horodowich , Jeff Cooper , Greg Barton , Kent Fink , and Randy Carlson
Director: Kent Ford
Manufacturer: Performance Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0000AMKI6
Release Date: 2003-03-01

Description

The best selling paddlesports video "Performance Sea Kayaking... the basics and beyond" demonstrates and explains hot paddling technique, rescues, and basic seamanship skills. The 59 minute project features instruction from many of the leaders in the field.

Customer Reviews:

Good overview, but not much more to offer.......2004-08-03

This video is only useful as an additional instruction aid for absolute beginners to Kayaking. If you take a beginning strokes and safety course, which you should, then you'll already learn most of the information on this video. The video has so much material to cover, that it skims over each topic fairly quickly. Most all of the skills on the video are better taught by an instructor in person.

The video covers efficient and relaxed stroke techniques, wet exits, self and assisted rescues, cold-water safety, eskimo rolls, tides and currents, chart reading and navigation, and signaling for help.

This would be a useful video to own for those who are interested in the sport, but have only rented a few times, or for those who want to expose others to trying the sport.

A minor complaint of mine is that the video seems to have been filmed quite a while ago, complete with mullets and 80's-style haircuts and clothing. The self rescues section assumes that you don't have deck bungies to the rear of the cockpit, which most all kayaks come equipped with now.

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