Filmography: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); Intolerable Cruelty (2003); The Ladykillers (2004); No Country for Old Men (2007); Burn After Reading (2008); A Serious Man (2009); True Grit (2010); Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) There is no one on this Earth like the Coen Brothers, and thank God for that, because the world could not likely handle that amount of genius at one time. What's fascinating about the Coens is their versatility from screwball, and even slapstick, comedy, to austere work pondering issues of existential crisis, to sometimes, a mix between the two. The Coens' brand of black humour is hard to categorise, yet so tangibly them, that the Brothers practically constitute their own genre. Remarkably, despite their peculiarities and sometimes intellectually esoteric references, the Coen Brothers films are often very popular with the public at large as well. The Coens' are at their best when they are the most intellectually challenging. Films like No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man not only stand as some of the finest cinematic art of the 21st century, but compare favourably to the greatest films of any era. The former's chilling existential nihilism, and the latter's beguiling theological quandaries evoke such powerful emotional responses, that the mere mentioning of their names can create a feeling that hits the gut. Simultaneously, even the Coens' silliest work, like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers, is so immaculately written, so entertainingly executed, that these films stand not far behind their best work. It may hurt your head to try to comprehend the types of minds that can store such seemingly oppositional moods, but thankfully for filmgoers everywhere, the Coen Brothers seem to be able to reconcile these elements without breaking a sweat.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
