Coen bros. Favorites

Salon have been doing a little polling of a variety of film figures, asking them for their favorite movie by Joel and Ethan Coen. The people posed the question were directors James Toback, Jeff Lipsky and Mary Harron, media mogul Mark Cuban, critics Aaron Hillis, Glenn Kenny and Molly Haskell, producer Ted Hope, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns.

I particularly liked what Burns (who recently penned the superb The Informant!) wrote in response to the question:

I grew up in Minnesota and attended the same Hebrew School as Joel and Ethan. (I doubt any of us can actually speak a sentence of Hebrew.) We all ate at the same restaurants, bought cars at the same dealerships and wandered around in the same graying snow drifts. When I first saw Fargo, I thought someone had broken into my brain and removed scenes from my childhood -- and my sense of foreboding about things like wood chippers. It was funny and frightening and strange and poignant: It was Minnesota. I was certain that only about 15 other people would understand the movie because of the specificity of place. And yet, it is exactly their attention to place that makes Fargo so remarkable. Other people do connect. Because detail is so much of life -- all lives. And it is the realization that details will haunt us, kill us and save us that makes me love Fargo slightly more than all of their other movies.

The piece is well worth checking out in its entirety, as is the comments section which includes this very unconventional but nevertheless compelling endorsement of the Coens follow-up to Fargo:

I swear this is a true story. My wife and I spent much of the late '90's trying to conceive. After years of constantly taking body temperature, taking time off work to drive to a fertility clinic (90 minutes from where we live) once a day during the 2 or 3 day window of opportunity every months, we finally just decided to give it up, save up our money and adopt. A few months later (this was late 1998), we rented The Big Lebowski on VHS and, after watching the scene in which Maude Lebowski does some post-coital contortions to improve the chances of conception, we both jokingly complained that the fertility experts hadn't told us about that method. The next time we did the deed, my wife jokingly tried it afterward, but just that once (let's face it, the joke is only funny the first time). A few weeks later, we found out she was pregnant and, when we checked the dates, we realized that the conception must have happened that particular time. She never tried the "method" again, and we never conceived again (although we did adopt twice and have a beautiful family). Our daughter is ten now-too young to be told the story of course-but we still wonder if we should even explain this to her when she's older. After all, what kind of trauma could result from finding out that you owe your existence to a Coen brothers' movie.