This movie was pretty weird. For the first maybe 10 or 15 minutes, I was not sure about it. Then, suddenly, I was completely in love: a darkly, awkwardly funny neo-noir about doubt and ignorance and speech and sterility and messiness? Sign me up! I kept being in love with it for a while, then my feelings cooled, but I was thrilled with the very end.
I really enjoyed:
-The vast majority of the performances, esp. those of Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Katherine Borowitz. (Borowitz has a small role--Ann Nirdlinger Brewster--and she's so funny in it, her eyes frozen wide with comically misguided terror and urgency.)
-The lighting and cinematography and what-have-you, although I'm not even for a second going to pretend I know shit about those things.
-How quiet it was. It's a patient movie.
-Coen brothers. Duh.
I did not so much like:
-Billy Bob Thornton. I know that the webs were once abuzz with praise for his minimalist performance, but it sometimes feels so minimalist that I wondered if Thornton was just talking to me as himself. This might have been less bothersome if I had seen the movie when it came out. Watching it now, I was at times too aware of the connection between Ed Crane and the epic douchebag who insists that his music is more remarkable by far than his jettisoned film career, and who, at his most petulant, waxes not-quite-poetic about his King Kong model-building.
-Scarlett Johansson. Don't enjoy her acting. Too sleepy for my taste.
The thing I both liked and disliked was the pacing, which was alternately too slow for me and exactly slow enough.
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