Good morning 🐣

I’ve never really been into awards season, other than using it as an excuse to watch more movies, but I’m happy to see “Everything Everywhere All at Once” receive so much recognition at this year’s Academy Awards. It was one of the first movies I wrote about in this newsletter and it deserves all the praise.

Now I’m no diehard auteur theorist (the idea that the director of a film has the ultimate creative authorship), but it’s hard to deny the unique vision of Daniels (as the co-writing and co-directing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert call themselves, sans “the”). They actually join a very exclusive club: only the third directing duo to win an Oscar, following Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise for 1961’s “West Side Story” and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen for 2007’s “No Country for Old Men.”

And it’s the Coen Brothers we’re going to talk about today. They’re known for working within a wide variety of genres and styles, yet are almost always uniquely Coen. Think “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Raising Arizona,” “True Grit,” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

Even with all that range though, as Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos show in this 7-minute video installment of Every Frame a Painting, no matter the genre, the Coens have a dependable filmmaking technique that creates empathy and comedy — the “shot, reverse shot” technique — that is, shooting actors in close up with a wide lens. You’ll recognize it immediately.

But just as Daniels could not have created such a beautiful, goofy film without hundreds of hardworking people in front of and behind the camera all contributing their own creative visions, the Coens don’t work on an island either. Composer Carter Burwell, sometimes known as “the third Coen brother,” was profiled recently by David Owen for the New Yorker:

In a lecture at the Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, in Glasgow, in 2001, Burwell said that he usually urges directors to use as little music as possible, because movies, like life, are most interesting “when you don’t know what’s going on, and you’re uncomfortable about it.” Ron Sadoff, the director and founder of the screen-scoring program at N.Y.U., told me, “Carter doesn’t do what’s called Mickey Mousing, where you try to touch every little element of the film with music. His approach is much more conceptual.”

Owen continues:

In the score for “Fargo,” the Coens’ sixth film, Burwell used a Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian instrument that has two sets of strings, one of which isn’t bowed but resonates with the other. (That choice was inspired by the Scandinavian names of some of the characters.) His goal was to help make a darkly improbable comedy seem as straightforward as a news bulletin, an effect established with the title sequence, in which a car is being towed across a white-out winter landscape, accompanied by a fiddle-and-percussion passage that swells into something like a funeral march. Ethan Coen told me, “People don’t realize how much of what they’re getting from a movie is from the score, delivered by the composer. It’s powerful, but, for the life of you, you can’t say what it means.”

Now watch this 👀

I’ve wanted to write about “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes” for a while now because it is so utterly original and clever, a low-budget, quick 70-minute film shot on an iPhone whose poster describes it as “a one-take time travel sci-fi comedy,” but that description doesn’t even remotely do it justice; you just have to watch it because

1. they perfected that one-shot technique, in which everything is shot and edited in a way that makes it look like the camera never cuts away, as if the actors really are just running all over the place in real time, and

2. it actually uses this technique for a reason, employing the Droste effect (actually referenced in the original Japanese title) for its premise: the main character’s computer monitor shows two minutes into the future from the perspective of the TV down in the cafe, while the TV shows two minutes into the past from the perspective of the computer, so that when the two devices are made to face each other, you’re able to peer several minutes in each direction of time, kind of like standing between two mirrors but they’re also janky time machines and not just for checking yourself out;

it’s a mind-bending effect of recursion named after the Dutch chocolate company Droste, which had a product in the early 1900s where the tin can depicts someone holding the can, which depicts someone holding the can, which depicts someone holding the can… you get the picture…

and it creates a lovely little run-on sentence of a film that could easily have become confusing if the cast and crew weren’t so good at guiding you through it — it’s something I remember doing myself as a kid when there was this competition in our school to design ads for local businesses; I was assigned a grocery store and I pretty much just drew the building with a poster on it that showed the building with a poster on it… I’ll freely admit it wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve ever made and the store seemed to have had similar thoughts and rejected my entry, but you know what, that store doesn’t exist anymore (if only they’d listened to me) — and that silly little run-on sentence of a film has a lot of fun playing with the concepts of free will and predestination and just what kinds of hijinks (and the ramifications) you’d get into when you have a limited window of peering two minutes into the future, and how that could influence your actions in the present. It’s a delight. Do check it out.

Until next time! 👋