Tag: joel coen

Actor’s Spotlight: Nate’s Top Ten Jon Polito Performances

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Many people saw Jon Polito as the effervescent, rambunctious mafioso character actor, a playful scene stealer never short on buzzing bumblebee characteristics and zesty Italian American energy, and indeed some of his greatest roles showcased that. But given the right script he was also capable of a disarming centre of gravity, a melancholic, thoughtful presence in certain key projects that to me was just as compelling as his loopy side. He has passed on now but here are my top ten performances from this incredible actor:

10. Officer Sherman in Stuart Little

A classic NYC beat cop, Sherman warns the Little family about an incident involving their… littlest member with deadpan comic relief, and Polito shows off his skill for situational comedy nicely. I have fond memories of this film from my childhood and him being a brief part of it was always cool to see.

9. Agent Chester Hymes in Big Nothing

This indie cult comedy sees two hapless conmen (Ross from Friends and Shaun from Shaun Of The Dead) try and pull off a bunch of dummy level schemes and constantly get thwarted by Ross’s cop wife (Natascha McElhone). Jon plays an eccentric, Colombo type FBI forensics guru who appears to be thick as hell at first but proves to be anything but. With hysterical coke bottle glasses and a spluttering line delivery he makes the character stand out.

8. Ashcan in Homeward Bound II: Lost In San Francisco

Ashcan is the belligerent villain of this urban set sequel, an obnoxious boxer dog who makes life difficult for the heroes with his sidekick Pete (Adam Goldberg). Jon’s trademark gravelly voice lent itself to lots of cool voiceover work in his career, this being one of the most memorable.

7. Rossi in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster

A brief but affecting cameo, Italian crime boss Rossi reflects to Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas in regards to the changing of the times, the way the mafia operates and essentially laments that things ain’t what they used to be. It’s an important scene because as he speaks we can see the wheels turning in Frank’s mind and this interaction could have largely spurred the now legendary actions of Lucas and his organization. Who better than Polito to carry such a pivotal scene.

6. Montesquino in Masters Of Horror: Haeckel’s Tale

This wonderful horror anthology series saw many of the biggest names in the genre get to play in the sandbox for various mini movies. This one sees Jon play a demented necromancer who brings back people from the dead, at a high cost. Adorned in a top hat and more hair than we ever saw him have in his career, he gets to ham it up and lay on the creep factor big time in one of his showiest genre turns.

5. DaFino in The Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski

Another quick cameo, he’s been in nearly half the Coen’s filmography and always amps up the scene. Da Fino is a ‘private snoop’ in his own words, a ‘brother shamus’ to which Jeff Bridges’ The Dude aloofly replies ‘Your mean like an Irish monk?’ It’s a priceless little exchange of dialogue between the two actors that allows Jon to impart some important exposition in the highly convoluted plot and have some cheeky fun while he’s at it.

4. Steve Crosetti in Homicide: Life On The Street

One of the most well rounded characters he got to play, Steve is a Baltimore cop trying to keep the pieces of his life together in between tough job stress and the serious injuring of a friend and fellow detective (Lee Tergesen). He’s got a daughter he fights to see and the twilight of his arc sees him leave to Atlantic City where he apparently commits suicide. It’s a tragic turn of events that ends on a bittersweet note in the follow up film where we see him return in an epilogue that can only be described as heaven for cops. It’s so touching to see him sitting by his wounded friend’s side in the hospital, putting the man’s Walkman on for him with his favourite music even though the fellow is unconscious and listening in himself so that he might share a moment with someone he cares about a lot. Polito plays this character beautifully and I wish he got to play more like him in his career.

3. Johnny Caspar in The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing

A feisty Italian crime boss constantly at odds with his two Irish rivals (Albert Finney and Gabriel Byrne), Johnny has a short fuse, volatile nature and has simply had enough bullshit or, as he idiosyncratically puts it, “I’m sick of the high hat!!!!” The amount of energy and frenzy Jon could whip up in his work was really something else, and this is a prime example.

2. Gideon in Alex Proyas’s The Crow

Motor City’s meanest pawnbroker, Gideon is a sleazy, amoral, nasty piece of work who serves as conduit between ill gotten goods and dirty money to a pack of savage local thugs. Fast talking, profane, volatile and ultimately a straight up fucking coward, he gets all the films’s funniest lines and Jon delivers them with effortless, scummy magnetism and milks the character for all its worth. “You’re lookin for a coroner, shit for brains!!”

1. Eddie Scarpino Giannini in Millennium

Eddie is a low level mobster who thinks he’s about to kick the bucket when he finds himself in the middle of the woods on the wrong end of an assassin’s gun. Then something very special happens to him. This is not only the finest work he’s done as an actor for me but the best guest arc on the fantastic Millennium. Eddie transforms from a selfish, murderous criminal into a fiercely protective guardian angel with something and someone to live for. It’s a beautiful performance that might have been nominated if it wasn’t just one episode. Plus we get to see him act alongside Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black as the two share a quiet moment at Christmastime.

-Nate Hill

Burn After Reading: A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

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The Coen Brother’s Burn After Reading is the duo at their height of trolling the audience, a mood they seem to make some of the most devilishly funny films of their career. This one reminds me of long days full of running around, confusion and missed appointments, days where I get home and reach the end only to realize that for all the frenzy, nothing I did all day was really of any consequence. This film is sort of like that; a whole lot of clandestine nonsense and tomfoolery that adds up to.. well, not much of anything in the end. If that sounds like I’m being negative, I’m not. That’s part of the Coen’s charm and a core aspect of what makes this one so hilarious. It’s also full of complete dimwitted morons, which only adds to the chorus of lunacy. John Malkovich teeters on the borders of mania, scary and funny as ex CIA half wit Osborne Cox, in a performance so utterly Malkovich that he almost seems like some other actor parodying him. He’s got a cold hearted bitch of a wife (Tilda Swinton) who is fooling around with even bigger idiot Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney  is a riot) who is also fooling around with anything that has a pulse, being the squirrelly sex addict that he is. Cox has started a memoir (or, ‘mem-wah’, as Malkovich ludicrously intones it), the contents of which are on a disc that end up in the hands of yet even bigger idiots. Linda Litzke (Frances Mcdormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) run a gym called Hardbodies (only the Coens, folks) and see the disc as ‘secret spy shit’ they could use to make a buck. That’s where the plot hollers off the rails into pure madness, as each and every character makes the dumbest possible decision  along the way. J.K. Simmons are gold as two CIA honchos who are more puzzled than the audience, Richard Jenkins trolls perhaps the subtlest of all, and the cast also includes Jeffrey Demunn, Olek Krupa and a meta cameo from Dermot Mulroney. Among the cloak and dagger chaos, the Coen take every chance they get to spoof and lovingly ridiculue society’s cringe inducing stereotypes, until you start to realize they’re levels of exaggeration aren’t all that over the top. Pitt is gold as the air headed gym rat, Clooney pure screwball, and Malkovich is a force of demented nature, his exentuated word pronunciations reaching a boiling point of absurdity here. This is up there with the Coen’s best, and certainly one of their funniest hours.

O Brother Where Art Thou? -A Review by Nate Hill

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Coen Brother’s O Brother Where Art Thou is just a rush of pure originality, musical genius and inspired storytelling, situated outside the box of used conventions, and rooted deeply in a whimsical realm of absurd, charming characters on an epic odyssey across the American south during arguably the most eccentric time period, the 1930s Great Depression. It’s the Coen’s second best for me (it’s hard to top the Lebowski, dude), and a film that I watched so many time growing up that it’s almost now a piece of my soul. It’s loosely based on Homer’s The Odyssey. Three bumbling convicts escape from a dusty chain gang in a delightful opening romp set to Harry McClintock’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) is their silver tongued, troublemaking leader, on his way to reunite with his estranged wife (Holly Hunter, reliably stubborn and sassy) and little daughters. Along with him is short tempered Pete (Coen regular John Turturro in top form) and sweet, dimwitted Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). Together they get in just about every kind of trouble that you can imagine three hapless convicts on the run in depression era south getting into. They briefly share paths with musician Tommy (Chris Thomas King), cross the radar of a boisterous bible salesman (John Goodman, stealing scenes as usual with his effortless, booming charm), become involved with duelling governor candidates Homer Stokes and Pappy O Daniels (Wayne Duvall and Charles Durning), and have run ins with sexy sirens led by Musetta Vander, the KKK, notorious mobster George Babyface Nelson (Michael Badalucco has to be seen to be believed as the lively, likely bi polar suffering wise guy) and more, all the while pursued by mysterious Sheriff Cooley (Daniel Von Bargen, RIP). It’s quite al lot of goings on for one film, but the Coens are masters of telling zany, eclectic stories that deviate into all sorts of unexpected subplots without ever derailing and losing us. This one flows along wondrously, a wild, funny and haunting fable that almost feels like a dust bowl Dante’s Inferno at times, albeit of much lighter subject matter. Roger Deakins spins poetry with his lens, capturing every chaff of wheat, every ray of southern sun and brown hued set design with painstaking expertise. What really holds it together though, is the absolute knockout soundtrack. There’s so many moments of now iconic musical storytelling that we feel we’re watching a strange bluegrass lullaby that just happens to take place in cinematic vision. The Coens have always known their music, but they transcend to another level of intuition here, gathering an incredibly evocative group of songs and artists together that stir the collective ancestral memory of historical Americana. Off the top of my head there’s You Are My Sunshine, Keep On The Sunny Side, I’ll Fly Away beautifully warbled by the Kossoy Sisters, Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Babe sung by the slinky sirens, In The Highways by the adorable Peasall sisters, Jimmie Rodgers’s In The Jailhouse Now, Lonesome Valley, Ralph Stanley’s two eerie pieces O Death, and Angel Band, also by the Peasall Gals, and the classic Down To The River To Pray, which sneaks up on you and leaves you in rapture from its inescapable grip. My favourite by far though is I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow, an endlessly catchy hobo tune of jangling melancholy and highway humour, sung by John Hartford but cheekily lip synced by Clooney and team, an original piece made up on the fly by the three characters that goes on to make them ridiculously famous under the pseudonym the ‘Soggy Bottom Boys’. It’s all an intoxicating wonder to take in, the period authentic screenplay and production a feast for the senses. The Coens seem to be adept at whatever they try; sly satire, period piece, stinging violence, dark humour, and even touching drama when they put their minds to it. This is a career high for them, a totally unique piece of art that demands multiple viewings and a spot in any avid movie collectors pantheon.