The next feature from the Coen brothers, A Serious Man, is set for release this fall, but in the meantime, the Coens have made time to direct a public service announcement for The Reality Coalition, a recently minted organization composed of five environmental groups, whose mission is to combat the idea that there is such a thing as "clean coal." The Coens didn't write the ad, but they must have decided that the script was a neat fit for them after it was sent to them by Crispin Porter + Bogusy, the ad firm representing the Coalition. The firm also put out the short making-of film above, apparently for the benefit of Coen brothers fans who might need such concepts as parody and irony explained to them in one-syllable words. (You also get the thrill of hearing Ethan instruct someone that their line reading should be "a little queased out.") Here's the spot itself:

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The smaller Coen Brother made his off-Broadway debut as a playwright this month, with a triptych of one-act plays called Almost an Evening. Here is how the plays are described on the show’s website:

Waiting: Someone waits somewhere for quite some time.

Four Benches: His voyage to self-discovery takes a British intelligence agent to steam baths in New York and Texas, and to park benches in the U.S. and U.K.

Debate: Cosmic questions are taken up. Not much is learned.

Sounds positively Coen-esque, no?

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First, I must extend heartiest congratulations on behalf of the Screengrab to our colleague Paul Clark, who absolutely smoked the rest of us in the Oscar pool. Next year I’m giving my ballot to my dog (who didn’t much care for the bee montage, by the way).

Secondly, who agrees with me that the Oscars are ten times more enjoyable here in the DVR age? The ceremony clocked in at about an hour and fifteen minutes for me, after zapping through the commercials, Enchanted musical numbers and acceptance speeches in languages I couldn’t understand. The purists may frown on my methods, but I know the Academy Awards well enough by now to take matters into my own hands. Herewith, the top five moments:

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The red carpet continues to roll out for Joel and Ethan Coen en route to Oscar night. On January 27th, the brothers convened in Hollywood for a three-part Q &A on the crafts of No Country for Old Men, moderated by Spike Jonze. On the first panel, dedicated to cinematography, the Coens were joined by Roger Deakins, who has lensed all of their movies since 1991’s Barton Fink. They discuss the Coens’ detailed storyboards, their shorthand manner of communication, and the difficulty of shooting the early morning sequence in which Josh Brolin's Moss is discovered at the crime scene and chased into the Rio Grande, which was pieced together from footage that could only be shot within a few minutes of dawn and dusk. The second panel shifts focus to sound editing and mixing, with Oscar nominees Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland sitting in, and the third covers production design with Jess Gonchor. Although moderator Jonze often comes off like a character from a Saturday Night Live sketch about a nervous high school AV club president, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the Coens’ working methods, and all of it can be viewed on the No Country website.

Not content to rest on their laurels, however, the brothers are already looking ahead.

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One of the most appealing characters in Joel & Ethan Coen's brilliantly realized No Country for Old Men is Llewellyn Moss' young bride, Carla Jean, and the psychotic criminal Anton Chigurh's determination to hold her responsible for her husband's actions provides some of the movie's most tense and compelling moments.  So fully does actress Kelly Macdonald inhabit the role -- projecting youthful innocence, patience, confusion and understanding, and a near-perfect west Texas accent -- that it took me some time to realize that she is, in fact, that Kelly Macdonald, a Glaswegian actress whose own broad burr couldn't be further than the high-plains drawl of her charcter in the film.  Macdonald first came to fame after being cast, more or less on a fluke, as Ewan McGregor's ill-fated girlfriend in Trainspotting, a character as far removed from Carla Jean psychologically and emotionally as she is physically.

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The previously publicity-shy Coen Brothers are practially media darlings with the release of No Country for Old Men, but one of the most enjoyable interviews they've done as part of the blitz is this one, with the Guardian's always-reliable John Patterson.  The boys seem downright gleeful -- giddy, even -- discussing the ultraviolence they bring to the screen in the Cormac McCarthy adaptation; likewise, they seem well aware of the inevitable comparisons to the works of Sam Peckinpah that the western setting and over-the-top bloodshed is likely to draw.  Ethan says "We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the southwest, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing...you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand."  Over the course of the interview, they also provide insight into Javier Bardem's inhuman haircut, why they're not likely to ever take on a science fiction movie despite dabbling in almost every other genre, and the surprisingly high death toll of animals (cows, lizards, rabbits, dogs) in their films.  In fact, it's that thread of the conversation that leads to a surprising preview of their next, and still unnamed, film project:  "It's a proper western, a real western," Ethan explains, "set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken."

People say I’m a weenie for thinking this, but I feel these year-end top ten lists should be handled like the Hall of Fame: there should be a five-year waiting period in order to avoid any embarrassing blunders. Believe me, I have a record of top tens dating back to 1999 preserved forever on the Internet, and never fail to experience twinges of regret, shivers of shame and head-scratching moments of pure bewilderment when I look back at them. I’d feel much better right now if I were compiling my favorites of 2002, but rules are rules, so here are 10 movies I hope I won’t feel terrible about praising when 2012 rolls around:

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Unlike many of my fellow bloggers here at the Screengrab, who live in urbane, sophisticated metropoli, I make my home in San Antonio, Texas.  We have a ratio of approximately one movie theatre for every million people here, and "art house" is just what the locals call a museum. I hear if we play our cards right, we might be getting a one-week screening next year of that movie The Graduate all the cool kids are talking about, but until then, it's pretty much Transformers on nineteen of the twenty-four screens down at Huebner Oaks.  So you'll forgive me if my list leans pretty heavily on stuff that's already available on Netflix; at least half the movies on my list were ones that I had to drive an hour up to Austin to even have a chance of seeing before their DVD release, and there's more than a few movies that likely would have a chance of appearing here (I think specifically of There Will Be Blood and Syndromes and a Century) that there was simply no way for me to see before the year was up.  Still, I'll be happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom that 2007 was an especially rich year for film; there was plenty to see, even if you had to go out of your way to see it.

#10:  THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, dir.)

Although it was released in 2006, this masterful film from Germany didn't receive an American audience outside of the Telluride Film Festival until February.  It was well worth the wait.  Far too many movies that pick up Best Foreign Film Oscars are the international doppelgangers of Best Picture winners -- overblown, overpraised, middlebrow 'prestige' pictures lacking in resonance, depth and any particular qualities that will result in their being remembered far down the line.  But The Lives of Others -- best thought of as a brilliant reworking of The Conversation against the dreadful backdrop of Soviet East Germany -- deserved every bit of praise heaped on it by critics both here and abroad.  It's a stunning, terrifying film, brilliantly illustrating Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' in the person of the astonishing Ulrich Mühe.

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Okay, that's enough of the artsy-fartsy European creeps.  Let's get back to America!  And they don't come much American-er than Big Steve Root, one of the most prolific character actors in the business today.  For a guy whose first film role featured him unseen in a toilet (although, considering the movie was Crocodile Dundee II, maybe it's just as well), Stephen Root has a rather highbrow acting background:  for years prior to the kick-off of a remarkably rich film and television career, he was a respected member of the National Shakespeare Company.  His first major recognition as an actor came when he portrayed the flighty, meddling billionaire Jimmy James as part of the high-powered cast of NewsRadio, and even with dozens of film roles to his credit, he's probably best-known -- and best-paid -- for that role and his voice-over work on King of the Hill, where he plays, among other roles, the hapless Bill Dauterive.  A number of directors have enjoyed his work enough to make him a regular member of their repertory companies, particularly Mike Judge, Kevin Smith, and the Coen Brothers; Root's ability to play extremely eccentric roles while never giving the same characterization twice makes him especially sought-after by directors who specialize in character roles, and Root admitted in a recent interview that being killed by the Coens (as he, or at least his character, is in No Country for Old Men) has been the high point of his career to date.  Having just celebrated his 56th birthday, Root -- who, to be perfectly honest, looks like he's been playing a 56-year-old for the lion's share of his career -- no doubt has plenty of years ahead of him both on the big screen, playing his specialty of suit-wearing middlemen who have something extremely wrong with them, and in voice-over, where he's proven to have exceptional talent.  And with most of his comedic work for television widely available on DVD, a case can be made for Stephen Root as the preeminent comic character actor of the 1990s.

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LEONARD PIERCE: Unlike our last Face/Off, when we discussed Children of Men (a film which you will be marrying next summer in a small private ceremony at the Film Forum, whereas I view it simply as the most overrated movie by one of the Three Amigos prior to the release of Pan's Labyrinth), today, we're going to talk about a movie we both really liked, albeit possibly for different reasons — Fargo by the Coen Brothers.

Specifically, we're going to talk about how the movie feels about Marge Gunderson, its main character and moral center. One of the most common critiques of the Coen Brothers as filmmakers is that, while they're technically gifted and skilled synthesists, they lack heart, soul and feeling — the humanistic qualities of the directors they choose to ape. I don't believe this is true, necessarily; while I don't think the Coens will ever be accused of Capraesque oversincerity, I think they believe, more or less, in the message as well as the medium. But I do think that the Coens are very cynical filmmakers, not calculating or phony, but with a pretty jaundiced view of humanity. I don't, in short, think they really like their characters very much.

I won't go as far as to say they hate Marge Gunderson; she is clearly a decent human being for the most part, and they don't reserve for her the contempt with which they treat Jerry Lundegaard, who doesn't even have the courage to be a bad man, or Wade Gustafson, who treats the kidnapping of his daughter like a business deal only he is competent enough to close on. But I think Marge is meant to be yet another manifestation of the dull, unimaginative "Minnesota nice" of their childhood, which they sought to exorcise in Fargo just as surely as Todd Haynes did the wealthy Southern California of his youth in Safe.

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