Blood Simple
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Movie Reviews of Blood Simple
Movie Review: Blood Simple... Simply Red
Summary: 3 Stars
Blood Simple: 6 out of 10: Some movies are victims of their own success. Alien is a great film but it seems a little slow nowadays and the plot while very fresh in 1984 has been done to death. (I still love it mind you but if I saw it for the first time this year I would probably wonder what the big deal is) The surprise is gone. I bring that up because at its time Blood Simple was a critics darling. A breath of very fresh air in our nations multiplexes. Not anymore.
This kind of noir has been done to death since the Coen brothers revived it twenty plus years ago and Blood Simple through no fault of its own suffers as a result. The plot of the jealous husband and double crosses has had so many spins of the same record (1/2 of them seemingly starring Tim Matheson) that the original simply doesn't have the freshness or power it undoubtedly had back in '84.
The movie has great strengths still however. Seeing Frances McDormand looking this cute reminds me of see Lucille Ball or Bette Davis in one of their first films when they were sex objects. And while John Getz gets swallowed up in his straight role Dan Hedaya (Cheers) on the other hand plays sleazy so well I forget I have seen it so many times since.
Overall very well done if slightly slow paced and certainly worth a view just too familiar to encourage a repeat viewing.
Movie Review: 2.5 stars out of 4
Summary: 3 Stars
The Bottom Line:
A cleverly-plotted neo-noir, Blood Simple is hampered by the fact that only Emmett Walsh shows any charisma--the lead couple is so wooden that the audience is hard-pressed to care a hoot about them; it's not a bad movie, but it's not very special either.
Movie Review: Coen Brothers first film fails to take off
Summary: 2 Stars
Abby Marty (Frances McDormand) is running away from husband Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), known simply as "Marty". She's hitched a ride with Ray (John Getz), who works for Marty at his bar. When they stop at a hotel the affair starts. Little do they know that Marty has a private investigator on them, Loren Visser (M. Emmett Walsh), taking pictures of their more intimate moments. Ray and Abby return to town instead of running away, but Abby refuses to move back in with Marty.
Marty, in the meantime, has decided to pay the slippery Loren $10,000 to murder Ray and Abby; but Loren figures it's a better deal to steal Abby's gun, murder Marty with it, and take the money anyway. Ray finds the body and Abby's gun and believes that Abby murdered Marty, so he attempts to hide the crime, becoming involved with it also. But Abby is innocent, and doesn't know what to do when Ray vaguely tries to tell her he's helped her out.
I wasn't that impressed with this first Coen Brother's film. It was rather deadpan, and whether on purpose or by accident it was too hard to tell. There just wasn't enough 'Ummph" in the movie for my tastes. There is such a thing as drawing out a scene too long, and that's what happens several times during the film. It's slow, and lacking in drama or suspense. There's a great plot here, it's just poorly executed. After being told how great the movie was, and after seeing what the Coen Brothers and Frances McDormand did with 'Fargo', I found 'Blood Simple' to be a disappointing let-down. Rent, don't buy.
Movie Review: Doesn't Hold Up
Summary: 2 Stars
I've heard about this movie for a very long time. I've always wanted to see it. But now that I have, I want my time back. The characters are frustrating to the point where they all needed a good smack on the back of the head. M. Emmett Walsh's acting was the one high point. Even if the script isn't clear about his motives, Walsh shows what a great actor he really is. I can't say the same for anyone else in the movie. I know the film makers were trying to be funny (burying someone in a plowed farm field is supposed to be humorous.) But the pacing is so slow, it's painful. The trailer quotes Alfred Hitchcock's line about it taking a long time to kill someone. But he was talking about the suspense, not about the stupidity of the crime. This movie is a perfect example of "Stupid people are more irritating than evil people."Movie Review: Not a Coen brothers fan
Summary: 1 Stars
This is my generic Coen brothers film review; "Blood Simple" is their first film, so I'll stick it here.
Somewhere Philip Roth--quoting his mother?--gives his rule for matching pants, shirt, tie, etc.: "You can have two plains and one fancy, but you can't have two fancies and one plain." The Coen brothers are nothing but fancy. Or to put it another way, there's a difference between real art informed by modernist self-and-art-consciousness (Godard, Kundera, Roth) and incessant, insufferable film-school smarty-pants solipsism--that's to say, most of the collected works of the Coen brothers.
This one is their first, so the ceaseless "Notice me! Notice me!" of their filmmaking still has a bit of adolescent charm; preferable to the dreary smugness of "The Big Lebowski." But it still wears very thin by the end.
There's a difference between a movie that's impressive and one that's working way too hard to impress, and if you're not sure what it is, go see a Coen brothers' movie.