Coens Soak In Blood

Tom Hanks shares his recipe for delicious fried chicken in the Coen’s last film, The Ladykillers.

Some of you may only remember Joel and Ethan Coen as the guys who dressed Tom Hanks up as KFC mogul Colonel Sanders, but if your memory is longer than five minutes you hopefully remember them as one of the few brother director teams that usually makes good movies. The Wachowskis and the Farrellys certainly can’t claim that distinction.

According to Production Weekly the brothers Coen are deep into planning their next project, and it’s an adaptation of a novel described as “blood-soaked”. Blood sounds pretty good. The book their basing their next script on is called “No Country for Old Men” and it’s written by a guy named Cormac McCarthy.

The description of McCarthy’s book over at Production Weekly is pretty confusing, but from what I can gather using other sources and people who have time to read, it is in fact not set in a bizarre, fuzzy, alternate universe. Instead, it’s a sort of modern-day western about a hunter named Llewelyn Moss who stumbles on some corpses, a bunch of heroin, and two-million dollars. Llewelyn does what any man with empty pockets would do, he grabs the money and runs. The book becomes a man-on-the-run story with Moss fleeing from an ex-Special Forces agent employed by a drug cartel, a psychotic murderer, and a Sheriff unsure of his ability to enforce justice.

Joel and Ethan are well into pre-production on the film, and should be shifting into full blown production when the movie starts shooting this May in the boring, illegal alien infested wastelands of Texas and New Mexico.

Joel and Ethan’s last really good movie was O, Brother Where Art Thou back in 2000, a movie which I appreciate a lot more now than I did then. Between then and now they’ve done some nice stuff like The Man Who Wasn’t There, and some inexplicable stuff like the Colonel Sanders powered Ladykillers, but let’s face it: they’re still the guys who made The Big Lebowski. That ought to be good enough for anyone.