Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I just watched all of the Coen Brothers movies on which they collaborated. Almost all of their films are good, and rating them was harder than I expected. I hope to eventually get around to their newer projects and those they scripted. A few of the later films could move up with additional viewings. 18. The Ladykillers  17. Intolerable Cruelty  16. Burn After Reading  15. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs  14. The Man Who Wasn't There 13. The Hudsucker Proxy 12. A Serious Man 11. Hail, Caesar! 10. Inside Llewyn Davis 9. O Brother, Where Art Thou? 8. True Grit 7. No Country for Old Men 6. Raising Arizona 5. Barton Fink 4. Blood Simple 3. The Big Lebowski 2. Fargo 1. Miller's Crossing

Sometimes when you work too much, you achieve a level of clarity that allows you to step back and take stock of your life and the choices you have made. Other times you just feel exhausted and want to take naps and sleep in every day. Of course, you force yourself to get out of bed and go to work because that is the adult thing to do and you have responsibilities. If you are anything like me, your sense of self-worth that is intricately connected to conscientiousness bordering on insanity. Your Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) leads to the strangest behaviors like getting to work early and taking on extra work to maintain a sensible sense of identity.  During these odd days of COVID, I find myself doing less work than usual or struggling to maintain my usual level of obsessive-compulsive writing and grading. I have new habits of grading a few papers a day instead of my standard marathon sessions; however, if I do decide to embark on a marathon grading regimen, I have graded for ...

  My relationship with the Coen Brothers' films is somewhat tumultuous. It seems like for every excellent movie they make, there are two that leave me with reservations.This applies to their entire filmography because I find myself loving certain movies like Barton Fink and Miller's Crossing , yet am completely disappointed with others like Raising Arizona and The Lady Killers. I admit that I probably should delve more deeply into their later films; I've barely given them the chance. In my teenage years, I was something of a indie film snob; I stayed up late at night to watch Bravo and any independent film on Showtime or HBO. I was there for the everything from Floundering and Spanking the Monkey to Clerks and Pulp Fiction. The first time I saw Fargo was on Showtime when they were counting down the best independent films of 1996. My taste at the time wasn't so refined; I remember thinking that Swingers should win -- I had an early, cloying fascination with th...