July Film Club #1

 Our first film for July is Barton Fink.

Barton Fink is a 1991 American black comedy thriller film written, produced and directed by the Coen Brothers. Set in 1941, it stars John Turturro in the title role as a young New York City playwright who is hired to write scripts for a film studio in Hollywood, and John Goodman as Charlie Meadows, the insurance salesman who lives next door at the run-down Hotel Earle. The Coens wrote the screenplay for Barton Fink in three weeks while experiencing writer's block during the writing of Miller's Crossing. They began filming soon after Miller's Crossing was finished. The film is influenced by works of several earlier directors, particularly Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976).

The film currently holds a fresh rating of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert gave it 3.5/4 stars, saying this in his review, "Like all of the Coen productions, “Barton Fink” has a deliberate visual style. The Hollywood of the late 1930s and early 1940s is seen here as a world of Art Deco and deep shadows, long hotel corridors and bottomless swimming pools. And there is a horror lurking underneath the affluent surface. Goodman, as the ordinary man in the next room, is revealed to have inhuman secrets, and the movie leads up to an apocalyptic vision of blood, flames and ruin, with Barton Fink unable to influence events with either his art or his strength. “Barton Fink” is above all a black comedy in the tradition of David Lynch, Luis Bunuel and the Coens themselves. Turturro is the right man for the role, making Fink a plodding, introspective, unsure intellectual whose lack of insight is matched only by his lack of talent."

We will be meeting Thursday, July 17 at 5:30 pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK0WjWlVO9w&t=7s

Hope to see you there!