“Pretty boring”: The two classic movies the Coen brothers called “hard to sit through”
It can be crushing when you realise that you don’t like a movie that many anoint the greatest of all time, with the doubts creeping in about your intelligence, and whether everything simply went over your head, and you are unable to see objective genius.
Perhaps you’re not on the right intellectual level to take in a film like Mirror or Tokyo Story, you think to yourself. Am I destined to prefer Judd Apatow comedies instead? Well, you can calm the insecurities, as the truth is, even some of the biggest cinephiles have negative things to say about classics, like Quentin Tarantino, who tore apart some iconic works of French cinema in his novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, using Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth as his mouthpiece for it.
“The first two films he [Cliff] watched (in a Truffaut double feature) just didn’t grab him. The first film, The 400 Blows, left him cold. He really didn’t understand why that little boy did half the shit he did. And he thought the mopey dopes in Jules and Jim were a fucking drag,” he wrote.
Opinions can change, though, and I, for one, have come to love movies that I initially found boring, while other classics have remained just as boring on a rewatch as the first time I tried to appreciate them. It’s OK to admit to not liking a classic, and it doesn’t mean you’re stupid or that your tastes are low-brow; maybe a certain film just isn’t for you, which is a very natural occurrence.
The Coen brothers aren’t afraid to admit to disliking some popular works of cinema, even movies that are considered some of the most influential ever made, and being bigshot directors themselves whose works are film school staples, they do have a lot to lose admitting to their disdain. Talking about epic biblical movies in an interview with NPR, the brothers said, “Yeah, you know, we’ve seen those movies, too. Let me tell you, most of those movies are pretty boring and pretty stiff.”
Especially considering the cinematic landscape we’re currently living in, where fast-paced action and snappy dialogue reign supreme, it’s sometimes hard to stomach a film where long chunks of boring conversations play out like the cinematic equivalent of that long chapter in Moby Dick where Herman Melville describes every kind of whale in excruciating detail; you just itch to skip to the next scene as you struggle to stay awake.
For the Coens, the movies that bore them the most are some lengthy epics, noting, “It’s hard to sit through Quo Vadis or Ben-Hur,” and can you blame them? While Mervyn LeRoy’s depiction of Nero’s reign comes in at 171 minutes, the latter is 212 minutes long, and you really have to be in the mood to take a tiresome journey through stories far-removed from the present day, probably full of outdated social and religious practices that are hard to sink your teeth into.
It’s nice to hear filmmakers like the Coens admit that even they find these movies, held as gold standard pieces of cinema, actually a bit of a drag. They’re just human, after all, and so are you.
