Good things come to those who wait. No, five-ish years isn’t nearly the craziest gap in a director’s filmography, but Joel and Ethan Coen sure seemed ready to take their leave after The Ballad of Buster Scruggs––Joel for The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan to the (so I’ve heard) very funny Drive-Away Dolls. Whether you consider the duo geniuses, sadists, pseuds, or absolutely essential, to paraphrase Kent Jones on John Carpenter: America doesn’t have so many great directors to spare that it can afford to let the Coen brothers fall through the cracks.
Great news, then, that the last handful of years are more respite than severance. Speaking to the Tromsø International Film Festival (a different kind of TIFF) in promotion of Dolls, Ethan Coen said he and Joel have already scripted their reunion: “a pure horror film, and it gets very bloody.” One, he adds, in the style of Blood Simple, which I wouldn’t per se call horror and memory tells me it’s only “bloody,” no “very,” but I’m not going to argue with the man himself, nor do I at all mind his wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke saying it’s “horribly funny.” These are nice adverbs to hear about a Coen brothers film. [Montages]
The story notes that while development’s well and truly along, “Joel may have to finish another project first.” Since we’ve heard of no such project it’s anybody’s guess what that could mean. In the meantime, Drive-Away Dolls opens on February 23, ahead of which there’s a new, mostly symmetrical poster one can find below:
