Day 53 – The Perfect Film Adaptation

As I said recently, I love the Coen brothers. They have made so many fantastic movies it’s hard to pick a favorite (ok, not that hard…it’s The Big Lebowski). O Brother, Where Art Thou? is up there with their best work and is one of my favorite films. The music is superb. The cinematography and film processing that were used on the movie make you feel like you have been transported to a different time and location. It looks like an old photograph from that era. And of course the cast is amazing. I actually hated George Clooney before this movie. I didn’t like ER and had never seen him in anything where I did not want to punch him but he did a great job here. He is really good at comedy. Clooney, John Turturro, and Timothy Blake Nelson were the perfect trio of idiots for this odyssey. Which brings me to the other masterful part of this movie. It’s actually a modernized (yet still period) loose adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. When you keep that in mind an recognize that one-eyed John Goodman is supposed to be the cyclops, you realize this movie is truly brilliant.