An Evening With The Coen Brothers

week ago I went to the Walker to see the Coen Brothers.  Live.  Talking about movies.  This started to come about a few months ago when my dad told me about this 25th(?) anniversary of Blood Simple talk they were giving.  Apparently my parents are members of the Walker, so they got first crack at the stupidly expensive tickets.  Yay massive disposable income.  My mom didn't especially want to go, so my dad said he'd get 3 tickets and that if my sister didn't want the 3rd I could bring someone from college.

An interesting conundrum!  Who would I invite?  I have several friends from town who I'd love to bring to a talk like that.  DBlock and Joey come to mind, and Danl is not a bad backup.  Sadly none of them were in town, so I started thinking of people at Carleton.  Turns out most of my friends here are either not very interested in movies or I don't know well enough to invite on what looks sort of like a date except my dad is there, too.  Awkward.  (Yes, the majority of the college people I like spending time with are girls, so that last sentence makes sense.)  Silly me, I'd forgotten Joey was going to Olaf this year and didn't get around to inviting him until he was already busy with rehearsal for some unspecified thing.  Lame.  Turns out my sister took the ticket anyway, so no harm done.  I like the theoretical question, though.  You've got an extra ticket to some cool thing that you're going to with a parent.  Which of your friends do you offer the ticket to?  Almost like one of those boundaries things.  Once I know you well enough to offer you that ticket, I know we're tight.

We left early so we could eat Thai food for dinner.  It wasn't the greatest, but I like most anything  branded as Thai food.  Plus, free meals.  That means so much to a college student.  It was rainy and cold out, which sucks.  I remember last year we had such a beautiful fall and this year it's just dreary.  Stupid Minnesota getting my hopes up.

The line to get into the performance hall was long even though we were 10 minutes before doors opened.  Everyone was dressed up except me in my unicorn-riding-a-motorcycle t-shirt.  Also everyone was suspiciously middle aged.  Given the price of the tickets I'm not surprised.  I'm probably one of the few kids who would've tried to get tickets to this thing at 17, so I don't know what I was expecting.  Different age groups are just scary.

They had this slide show on the giant screen going for the 30 minutes before the talk that showed pictures of all the other people the Walker had had come for this lecture series.  Elena and I talked about how creepy that one guy looked.  You know the guy.  This guy:

Holy shit, guys.  That guy is freaky looking.  John Waters of Pink Flamingos fame.  I still haven't seen that, but judging by what I've heard that's a good thing.  I recognized maybe a 3rd of the people.

After way too long, someone finally came out on stage and started introducing the men of the hour.  Blah blah blah, they're awesome, go see their new movie, this was the room Blood Simple premiered in, etc.  Shut up and give me my Coen Brothers, lady.  She complied with my request pretty quickly, and voila!  There they were!  Huzzah!  Standing ovation!

This other guy came out with them.  Some movie critic who was there to ask them questions so they'd have something to talk about.  Problem was, he was all "oooo, film theory" and they were all "yeah, we pretty much just like telling stories.  Aren't stories awesome?  We like reading, too."  Then the critic would go "yeah, what about this thing?  What about that film theory thing?" and they'd go "yeah.  Um... yeah?"

My favorite exchange pretty well summed up the whole night.  The critic plays this clip from Miller's Crossing where an Irish gangster's house gets shot up while Danny Boy plays in the background.  It's a great scene, beautifully timed to the music and very important to the movie.  This guy gets shot like 100 times by a tommy gun at one point but the movie is stylized like that so it's okay.  Anyway, great scene.  This gets shown and the critic asks "Why Danny Boy?" to which they reply "Um... because he's Irish?"

Overall, a bit disappointing.  I felt like I didn't get a whole lot out of it.  It was hilarious just how casual they were - just a couple of guys that make movies doing their thing.  Hopeful, in a way, because it means maybe I can be that guy some day.  I just gotta go find me a friend to write with.  That's what college is for, though.  Right?