Blood Simple

I'm beginning to recognize 90s style.  There's a certain film grain to films from that decade and the late 80s.  I don't know if it's just better cameras or what, but movies look a bit different these days.  Probably just technological improvements; the whole shift to digital has come since then, after all.

Blood Simple is the first movie made by the Coen Brothers, and like most of their movies, [SPOILER ALERT] pretty much everyone dies in the end after a crime gone horribly wrong.  This one in particular reminded me a lot of Quentin Tarantino - Reservoir Dogs, to be specific.  The time the movie was made is about the same, they both have this crime gone wrong thing, they both end in with lots of people getting killed...  There's also the whole scene where the main character is cleaning up his bloody car where I kept thinking of The Cleaner from Pulp Fiction.

I feel in some ways like No Country For Old Men was the Coen Bros way of remaking Blood Simple.  The motives behind the killings are very different, but they have lots of similarities.  Both are set in Texas.  Both start with roaming shots of landscapes voiced over by one of the main characters.  Both have a nasty bad guy running around trying to kill everyone.  Both involve crimes gone wrong leading to massive amounts of bloodshed.

On the other hand, Blood Simple has music.  It has a girl who survives.  It has dream sequences and that amazing section where the main guy is burying the other guy (oh my god so creepy).  It has driving sequences, though they come straight out of Fargo.  Or I guess the ones in Fargo come straight out of here.  This movie also has a huge emphasis on sound.  The music is crazy atmospheric.  There's this recurring motif of a repeating sound beating over and over.  It starts with windshield wipers but comes back again as a fan, an alarm clock ticking, and the footfalls of someone in the next room.  Very soothing but placed in this context that's so intense.  It put me on edge the whole film.

Another thing this movie does really well is setting the scene with little close up shots of all sorts of details.  Like when the two men are meeting in the back room of the bar:  we see some fish heads.  We see the fan.  We see a chair.  We see one of the men talk.  We see a cigarette.  All these shots come together to give us a really rich scene.

Man, those pipes at the end of the movie...

And that sequence dealing with the first dead guy's body...

Damn.

Damn, y'all.