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BI<>H❝•1.🔗🖼Spoiler—

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  @rodneysreviews(53)· 2882d

  "Barton Fink is something they probably study in film school"

  You'd be right about that lol.

  Some spoilers follow. . .

  I actually love this movie, but any movie is only gripping to the extent that it reaches out to a person's own mind and experience, joins with them, and takes them on a ride. This did that for me, but if it didn't for you, then it failed.

  And not only did it fail, it failed BIG time, and here's why:

  (1) The movie itself is a critique of artists who fail to reach out to the "common man." You see, Barton Fink is a snob, who makes plays for the "common man," but when he actually meets one, John Goodman, he doesn't show any interest in his story;

  (2) Not only does Barton Fink show no interest in John Goodman's story, cutting him off, refusing to listen, he patronises him, explicitly suggesting Goodman is too dumb to understand Fink's work. Which is rich, since Fink is supposedly devoted to the "common man;"

  (3) And worse, Fink assumes the common man IS a "common" man, with simple easily definable traits, whereas Goodman shows that the common man is in fact, incredibly complex, unique, full of inexplicable feelings and motivations, much more complex in fact that the vacant mind of the pretentious Barton Fink. When Goodman roars that he DOES understand "the life of the mind," that is the moment Fink is well and truly roasted for his bullshit. The inferno around him gives visual representation to the roasting of Fink's craven mind.

  Therefore, if the Coens themselves have pompously, artily elevated themselves above the complex, rich, unique and dazzling common daily life of one Mr Gooddream, they have ironically committed the exact same bullshit that they roast Barton Fink for committing! And that's a fail. :0

  I don't agree that most of the movie is in Fink's mind, but it could be. The Coen Brothers always play things any which way.

  Here are some observations, that may shed some light on this movie:

  The movie massively quotes Kubrick's "The Shining," in that visually The Earle Hotel is a kind of Overlook Hotel, with spooky long ghostly corridors that suggest roads to hell, and paths into the imagination, and plot-wise, Barton Fink is exactly like Jack Nicholson's character, a writer with writer's block, unable to write words on a page, slowly losing his mind, in a murderous hotel with peeling walls and an impending inferno.

  What the Coen brothers do, that is different, is resist the move to personal insanity and supernatural happenings. Instead they suggest that this is no exceptional madness, but a universal madness suffered by all writers faced with an empty page, the quotidian horror of never being able to understand what goes on in other men's minds.

  The end image is a beauty, showing how the picture on Fink's wall, which to him represented an escape from his hellish empty existence, is in fact, utterly empty when it happens LITERALLY: it is in the end just a woman sitting on a beach, totally banal and meaningless, and this banality is punctuated by a bird of flight plunging to it's sudden death. This punctuates the idea that there is no flight out of the human condition, no fantasy escape from any of it.

  We thus return to the ultimate mystery of the writer: for the studio boss, it is the factory of flights of fancy and fantasy, which manufactured dreams are condemned by the final image of the film.

  So we return to Goodman's "common" man and the female writer, for our final understanding of what it really means to be a writer: like she said, it's about "empathy," like he said, it's about the "life of the mind."

  What the movie says is that empathy and the mind are incredibly opaque, difficult and endlessly mysterious places, and the work of a writer is never done. :)

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  @spiritualmatters(56)· 2882d

  Most movies survive on hype. They aren't really designed/produced for deep thinkers...JMHO.

  Peace.

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  @coolguy222(73)· 2882d

  Thanks for sharing your review about the film, it's boring for you as well as for me.

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  @aydogdy(58)· 2882d

  Even if you do not look into the semantic part (but about it a little later), then we still have a wonderful drama. The rhythm of the narrative is somewhat sluggish, but there is not a single superfluous episode and it's still very exciting to look at all at the expense of excellent drama, an excellent example of how to make a film entirely built on dialogues monstrously interesting. Magnificently spelled out characters again and very good dialogues between them. But what's the meaning? And here the most interesting begins. At first glance, the film is really "about nothing", like someone who cares about the next story from the category "in the factory of dreams everything is very bad." On the second, more in-depth look, you begin to notice a huge number of subtexts, references, metaphors and allegories on a variety of subjects, from literature (almost immediately to the head comes Franz Kafka) and cinema (except for references to various films, there is also a satire on the Hollywood film industry) right up to religion (not without reason very often it is said about the nationality of the main character) and already the device of the universe. All this business is mixed in a crazy cocktail with an admixture of a healthy portion of satire, not everyone can master it. But here's what's interesting: for an even more in-depth look, you notice not deeper meanings but the "smiling face" of the author mocking the viewer's desire to learn something more and saying that one should live simply and not bother with any nonsense. The film is very interesting and atmospheric film with a cunning semantic component. Not everyone will like it, but it's already a classic of cinema.

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  @oraclefrequency(45)· 2882d

  It wasn't really my thing either. Had all the makings of something great, and def has some good chuckles, but I think you're being fair with 6 of 10.

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  @sayeds1956(53)· 2882d

  Very entertaining movie

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  @emwalker(65)· 2882d

  "I'll show you the life of the mind !!!"

  One of my favorite movies about a writer. it's not for everyone - I've tried to get a bunch of ppl to watch it but no one else has ever made it all the way through.

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  @kwadjobonsu(61)· 2882d

  First it should be noted that this is not so much a comedy as a comedy/drama. The comedy parts are indeed funny, but there aren't that many of them. The drama parts are desperately slow and dull, but the entire movie is absolutely rife with metaphor and symbolic meaning. Also, the acting performances are fantastic.

  So if you're the kind of person who likes to think about every possible idea the filmmakers could have been intending to communicate in every scene, then you'll have a great time with this movie, but if you prefer a story that moves from plot point to plot point at a reasonable pace, then you might find this very hard to sit through.

  Personally, I felt the filmmakers were trying to beat me over the head with symbolism, metaphor, and atmosphere to try to make a point that most people already agree with.

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  @beautifulplaces(49)· 2882d

  Barton Fink. The movie is good overall and the story is average though. I am not actually a fan of such movies but the plot from you regarding it is somewhat interesting. So Barton is sent to Hollywood as a playwright and he does his job goodly and is soon in the highlights. He checks in a hotel and meets a noisy neighbor Goodman. Barton and Goodman have a good relationship and this is what I actually love about this film. Thanks for sharing

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  @huriya(39)· 2882d

  Very interesting movie

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