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Topic: Barton Fink


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In the News (Sun 23 Nov 08)

  
  A Viewer's Guide to Barton Fink
Barton Fink is a movie with complex symbolism, plot twists, hidden meanings, and a helluvalot of funny jokes.
When Audrey and Barton roll onto the bed (with a hilarious reference to the old film code that in a lovemaking scene, a man had to have at least one of his feet on the floor), the camera pans over and enters the bathroom.
Despite being annoyed at Bartons noise complaint, Barton's fake sympathy ("I thought you might be...in distress.") makes Charlie think he might be an OK guy, that Barton could help fill some of the loneliness in his life.
www.coenbrothers.net /viewer.html   (907 words)

  
 Barton Fink   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Barton resents the intrusion, as he is rather anxious to return to his work, but he accepts the drink and takes the time for a little get-acquainted chat.
Barton Fink is physically modeled after the playwright and screenwriter George S. Kaufman, and his play at the beginning of the film is a pastiche of the sort of social drama that Clifford Odets wrote for the Group Theatre in New York--before moving to Los Angeles to work for the movies.
Barton, at the beginning of the movie, is a writer who has run out of things to say; he finds himself cut off from any source of artistic creativity.
faculty.frostburg.edu /phil/forum/Fink.htm   (10220 words)

  
 [No title]   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
BARTON Thanks, Richard, but I know for a fact the only fish you've ever seen were tacked to a the wall of the yacht club.
Barton is walking toward two wing chairs in the shadows, from which two men in suits are rising.
Barton holds it up to his ear and listens for a long beat, as if it were a seashell and he is listening for the surf.
members.tripod.com /~broknstone/fink.txt   (15064 words)

  
 Barton Fink
Barton Fink is packed full of intentionally unexplained riddles, visual puns, potently punchy language and all sorts of oddly suggestive, creepy-funny sights (peeling wallpaper and oozing paste,) and sounds (the hollow whoosh whenever Barton's hotel room door opens, the infernal buzz of a mosquito above his bed, groaning pipes, muffled voices from adjacent rooms).
Barton encounters the personification of his common man in the bulky form of his gregarious next door neighbor, a sweaty insurance salesman named Charlie Meadows (John Goodman).
In one shot, Barton and Charlie, sitting on the bed and putting on their accidentally swapped shoes at the same time, become mirror images of each other, hinting that perhaps the two could be seen as complementary sides of a single personality.
www.cinepad.com /reviews/barton.htm   (1203 words)

  
 AboutFilm.Com - Barton Fink (1991)
They paint Fink as an ineffectual and impotent left-wing intellectual, who sells out while telling himself he is doing the right thing, who thinks he understands the "common man" but does not understand that, for many common men, fascism had a seductive appeal.
Fink tries to write a wrestling picture and sleeps with the great writer's mistress, while the Holocaust approaches and the nice guy in the next room turns out to be a monster.
Barton sits alone in his room, which is a wholly self-contained world--a metaphor for his own mind.
www.aboutfilm.com /movies/b/bartonfink.htm   (1939 words)

  
 EI > DVD > Barton Fink (1991)
Barton Fink (John Turturro) is the rave of Broadway.
Barton believes in the dramatic possibilities found in the ordinary life of the common man. He is a naive elitist with an attitude.
Barton doesn't want to sell out, but his manager finally convinces him that the money he will earn could be used to finance future plays.
www.einsiders.com /reviews/dvd/bartonfink.php   (790 words)

  
 Joel and Ethan Coen aka The Coen brothers
Barton Fink, fresh from an unprecedented sweep of the major awards (picture, director, actor) at the Cannes Film Festival.
Barton Fink frustratingly off-putting and insular, as if the Coens were attempting to be strange and obscure just for the sake of being strange and obscure.
Barton Fink, obviously -- outside of the physical resemblence and the fact that he's an alcoholic -- he really doesn't resemble Faulkner very much in any other respect.
www.cinepad.com /coens.htm   (1992 words)

  
 Barton Fink - The CHUD.COM Message Boards
That the Hotel symbolises Hell and either Goodman or Lipnick Satan is also brought up a lot, as well as Fink being punished for his pretentiousness and only being able to write with his muse's head by his side in a box just for him, because of his fear of sex and egocentricness.
Barton Fink is certainly the only Coens film to be open to such abstract symbolism, so maybe they were half-serious and half-joking about it, which is the tone of most of their films.
it's just sort of an assumption because barton is definitely an inept character, a bit of a blowhard, and they don't pull many punches in their critique of him.
www.chud.com /forums/showthread.php?p=1323834   (978 words)

  
 Dual Lens - Barton Fink   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Barton is a very earnest New York playwright whose successful play about the hard lives of fishmongers has caught the attention of Hollywood.
Barton is very sad and tragic and, to this end, the soundtrack rips my heart out every time I hear it.
Barton Fink was similar to the director character in "Sullivan's Travels" who also wanted to make a pretentious 'serious' picture but later released the desired audience preferred entertainment to message movies.
www.duallens.com /index.asp?reviewId=92603   (1239 words)

  
 Movie Database - tvguide.com   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
The grand-prize winner at the 1991 Cannes festival, BARTON FINK is the fourth installment in the Coen Brothers' series of highly stylized homages to classical Hollywood.
But like their earlier films, BARTON FINK is a tour de force of cinematic technique that encases a quirky narrative of little depth.
Barton Fink (John Turturro) is an earnest young New York playwright who hits it big with a Depression-era proletarian drama before being reluctantly seduced by a lucrative offer to go to Hollywood and write for the movies.
online.tvguide.com /movies/database/Movie-Review.asp?MI=34739   (433 words)

  
 Amazon.com: Barton Fink: DVD: John Turturro,John Goodman,Judy Davis,Michael Lerner,John Mahoney,Tony Shalhoub,Jon ...   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Fink seeks out assistance from the Faulkner-esque writer W. Mayhew (John Mahoney), which turns out to be a futile maneuver, and finally winds up getting some inspiration from his hotel neighbor Charlie (John Goodman), who might or might not be a serial killer who likes to lop off his victims' heads.
Barton's room is a character in itself and each movement he makes causes a reaction that seems to stem from deep inside his imagination.
The first meeting, where Barton complains about the noise, is awkward and hard to watch as Barton is so busy pontificating about the good of the common man, that he fails to listen to real trials and tribulations of the common man that stands right before him.
www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00008RH3J?v=glance   (3330 words)

  
 Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat
Barton stares at his wallpaper, his ceiling, his bathroom floor, his typewriter, the pages he's writing on--stares and stares, and the camera just worms right into whatever he's looking at.
The benefactors behind Barton’s play prattle on as though (much to the writer’s irritation) it were just a particularly moving excuse to dress up and get drunk.
The bitter, sadistic genius of them, to let Barton believe to the end that his finally-finished film script is the best thing he’s ever written, even though we the audience know he’s merely cannibalized the work he’s already done.
www.alltooflat.com /about/personal/sean?BlogNum=382   (983 words)

  
 MILLER'S CROSSING + BARTON FINK - DVDs   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Barton is shocked to discover, for example, that the Faulkner-like novelist W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney, miles from "Frasier") is ghost-written, that anti-Semitism runs rampant out west, that mosquitoes bite the dead, and, above all, that screenwriting is hard.
Barton Fink is as stymieing as it is affecting.
As Barton grows resigned to aspects of our existence being beyond his intellectual grasp, the Coens deliver a canny lesson to us and to Barton alike in shutting up and letting the picture speak its thousand words.
filmfreakcentral.net /dvdreviews/millerscrossingbartonfink.htm   (1384 words)

  
 Barton Fink (1991): Reviews
What "Raising Arizona" was to baby lust, "Barton Fink" is to writer's block -- a rapturously funny, strangely bittersweet, moderately horrifying and, yes, truly apt description of the condition and its symptoms.
Barton Fink has an atmosphere of languid comic anxiety (it's like a cross between "Eraserhead" and "Angel Heart"), and it's fun to watch, if only because you have no idea what's coming next.
As Fink struggles with his assignment to write the script for a wrestling picture (which must feature either an orphan or a dog) he comes across a sparse and strange cast of characters, most notably William Faulkner and his toothsome assistant played by the memorable Judy Davis.
www.metacritic.com /video/titles/bartonfink   (1265 words)

  
 Blogcritics.org: DVD Review: Barton Fink
The surface plot is pretty simple: New York playright Barton Fink (John Turturro), who likes to write for the "common man," has caught the eye of a Hoollywood movie-studio mogul, Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), due in part to the success of Fink's latest play.
Fink checks in to the Hotel Earle, a hotel that seems devoid of any other guests and also appears to be run by one man, Chet (Steve Buscemi), who looks as if he's never been outdoors due to his deathly pallor.
And what to make of the final scene, with Fink at the beach, joined by a mysterious woman — and a plummeting bird that crashes into the ocean (which, apparently, was unintentional — a bird did fall into the ocean, and Joel Coen left it in the shot).
blogcritics.org /archives/2005/10/25/182443.php   (1216 words)

  
 Memorable Quotes from Barton Fink (1991)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Barton: Who cares about the fifth Earl of Bathsdrop and Lady Higgenbottom and...
Barton: I - I've got respect for - for working guys, like you...
W.P. Mayhew: Mister Fink, they have not invented a genre of picture that Bill Mayhew has not, at one time or other, been invited to essay.
www.imdb.com /title/tt0101410/quotes   (1070 words)

  
 'Barton Fink'
But if "Fink" lacks cumulative punch, its fighting power is a technical knockout.
Set in 1941, it's a gradual descent into hell for Jewish playwright Barton Fink (Turturro), who answers the Mephistophelean call to write for Hollywood.
"Fink" is drawn with expert menace, as Turturro's deadline pressure mounts and Goodman's more disturbing side becomes apparent.
www.washingtonpost.com /wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/bartonfinkrhowe_a0b31a.htm   (566 words)

  
 Amazon.ca: Barton Fink: DVD   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Fink thinks the job is beneath him, but his desire for acceptance gets the better of him, and he suddenly finds himself holed up in a fleabag hotel in Los Angeles, where he is almost immediately afflicted with writer's block.
Barton Fink is a nightmarish film and a fl comedy, much of which takes place in a lifelike hotel sparsely populated by grotesque characters.
Barton is himself a nervous, self-absorbed nerd, and fits right in.
www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008RH3J   (688 words)

  
 DVD Review - Miller's Crossing & Barton Fink
Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a populist New York playwright who decides (at his agent's request) to relocate to Hollywood and write for 'the pictures' for awhile, hoping to earn enough money to live off of so he can return to writing for the theater back home.
There is one problem, when he gets to Hollywood the heat is sweating the wallpaper off the walls, there's a mosquito in his room, one of his idols is a belligerent drunk, he knows nothing about wrestling pictures, and he can't write more that an opening sentence.
It is also worth noting again that this is also probably the most divisive film in their career, probably due to the film's shift in tone about halfway through.
www.thedigitalbits.com /reviews2/coenbros01.html   (1234 words)

  
 The Coens
Their next major effort (after Crimewave, a 1985 film they wrote that was directed by Raimi), 1987's Raising Arizona was a screwball comedy miles removed from the dark, violent content of their previous movie, and it won over critics and audiences alike.
A surreal, nightmarish movie revolving around a writer's creative block, it was a heavily stylized, atmospheric triumph that further established the Coens as visionary arbiters of the bizarre.
Their 1994 follow-up to Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, was a relative critical and commercial disappointment, though it did boast the sort of heavily stylized, postmodern irony that had so endeared the brothers to their audience.
www.coenbrothers.net /coens.html   (1354 words)

  
 Barton Fink : MovieOutfitter.com   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
BARTON FINK is the Coen brothers' apocalyptic masterpiece about the creative process.
So Barton seeks to find the answers in W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), a Faulkneresque novelist who has sacrificed his morals for the B-pictures and the bottle.
Joel and Ethan Coen's BARTON FINK is a multilayered, complex psychological study of the creative mind that is as frightening and bizarre as it is hysterically funny.
www.movieoutfitter.com /store/item/024543073802/BartonFink.html   (107 words)

  
 Joel Coen Quotes
Barton Fink got written very quickly, in about three weeks.
Barton is based on Clifford Odets from the point of view of his background, but...
Although, the character in Barton Fink, obviously-outside of the physical resemblence and the fact that he's an alcoholic-he really doesn't resemble Faulkner very much in any other respect.
www.brainyquote.com /quotes/authors/j/joel_coen.html   (1979 words)

  
 Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink
In 1941, New York intellectual playwrite Barton Fink comes to Hollywood to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture.
Staying in the eerie Hotel Earle, Barton develops severe writer's block.
His neighbor, jovial insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, tries to help, but Barton continues to struggleas a bizarre sequence of events distracts him even further from his task.
www.coenbrothers.net /barton.html   (121 words)

  
 Fargo/Barton Fink
In a complete turnaround, the score from Barton Fink is all about eccentricity and experimentation.
The film tells the story of a tortured New York writer played by John Turturro, who moves to Hollywood to write screenplays and, while holed up in a dingy apartment, becomes involved in all manner of peculiar things, including various encounters with a travelling salesman who has homicidal tendencies.
Some unusual sound effects (tolling bells and drain effects in 'Love Theme from Barton Fink' and the sounds of steam trains and people fighting in 'The Box') are incorporated into the score but, as well as being weird, parts of Barton Fink are also quite entertaining and enjoyable.
www.moviemusicuk.us /fargocd.htm   (542 words)

  
 Fargo / Barton Fink by Carter Burwell (1996)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
It is a soloist that dominates the most effective portions of Barton Fink--this time, Burwell relies on a piano solo for closing in on the emotional element of his score.
The best tracks of Barton Fink are thus the ones where the piano is used the most, those tracks including highlights "Fade In"
The fact that one also gets the bonus of having Barton Fink as well makes this purchase especially delicious.
www.cinemusic.net /reviews/1996/fargo.html   (430 words)

  
 Barton Fink (1991)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
Plot Summary: In 1941, New York intellectual playwright Barton Fink comes to Hollywood to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture...
Sonnenfeld appears in a cameo early in the movie - he is the page calling for Barton Fink in the restaurant.
Discuss this movie with other users on IMDb message board for Barton Fink (1991)
www.imdb.com /title/tt0101410   (384 words)

  
 Barton Fink Quizzes and Trivia -- World's Largest Trivia Site!
The lasting appeal of “Barton Fink” is due to various elements almost, but not quite, fitting into a rational whole.
To this day, arguments erupt over obvious and subliminal symbolism, and the Coen brothers continue to shun explanations.
* Near the begining of “Barton Fink,” the Harold publishes a favorable review of Barton’s play.
www.funtrivia.com /quizzes/movies/movies_a-c/barton_fink.html   (352 words)

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