I don’t want to live in a world where the Coen Brothers aren’t making movies on a regular basis.
Even after the disappointing duo of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, cinema is better off with these boys making movies. Lucky for us, Joel and Ethan will be returning after a three year layoff at this May’s Cannes Film Festival with No Country for Old Men (based on a Cormac McCarthy novel) and, this summer, they’ll begin their lucky thirteenth feature titled Burn After Reading, about a CIA agent who loses a disc of some importance. George Clooney, who joined the Coen company with 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, will return for his third go-round with the brothers, while Frances McDormand, who joined the Coen family by marrying Joel in 1984, will co-star.
The big news, though, is that Brad Pitt will pop his Coen Brothers cherry with this feature – and, really, it’s about time. Good looking, charismatic, self-aware… this guy should’ve been onboard a long time ago. As for who he’ll play in the film, well, the Coens are being predictably tight-lipped.
Pitt is scheduled to shoot his part in August. Upon finishing, it’s expected he’ll move on to Kevin Macdonald’s State of Play, which some complete piece of shit wrote about a week or so ago on CHUD. Pitt is also in Andrew Dominik’s long-delayed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which, now that I think about it, would’ve been an ideal Cannes entry given its comparisons to Terrence Malick. That film is currently without a U.S. release date, though it’ll probably turn up at Venice and/or Toronto at the end of the summer.