Last week, Slate published three pieces I wrote about the films of Joel and Ethan Coen: first, an essay about my path from initial fandom to mild hostility to a more thoughtful (I hope) devotion to their work (accompanied by a slide show of some of their favorite motifs); second, a brief write-up, with clips, of their short films and advertising work; and third, my personal (and tentative) ranking of their fifteen feature films, with links to the many rankings others have done over the last few years.Then on Monday I wrote a post for Brow Beat, the Slate culture blog, reflecting on the results of a poll Brow Beat blogger Nina Shen Rastogi put up asking readers what their favorite (and least favorite) Coen brothers films were. I also wrote in that post about the many enjoyable responses generated by the pieces published the week before (I learned, among other things, which Coen brothers film Judd Apatow prefers to the rest, something I did not think to ask him about last fall).
This is not the first time I have written about the Coen brothers for Slate: in 2008, ten years after the release of the The Big Lebowski, I considered the politics of Walter Sobchak.
