Coens to Go Heavy on the Marinara

So the Coen Brothers, currently responsible for one of the most overrated films in release today , are working on a spaghetti western .

For those unfamiliar with this subgenre, it is composed of “westerns” made by Italian directors, mostly in the 1960s, that have some fun with the American western’s genre conventions. Sergio Leone’s contributions are definitely the best of the bunch, and it was he who gave Clint Eastwood his biggest big-screen boost .

In fact, for a while there Eastwood would usually include at least one “Sergio Leone shot” in films he directed himself: an extreme close-up with the background, usually a landscape, in sharp focus. (See the underappreciated A Perfect World with Kevin Costner.) Leone used to do this a lot: He’d set up a typical western prairie longshot, and suddenly zump! —some cowboy’s dirt-defiled mug would pop into the frame. Leone liked to play with expectations of how the new technologies that expanded film aspect ratios—Cinemascope, Panavision, etc.—were being used by other directors, such as Anthony Mann .

What I don’t understand about the Coens’ proposal is this: “There’s scalping and hanging . . . it’s good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off.”

Excuse me? That would be “Native Americans using natural resources—in which they were rooted and to which they were wedded—to fend off the depredations of manifest destiny” THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Sheesh. Some people . . .