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Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n
Thu 25 June 2026 2:30, UK <\/p>\n
Everyone has at least a couple of objectively terrible movies that they\u2019ll defend to their dying breath, and just because they\u2019ve made some of the most acclaimed pictures of the last 40 years, it doesn\u2019t mean that the Coen brothers<\/a> are any different.<\/p>\n Some people might operate under the belief that a filmmaker will exclusively watch things that reflect their onscreen sensibilities, which is fair enough. Then again, the fact that Christopher Nolan adores MacGruber<\/a> and is obsessed with Fast & Furious quickly blows a hole right through that theory.<\/p>\n Since Joel and Ethan have largely specialised in offbeat, eccentric, and idiosyncratic genre fare that weaves between drama, comedy, farce, thriller, and many more genres at the drop of a hat, it wouldn\u2019t be the wildest guess in the world to assume that\u2019s what they grew up watching as a pair of young, inexperienced, and aspiring auteurs in rural Minnesota, but they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Instead, they pretty much watched anything they could lay their eyes on, which sent them down several strange rabbit holes. Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur, two of the most prominent epics of Hollywood\u2019s \u2018Golden Age\u2019, didn\u2019t grab their attention, with the Coens admitting that they could barely sit through either<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the 1965 sex comedy Boeing Boeing, starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, which they acknowledged was a bad movie by any measurable metric, became so integral to their shared cinematic upbringing that they called it both \u201cthe formative movie\u201d of their lives and the one film they\u2019d happily watch forever<\/a>, which makes sense for the Coens, since it doesn\u2019t really make sense at all.<\/p>\n \u201cA movie like Boeing Boeing was big with us,\u201d Joel confirmed, but it was far from alone. The four-time Academy Award winners would also rattle off a few other 1960s flicks that remain seared into their collective consciousness, and while a couple of them aren\u2019t awful in the strictest terms, lumping them in with Boeing Boeing says a lot about how the siblings remember them.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were into movies like That Touch of Mink, A Global Affair, Bob Hope movies, Jerry Lewis movies, anything with Tony Curtis, Pillow Talk,\u201d Joel continued. \u201cWe tried to see everything with Doris Day. Those were important movies for us. I saw Pillow Talk again recently. It\u2019s incredibly surreal.\u201d<\/p>\n Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n Chiming in, Ethan described those movies as having \u201ca very weird, wooden aesthetic that nobody\u2019s interested in anymore,\u201d before adding The Chapman Report to the collection because it\u2019s \u201cgreat that way, too.\u201d While it may not sound like they\u2019re being disparaging, let\u2019s not forget that the Coens had previously described that very era as the \u201cshittiest\u201d in the history of mainstream Hollywood<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pillow Talk and That Touch of Mink are arguably the best of the bunch, and while they each have their own merits, and Joel and Ethan aren\u2019t trying to deflect how instrumental they were in getting them engaged with cinema, it\u2019s obvious that they don\u2019t hold any of them on an especially high pedestal beyond that.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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