700th Post - Coen Brothers

It's my 700th post! Woo!

When it comes to the Coen Brothers, I think we can all agree that their movies are good. They're entertaining, and they have such confidence in their skills, they can do things with much more subtlety than most directors.

My issue about Coen Brothers movies is that I don't know how to think about them. Are they smarter than me, hopelessly pretentious, or both? It often seems there's an underlying metaphor, but I never can put them together. Example: What's the ending of No Country For Old Men about? Or the ending of True Grit? (Which I just saw and enjoyed. Jeff Bridges is great.)

I've read a few analyses of their movies, but they're generally a sort of crazy-person interpretation, where everything is a metaphor, every name is a weird code, and there's always someone that is standing in for God. While I know there are symbolic movies, I'm reluctant to accept such an elaborate metaphor based only on people's names, for example. I generally don't buy people's "elaborate metaphor" interpretation of stories.