17. “Intolerable Cruelty” (2003)
After dabbling with “Sullivan’s Travels”-type comedy in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and noir in “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” the Coen brothers explored another classic Hollywood genre with this homage to Hepburn/Tracy-style “battle of the sexes” screwball comedies. Initially meant to just be scripted by them (Ron Howard and Jonathan Demme were attached first), the Coens came on board after their silent war pic “To The White Sea” fell apart. George Clooney returns to the fold to play a hot-shot divorce attorney famous for his signature iron-clad pre-nup, who meets his match in a divorcee played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is out to destroy him after he thwarted her plans to get rich off of her philandering ex. It’s not the disaster some painted it as — there’s still enormous fun to be had in places, particularly thanks to some of the stranger supporting characters. But for the most part, the broadness doesn’t click well with the more traditionally Coen-ish qualities, Clooney and Zeta-Jones never quite gel, and unusually the directors simply can’t seem to wrangle a coherent tone here. Ultimately, while you might have some fun (disappointing Coens is still leaps and bounds above most mainstream entertainment, obviously), it feels like the diet, low-fat substitute rather than the real thing.
16. “Paris, je t’aime” – segment “Tuileries” (2006)
Each section in the fun but ultimately uneven anthology “Paris je t’aime” is named for and set in a different neighborhood (or arrondissement) of Paris. The Coens, of course, chose a subway stop for their arrondissement, and of course, had it star Steve Buscemi as a perplexed tourist trying to navigate the Parisian subway system while trying to avoid getting beat up. (He fails.) The short has an almost giddy energy, and it’s amusing to see the Coens address the fact that they love torturing (and in most cases, killing) their frequent collaborator Buscemi. This is an inessential but still quite funny bit of Coens miscellanea, capturing both some of the zonked-out energy of their earlier work and a winning performance by Buscemi.