Fargo excepted, Joel and Ethan Coen have had their greatest popular success with lighthearted, goofy comedies like Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? And that seems to be where they’re headed for their next couple of films. Due in 2004 is their remake of the Alec Guinness/Peter Sellers heist lampoon The Ladykillers, and this month sees the release of Intolerable Cruelty, a 1940s-style screwball comedy starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a shyster lawyer and gold-digging serial divorcée entangled in a web of seduction, love and revenge. It looks like the Coens’ most mainstream film yet. How mainstream? For one thing, the $60 million budget is more than any of their previous films have made. And there’s the full-page ad on the back page of this month’s Glamour. You can be sure that didn’t happen with Barton Fink. We’ve got high hopes for this one, not just as a new work from the Coens, but as a romantic comedy that might make us forget about recent genre junk like Sweet Home Alabama.
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