While looking for "Man on the Moon" I ran across a Coen brothers DVD I hadn't seen before (2001), so that came home too. It's a typical Coen plot (if such a thing is possible) where Billy Bob Thornton tries to commit extortion, ends up committing a murder, confesses to it but the police won't believe him. His wife gets charged for the murder and hangs herself in jail. Later Billy Bob gets charged with another murder, one he didn't commit -- but the evidence is rock solid, so he ends up going to the electric chair.
It's a treat seeing a teenaged Scarlet Johannson. Seeing James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) at the very beginning of the Sopranos, looking all lean and healthy. Of course Frances McDormand (who is married to one of the Coens) and Richard Jenkins (the dad from Six Feet Under). It's shot in black & white, in kind of a film noire style but with un-noire Coen touches. Set in 1949 too.
Not a comedy, although the plot twists & turns are meant to be WTF moments.
Billy Bob plays a character "with a very low metabolism" as the Coens say in the extras. Like a reptile without any sun. He moves and says very little -- yet he's the central character. Makes for a movie pacing that is somewhere between "languid" and "lugubrious."
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