The Coen brothers' gritty tale for kids


If you want to watch a Coen brothers movie with your kids, the options make for a pretty brief film festival. "Raising Arizona," with its loopy comic energy and nods to the Road Runner, isn't a bad starting point, though you still might have some explaining to do about the whole kidnapping thing. "The Hudsucker Proxy" has that marvelous, wordless sequence in which we see the hula hoop take flight in children's minds. But that's three minutes out of nearly two hours. "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Maybe. Provided your child digs Greek mythology and bluegrass music.¶It's not like Joel and Ethan Coen lie awake at night worrying about this hole in their filmography. That would signal they actually think about their body of work and the meaning of it all, when, really, once they finish a film, it's on to the next one. Self-analysis after the fact has never been their thing. ¶But when Joel, 56, took Charles Portis' novel "True Grit" off the shelf a few years ago to read aloud with his son, Pedro (now 16), the idea hit him that it'd make for a great movie, yes, and that it was a kind of movie they'd never done before.
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