Publisher's Synopsis
Box set of the complete works of Joel and Ethan Coen from 1984 to 2004, featuring eleven films in total. 'Blood Simple' (1984), their debut feature, is a knowing homage to 1940s film noir, a genre the brothers have subsequently revisited in some of their later works. 'Raising Arizona' (1987), was the first of the Coens' screwball comedies in which an odd couple (Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter) are desperate for a child but are both infertile, so they kidnap one of the famous Arizona quintuplets, believing that one wouldn't be missed. 'Miller's Crossing' (1990) is a Hammett-esque take on the gangster movie genre. In 'Barton Fink' (1991) the intellectual young playwright Barton Fink (Turturro) goes to Hollywood. He immediately obtains a contract, only to develop writer's block when he discovers he is to write a wrestling movie for faded star Wallace Beery. Screwball comedy, 'The Hudsucker Proxy' (1994) follows the unlikely adventures of Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a college graduate who secures a job in the postroom at Hudsucker Industries just as its chairman is jumping 50 floors to his death. In the grisly black comedy 'Fargo' (1996), Minnesota car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), deeply in debt, arranges for the kidnapping of his wife (Kristin Rudrud) in order to obtain a sizeable ransom from her father (Harve Presnell), to pay off both his henchmen (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) and his debts. However, all does not go according to plan. 'The Big Lebowski' (1997) is a typically bizarre mix of mistaken identity, hippy philosophy and ten-pin bowling that tips its hat to other great LA films. 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' (2000), very loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, sets the action in 1930s Mississippi, where three clueless convicts escape a chain gang and go in search of buried treasure. In 'The Man Who Wasn't There' (2001), the Coens' most obvious tribute to the noir genre, Billy Bob Thornton plays mild-mannered barber Ed Crane who suspects that his wife Doris (McDormand) is having an affair with her boss, department store manager Dave Nirdlinger (James Gandolfini). 'Intolerable Cruelty' (2003) sees George Clooney as Miles Massey, a divorce lawyer who always wins his case until he comes head to head with the scheming, money-grabbing, yet alluring, Mrs Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Finally, 'The Ladykillers' (2004) is a remake of the 1955 Ealing comedy classic, displaced from the English suburbs of the original to the American 'Bible Belt' and starring Tom Hanks.
