Issue 51 ☞ A Coen Film That Is Not Good?
And - Goodbye Vice.com
Last weekend, Drive-Away Dolls, a Lesbian road comedy directed by Ethan Coen and starring Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, bombed at the box office. Coen was once part of a very famous directing duo, the Coen Brothers, with his brother Joel. So synchronised were the pair they were said to answer questions with the same response, even when they weren't together. (They came to be known as “the two-headed director”, according to the critic Charles Bramesco.) But in 2017 the pair parted so that Ethan could concentrate on theatre work. And they have been working separately ever since.
Drive-Away Dolls is not theatre work. According to both critics and audiences, neither is it very good. (It has a 65% Tomatometer score on the review site Rotten Tomatoes. For context, Dune: Part Two currently scores 97%.) This is surprising. Working together, the Coen Brothers, who grew up in Minneapolis and fill their films with a droll humour, are six-time Oscar Winners. Several of their films, including Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men, are considered masterpieces. In 2021, when Joel directed a retelling of Macbeth without Ethan, that too won plaudits.
So what happened to Drive-Away Dolls? In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that Coen “draws you in with the promise of a movie that never materialises.” Though Qualley and Viswanathan are fine comic actors, here they are underdeveloped or underused. Drive-Away Dolls is set in 1999, which happens to be around the time that Coen wrote the script, with his wife, the editor Tricia Cooke. The pair have been fighting to make the film ever since. The problem, according to Richard Brody, is that “Coen doesn’t seem to have much to say about 1999. The result is a mere yarn that, lacking any sense of meaningful retrospect at a quarter century’s distance, remains untethered at either end of its time line and merely goes slack.”
Last week, Vice Media announced plans to shut down vice.com, and to “lay off several hundred of its more than 900 employees,” the New York Times reported, “eliminating staff from its digital publishing division.” The news came from a company memo from CEO Bruce Dixon. “It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon wrote, before adding that he planned to adopt a “studio model”, focus on publishing content across social media, and to distribute longer-form content on bigger platforms.
What a “studio model” actually is was not made clear in the memo. And what partners Vice Media is seeking to work with was also not announced. Vice overcame bankruptcy in 2023, and “the cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colosssus to a husk of its former self.” Still, vice.com was considered in the industry to be stable and safe. And to many, including the several hundred staff members who will be laid off, the news of its closure came as a shock.
Perhaps it shouldn’t have. Vice’s closure is not an isolated case among struggling media companies – the LA Times, Time, and the Washington Post have all lost millions of dollars in the past couple of years – but it is perhaps the most astonishing one, given the organisation was once hailed as the future of the industry. With the rise of new platforms like Tiktok, traditional media are facing rapid contraction. Who’s next?
Trainspotting, the classic British film about drugs and debauchery, starring Ewan McGregor.
This bomber jacket from Loro Piana.
Like Art, which collects American writer Glenn O'Brien's writings from the Artforum column he wrote about advertising from 1984 to 1990.