Sarah- We sat down Saturday night to watch Blood Simple. It’s an early Coen brother movie, so I had relatively high expectations – I loved Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but this film proved to be a let down. The basic plot is a man hires a private investigator to kill both his cheating wife and her new lover and things don’t go as planned. My first complaint is that the movie is VERY slow moving (even Aaron admitted to that). As a result I started to get sleepy about 30 minutes into it and at the 45-minute mark I gave up and took a nap. My other issue is that during the portion of the movie I watched, I never became invested in any of the characters. I didn’t care to follow the story because I didn’t care about the fates of any of the players. Overall the movie was totally boring, but my nap was great.

Aaron- First off, the wife misquoted me. The beginning was slow. About a minute before things started to get interesting, Sah tuned out, so she missed the payoff. Anyway, my opinion of the film is quite different from hers. I found that it had an excellent story, very good acting (Frances McDormand is one of my favorites), and just the right sprinkling of dark humor that the Coen brothers are known for. In some ways it’s more pure than their other more recent films. It didn’t have a big budget, with well-known actors, and new cinematic technology. But they were able to beautifully convey what they wanted to with simpler techniques. If you like Coen brothers’ movies, I’d recommend this.
So, if you’re thinking about renting this film, you can consider my opinion, which was in part informed by consciousness, or you can trust a pile of snore.