“Barton Fink,” July 2, 2016 (1991), DVD We were both drawn to and a bit weirded out by this darkly comic Hollywood psychodrama about film making in 1941/42 by the Coen Brothers. Coen Brothers regular John Turturro’s Fink is a newly crowned Broadway playwriting phenom prone to spouting platitudes about. and writing about the lives of the masses (Clifford Odetts, anyone?) who gets offered an incredibly lucrative contract in Hollywood where he’s put to writing a wrestling story for the now aged Wallace Beery. Living in a run-down travelers hotel that resembles nothing more inside than the hallway in “The Shining” and has many of the same creepy aspects, he becomes acquainted with his neighbor, an insurance guy brilliantly played by fellow Coen ensemble regular John Goodman. But Barton can’t/won’t listen to his stories, because he already knows the lives of his stereotyped workers. Wracked by writer’s block, his producer, Coen fav Tony Shaloub, tells him to talk to other writers and he turns to a Faulkneresque novelist drunk (John McCarthy) and his assistant/muse/ghost writer (Judy Davis). This is film where bad things happen to good and bad people alike and where, as in all of Hollywood, nothing and no one is/are what they seem. A fun and very weird movie with elements of Fellini and Prestin Sturges (“Sullivan’s Travels”) thrown in for good measure. Anti-Semitism rules just outside the boundaries in the land that Jews helped create. The film scored big at Cannes but bombed at the box office here when it came out. Like I said, we liked it, and it was loads of fun to watch these folks work 25 years ago. Were we ever that young?