PolishBrothers Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Recently, Eugene posted about Mark and Michael Polish's latest film, the wonderfully titled Manure. The flick, which just went into production, stars Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni, and Kyle MacLachlan, and it's about manure salesmen in heartland America during the '60s. It sounds strange, but sort of irresistible with Billy Bob and Kyle. And now, there's one more.

Variety reports that Ed Helms has picked up a role in the film, which makes him one of a trio of manure salesmen. More specifically, he'll "play Chet, a womanizing manure peddler." That seems ... antithetical. But it's more than just manure and women. David Mullen threw up a blog post about shooting the film on May 23, and gave some more details. The film focuses on these salesmen as they try to compete with "new aggressive modern fertilizer salesmen." Billy Bob is the lead manure salesman, Tea plays a woman who inherits the ailing company, and Kyle is the lead fertilizer salesman.

That's not all -- the Polish brothers plan to have the whole movie done in brown tones, and you can see a really excellent still exemplifying the look in the blog post. History, browns, and manure, here we come!

Mark and Michael Polish may not be as well-known a fraternal filmmaking pair as Joel and Ethan Coen, but they could out-weird the Coens any day of the week. Their films range from virtually inscrutable (Northfork) to very strange (Twin Falls Idaho) to merely offbeat (The Astronaut Farmer), but it's clear they won't be getting hired to direct the sequel to Alvin and the Chipmunks. So instead, they've formed their own production company, Prohibition Films, and are shooting two new projects back-to-back.

The first is entitled Manure, a title they should reconsider if only to make lazy film critics' jobs a little harder. Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni, and my man Kyle MacLachlan, the movie will explore the world of manure salesmen in 1960's heartland America. Upon reading that I frowned for a moment, but then realized that had you asked me who would be most likely to write and direct a movie about manure salesmen in 1960's heartland America, I would unhesitatingly have said the Polish Brothers.

The debate over the difference between mainstream and independent movies has raged for decades. The line has blurred more and more over the years as so-called independent companies began financing multi-million dollar films like The English Patient or Fargo, which were still labeled as "independents." To make things more complicated, what does one call a movie made by an independent filmmaker for a mainstream audience, say Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, Richard Linklater's School of Rock or Spike Lee's Inside Man? I'd argue that we could call it an acceptable compromise between personal vision and entertainment, and a case in which everybody wins.

That's also the case with Michael and Mark Polish's The Astronaut Farmer. It's the fourth film by the identical twins, who write all their screenplays together and appeared together in their debut, Twin Falls Idaho (1999). Subsequently, Michael has established himself as a director, while Mark has taken on acting roles. Their three previous films, which include Jackpot (2001) and Northfork (2003), certainly cannot be classified as "mainstream." A familiar collection of odd, beautiful wanderers and losers populate their frames, from Siamese twins, to a traveling, professional Karaoke singer and a pair of mysterious, black-suited agents charged with evacuating the site of a future lake. This time the hero of their film does not fit in with this crowd and we have the makings of an American hero: a man who launches his own rocket into space.