Oscar Bait 2014--Nebraska and Inside Llewyn Davis

These movies? Are essentially the same movie, with different flavorings.  Perhaps this is why the Coen's movie wasn't given much Oscar love--those spots were already taken by Alexander Payne's version.

• Bitter and difficult male protagonist
• Who has burned relationship bridges
• Begins to be confronted with his own failures
• Now needs to rely on people he has previously burned
• Only one (meaningful) woman in the movie, who is angry and prone to foul language
• Artistic color palette
• Superpower: Grudge holding
• Cares more about non-human items (air compressor and cat, respectively)
• Willful refusal to consider others' feelings--like, at all
• Protagonist gets beat up in an alley, emerges bloodied but unbowed
• Mocks domesticity while living off the efforts and comforts of others
• Unresolved relationships and situation at the end of the movie

The two movies are set some fifty years apart--perhaps there is a grand unifying theory, and Llewyn Davis grew up to be Woody Grant? Not literally, but definitely the same kind of character.

So should you see these movies? Sure--why not? Do you need to see both of them? Well, if you really don't have an extra two hours to see both, you can pick your cinematic flavor--chilly black and white midwestern landscapes that reflect the coldness of the relationships, or desaturated film stock effects backed with depressing folk songs about Tudor era caesarian births.