The Coen Brothers

From Wikipedia
Biographies
Joel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan (born September 21, 1957) grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their parents, Edward and Rena Coen, were professors; their father specializing in economics at the University of Minnesota and their mother in art history at St. Cloud State University.
When they were kids, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super-8 camera. Together, they remade movies they saw on television with a neighborhood kid, Mark Zimering (a.k.a. Zeimers), as the star. Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) became their Zeimers in Zambia, which also featured Ethan as a native with a spear.
Both of the Coen brothers graduated from Simon's Rock Early College (now Simon's Rock College of Bard) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Joel then spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University where he made a 30-minute thesis film called Soundings. The film depicted a woman engaged in sex with her deaf boyfriend while verbally fantasizing about having sex with her boyfriend's best friend, who is listening in the next room. Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, “Two Views of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.”
After graduating from NYU, Joel worked as a production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos. He developed a talent for film editing and met Sam Raimi, who was looking for an assistant editor on his first feature film, The Evil Dead (1981).
Joel has been married to actress Frances McDormand since 1994; they have an adopted baby named Pedro. Ethan is married to film editor Tricia Cooke.
Stylistic devices
Owing a heavy debt to film noir and other film styles of the past, the Coen brothers' films combine dry humor with sharp irony and shocking visuals, most often in moving camera shots. The Coens prefer not to put the opening credits at the very beginning of the film. The Coens are also amongst the few contemporary filmmakers who have shown a great affection for the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, and have incorporated their influences with varying degrees of subtlety, ranging from entire movies in the screwball mode like The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty to occasional fast-talking wacky characters like Steve Buscemi's cameo in Miller's Crossing.
Dialogue
Oscar winners for best screenplay (Fargo), the Coen brothers are known for the dialogue in their films. Sometimes sparse (The Man Who Wasn't There; Fargo) to the unusually loquacious (The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona). Their scripts typically feature a combination of dry wit, exaggerated language, and glaring irony. Besides Fargo, several of their scripts have been nominated for awards (The Man Who Wasn't There, , O Brother...).
Film noir and misunderstanding
In style and substance, Coen brothers movies show a heavy debt to the crime genre of film noir. While rarely admitting any influences, the filmmakers both freely acknowledge the impact that classic noir novelists have had on their darker films. In particular, Miller's Crossing is based on the works of Dashiell Hammett, particularly The Glass Key and Red Harvest, Big Lebowski on Raymond Chandler and The Man Who Wasn't There on James M. Cain - making up what is known as their Noir Trilogy.
The films also feature stark contrast in lighting and the typical theme of people being in over their heads working on a scheme. Their movies often deal with kidnapping. A near universal plot device is misunderstanding: misunderstanding over who killed Rug Daniels and who took his hair causes friction between different mobs in Miller's Crossing; misunderstanding of Norville's blueprint causes him some grief later in The Hudsucker Proxy; The Big Lebowski begins with a soiled rug caused by a case of mistaken identity; and in Blood Simple, misunderstanding is the driving force behind the entire plot past the thirty-minute mark. The Coen brothers' film The Man Who Wasn't There pays homage to film noir, with a plot that seems an update/twist of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film is in black and white and has been lauded by various critics for both its cinematography and its sharply drawn, fairly sympathetic characters, though many critics take issue with the sharp turn in plot towards the end. The Coens have described these twists as an attempt to mimic the unexpected third acts of Cain's novels as well.
Violence
The majority of the Coens' films are quite violent. In every one of their films, there is at least one death and, in many cases, multiple deaths. In The Hudsucker Proxy, the plot is unleashed by the suicide of Waring Hudsucker, and in The Ladykillers all of the main characters die in an attempt to dispose of a body. In some of their more graphic films, e.g., Fargo, most of the main characters die or are assaulted, all of which is portrayed onscreen; in one particularly graphic scene in Fargo, Carl Showalter's body is processed through a wood chipper.
The majority of the violence in their films falls under the category of dark humor. One of the most comic scenes in The Big Lebowski is when Walter, The Dude and Donny fight the Nihilists. The Coens always use violence to drive the plot forward; for example, in Fargo Carl Showalters' assault by Shep Proudfoot drives Carl to call Jerry and tell him to deliver the money.
Overall, acts of violence are never wasted in a Coen brothers' film, and often these scenes are written into the script for comic effect or to advance the script.
(I am not either of the Coen Brothers, or even affiliated with them, just a huge fan of their work, if you are too add this page and comment away!)