Now Streaming in Austin: Blood Simple

Getting dirty with Blood Simple: Join us for a live tweet of the Coen Brothers' Austin-made noir tonight.

Welcome to Now Streaming in Austin, highlighting locally made titles to watch while self-quarantining.
You want to solve a crime, you go to the crime scene. You want to know where the Coen brothers came from, you go back to Blood Simple, and the trail leads to Austin.

Yup, in 1982 two first-time directors from suburban Minneapolis shot their debut movie right here in Austin. Seems that the elder brother, Joel, had signed up for the grad film program at UT-Austin three years earlier but quit (word on the street is there was a bad marriage, and broken hearts can change a man's mind quick). But they came back to the Lone Star State for a story of murder, betrayal, adultery, mistaken identity, and (you guessed it) blood.

This sinister homage to the king of dusty noir, Dashiell Hammett, wasn't just a major movie in Austin's cinematic history, and the four-fisted intro the Coens and their Oscar-nominated (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Barton Fink) and Oscar-winning (Fargo, No Country for Old Men) career. It also launched the careers of long-time Coen collaborators Frances McDormand and composer Carter Burwell, plus it features an all-time banger of a performance from M. Emmet Walsh as corrupt gumshoe Loren Visser.

So, since Thursday night is live tweet night around here, we'll be watching this crime classic tonight and we'd love you to join in. Just follow our screens editor, Richard Whittaker, on Twitter @YorkshireTX, and join in the tweetstorm using the hashtags #NowStreamingInAustin and #BloodSimple.

See you tonight at 8pm (but not if we see you first)!

Blood Simple

• Amazon Prime (Link)
• Hulu (Link)
• iTunes (Link)
• Vudu (Link)
• YouTube (Link)