HONEY DON'T Review: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke's Neo-Noir Flails, Fumbles, Disappoints

Located in California’s Central Valley, the sun-baked city of Bakersfield has a population of more than 400,000 souls and the metro area more than twice that number. It's also one of California’s — and by extension, the United States — key agricultural and energy hubs.    In writer-director Ethan Coen (Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, Blood Simple) and co-writer Tricia Cooke’s (Drive Away Dolls) second entry in their self-described lesbian trilogy, Honey Don’t, though, Bakersfield exists somewhere between the real world and a fictional iteration, mingling past and present into a 21st century update of mid-20th-century detective noir.   As such, Coen and Cooke’s semi-imaginary “Bakersfield” ostensibly accommodates a population of several dozen people at most, the roads nearly empty, a place and time where modern niceties like cell phones, big-screen...

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