You could probably count the number of films that Woody Allen has appeared in where he wasn’t the director. In fact the last time he did so was back in 1991 with Scenes From A Mall with Bette  Midler. (Or 1998, if you want to count his vocal work in the animated Antz.) If we take Allen’s signing on to a project where he won’t be in charge as a positive sign, then we should perhaps start looking forward to actor/director John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo as it is being reported that Allen will be joining the cast of the indie comedy.

According to Variety, Allen and Turturro will be playing best friends who turn to gigoloing as a way to supplement their meager income. Arousing the suspicion of the Hasidic community where they live, the two adopt fake names. Complications arise in which characters to be played by Sharon Stone and Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara will figure.

This is not the first time that the two have worked together. Allen cast Turturro in a small role in his 1986 classic Hannah And Her Sisters. Allen has also contributed one of three one-act plays that will make up Relatively Speaking, Turturro’s Broadway directorial debut set to open next October.

Production is expected to get underway next month.

Barton Fink may be a hodgepodge of genres – a satire on Hollywood, a meditation on the creative process, a noir film, a horror film – but it is undeniably a Coen Brothers film. And quite probably, with apologies to the legions of Big Lebowski fans out there, one of their best.

Barton Fink screens this evening as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival’s “From The Vaults” series.

Flush with the success of his first Broadway play, New Yorker Barton Fink (John Turturro) is lured to Hollywood with the promise of writing for the movies. However, his first assignment is a wrestling picture to star Wallace Beery, a far cry he feels from his desire to write about the experience of the “common man.” Living in a rather run down hotel, Barton meets traveling insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, played by John Goodman, who uses and then subverts his usual genial screen persona here. Struck with some writers block, Barton approaches his producer (Tony Shaloub) for advice, who tells him to talk to another writer. That writer turns out to be William Preston Mayhew (John Mahoney), a novelist who was lured to Hollywood years earlier but who has been reduced to alcoholism and can barely write anymore. But as Barton descends deeper into Hollywood he finds himself becoming more repulsed and detached from his muse.

A critical success that stumbled at the box office, Barton Fink remains one of the Coen Brothers more dense films with explorations of the creative process and the dangers of hubris getting in the way of creativity’s true intent. There are allusions that span from Shakespeare to Hitchcock, from Keats to Goethe to Kafka. There’s the irony of Barton Fink declaring that he wants to create “a new, living theater, of and about and for the common man,” and not realizing that motion pictures are exactly that. And of course, there’s the metatextual element that the screenplay was written by the Coens during a three week break from work on the script for Miller’s Crossing.

Students of Hollywood’s Golden Age while find much that is familiar here. In the 30s, studios looked to Broadway for critically acclaimed writers only to assign them to B pictures. Barton Fink has an earnestness that is modeled off of Clifford Odets while the alcoholic Mayhew is inspired by William Faulkner. Michael Lerner’s studio chief Jack Lipnick is definitely a comedic amalgam of the big three studio chiefs of Hollywood’s Golden Era – Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. But for all its literacy, the film never forgets to engage us in its characters. We feel Barton’s almost confused detachment from the California lifestyle he finds himself immersed in.

Like an onion, Barton Fink has numerous layers and the more you peel away, the more you discover. It is a film that I return to every now and then and almost invariably walk away thinking about something new that I discovered in it.

1. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (Sony/Columbia, 3,074 Theaters, 106 Minutes, Rated R): Usually I cringe when I see the word “remake” in any film description, but it really doesn’t bother me this time. Maybe because enough time has passed between the 1974 version starring Walter Matthau and Martin Balsam and the 1998 TV version starring Edward James Olmos. Or it’s because this cast features Denzel Washington, John Turturro, James Gandolfini, and John Travolta’s mustache.

Yes, if I had to pick one weak spot from the trailers, it would be Travolta. His character in this film seems like a rehash of his one from Face/Off with a goofy hairstyle and mustache. I don’t know if he’s that hammy throughout the movie or, if he is, that his performance will take away from the other actors. But it just rubs me the wrong way.

Anyway, the film is about a kidnapping on a subway car, a ransom demand, and the Transit Authority employee dragged into it.

2. Imagine That (Paramount/Nick Films, 3, 008 Theaters, 107 Minutes, Rated PG): I remember as a kid being made to turn off a Eddie Murphy concert because his routine was inappropriate for someone my age. Now, all he seems to do is kid friendly flicks. Quite the road his career has travelled on, eh?

Murphy plays a financial analyst whose career takes an upturn when his daughter’s imaginary friend starts giving can’t miss stock tips. In the process, he realizes that family is more valuable than money.

This seems like one of those films that tries to appeal to parents and kids yet really appeals to neither. I could be wrong, but judging on Eddie Murphy’s track record, there’s a good chance I’m not.