Not as funny as I thought it was going be. The humor was there but on slow boil. No big laugh out loud moments as there were in the much dismissed (by others) Burn After Reading. I have a distain for using a nightmare sequence to interject some illogical humor. There at least three such scenes here. A mostly unknown cast (except for maybe Richard Kind*, Simon Helberg** and Adam Arkin***) and the mostly unknown stage actor, Michael Stuhlbarg, has to carry the film. He wore on me. As his character’s life is falling apart he used maybe two expressions. Weary and exasperated. A Serious Man is also 100% Jewish while trying to be being 100% everyday life. There are stetls, gets, bar mitzvahs, and rabbis galore, which can definitely leave us goys in the dark. There is no way this will be a blockbuster, its delivery and story, won’t be irresistible to the world at large. Burn After Reading, the Coens 2008 comedy, did $60 million. I will wait with interest to see if this year’s effort can top that. [ RT ] [ MC ]
* Many TV roles including 150 episodes of Spin City.
** “Howard Wolowitz” on The Big Bang Theory
*** Many TV roles: Northern Exposure, The West Wing and most recently Life and Sons of Anarchy.
The new Coen Brothers film is one of the movies I am really looking forward to seeing. It opens this weekend. Entertainment Weekly gives A Serious Man an A-.
A Serious Man | Movie Review | Entertainment Weekly
Joel and Ethan Coen aren’t generally accused of making personal films, and they have never dealt explicitly with their Jewish heritage. So A Serious Man, their remarkable new movie, is very much a landmark in the Coen canon. It’s set in 1967 in an amusingly flat and nondescript Midwestern city (very much, the Coens have claimed in interviews, like the Minnesota town in which they grew up), and it’s about a fractious, scrambling, and deeply anxious Jewish family, in particular the perpetually rattled physics-professor father, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), whose life is coming apart at the cheaply tailored seams. He’s a bespectacled, clean-cut Tevye with the shpilkes spilling out of him, only in this case there’s a faulty TV antenna instead of a fiddler on the roof. ● More from: A Serious Man | Movie Review | Entertainment Weekly
Listen to the Coen Brothers talk about their use of the 1967 Jefferson Airplane song in their new movie.
The Coen Brothers and Jefferson Airplane
One song that appears throughout this dark, period comedy is Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.” The two discussed their use of the song in the film and its significance during the Toronto film festival. ● More from: ArtsBeat Blog – NYTimes.com
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