The BBC Radio 4 show, Today, spoke to Joel and Ethan Coen today and you can listen to the nine minute interview here.

The interview is ostensibly about A Serious Man but, as is the norm for the brothers, there is a certain amount of tangent jumping. They, somewhat jokingly, admit to preferring box office success over critical success and Evan Davis, the shows presenter, also speaks to them about changes in the movie industry. Joel suggests that, ”Boom times in the movie business are over.”

Davis rounds off the interview by asking them which was their favourite Coen brothers movie, to which Ethan said, “Boy, err, you know, we don’t watch them once they’re done. God no!” As you would expect they do not actually answer the question

With A Serious Man’s UK release date approaching the reviews keep rolling in. Here’s another 5 star review, this time from well-resepcted movie magazine, Empire. This month’s issue also has a four page interview/article in it which I will try to get up on YKFK soon. Here’s the review…

“Plot
The suburban Midwest, 1967. Larry Gopnik’s (Stuhlbarg) wife wants a divorce. Larry Gopnik’s son owes the school bully $20 for a bag of marijuana. Larry Gopnik’s brother, Albert (Kind), is sleeping on the sofa. And Larry Gopnik? He just wants to know how it all went wrong, and what he can do about it…

Review
The Coen brothers are not serious men. From Blood Simple through to Burn After Reading, their movies have always scudded on a strong current of inky comedy. The results are often marvellous, but there have been slip-ups, where things can turn shrilly screwball. It’s when they’re going for out-and-out laughs that you have to be most wary; you could wind up with The Ladykillers rather than Raising Arizona.

So it’s with much satisfaction we can report that A Serious Man is a suburban dysfunctional-family drama-cum-metaphysical mystery. About the clash between rationalism and superstition (or faith). And Bar Mitzvahs. And academic integrity. And death. And teeth. And the inescapability of fate. And Jefferson Airplane. And, to some extent — how far we’ll probably never know, as the Coens, not being serious men, never answer a question straight — Joel and Ethan themselves.

While it feels as if the Coen DNA could, with enough scrutiny, be eventually extracted from A Serious Man, don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a ‘personal’ movie. Larry Gopnik is not their father. Still, Joel has gone as far as to say A Serious Man is “reminiscent” of things that happened to him and his brother as they grew up in their own Midwestern suburb, and we’d put money on one of the film’s stand-out sequences — in which Danny’s (Aaron Wolff) Bar Mitzvah plays out through the red-eyed kid’s marijuana-glazed POV — being rather more than “reminiscent” for one of the siblings.

Even if not properly ‘personal’, the film does stand out as their most human and easy to relate to, enhanced particularly by its approach to casting: it doesn’t star a single star. (The nearest you’ll get is Spin City’s Richard Kind; no distraction here of an A-lister with a bad hairdo…) The lead actor, Michael Stuhlbarg, has hardly ever played a named character on the big screen. Not that you’d guess. He gives the film valuable warmth and grounds it wonderfully as beset physics professor Larry, evidently creaking under the pressure, but never exploding into cartooniness. In one scene, Larry, still trembling from the shock of a car-prang, answers the phone to discover he’s been unknowingly enrolled in a record club. Stuhlbarg measures his reactions perfectly, shifting from confusion (“Santana’s Abraxus?!”), to frustration, to borderline hysteria (“I’ve just been in a terrible accident!”), but while the steam may build, the gasket doesn’t blow. There are parallels with William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo, although Larry is no weasel, and isn’t heading down a downward spiral of his own making. In short, he’s not stupid and doesn’t deserve his misfortunes — the same as most people who suddenly find themselves going through hell. The question Larry asks is the same that would be on any of our lips: why is this happening to me? The answer, as you’d expect, is not easily found.

A Serious Man had its UK premiere last night at the London Film Festival. Check out the Guardian’s 5 star review which claims that this movie could be their masterpiece…

“The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career.

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.

Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s mid-west America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing.

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coen-ised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk(wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don’t muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons.

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.

His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.

To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a  Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused.

It’s this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.)

The Coens, though, don’t quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there’s something very personal going on here.

It’s not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens’ own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik’s son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It’s  paid wonderful dividends.” - Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, 28th October 2009. *****

I refuse to call it a remake of the 1969 John Wayne movie. Everyone keeps referring to it a “remake” and then, in the next sentence, they say how it’s going to be closer to the source novel. So, to my mind, that makes it an adaptation, does it not?

Anyway, micro-rant over, Joel and Ethan Coen have been discussing their adaptation of True Grit, the Charles Portis novel, over on FirstShowing.net. Firstly Joel confirmed that the casting news from yesterday was correct. He curtly commented;

“Yes. Jeff, Matt and Josh, that’s true — something that you read in the trades that actually turns out to be true!”

With regard to the plot and the differences between the novel and the John Wayne movie version, Ethan had this to say;

“It’s partly a question of point-of-view. The book is entirely in the voice of the 14-year-old girl. That sort of tips the feeling of it over a certain way. I think [the book is] much funnier than the movie was so I think, unfortunately, they lost a lot of humour in both the situations and in her voice. It also ends differently than the movie did. You see the main character — the little girl — 25 years later when she’s an adult.”

“Another way in which it’s a little bit different from the movie — and maybe this is just because of the time the movie was made — is that it’s a lot tougher and more violentthan the movie reflects. Which is part of what’s interesting about it.”

While Joel added;

“I don’t actually remember the movie too well, but I do remember it as being much more of a standard western, and the book is just an oddity. It’s a very odd book.”

So, we can look forward to an unusual, odd Western that will remain funny even though it’s about a 14 year-old girl whose father is killed! Only the Coens could pull that off! After their last “western” novel adaptation, No Country For Old Men, I am really, really looking forward to this and I haven’t even had the pleasure of seeing A Serious Man yet! They’re so prolific of late.

Hi all, I’m a bit slow posting this up (the original article went up on 14th October)- the Onion AV Club has an excellent interview with Joel and Ethan Coen where they discuss A Serious Man.

Not long now till it’s out here in the UK. I can’t wait!

Thanks to Matt and Will for letting me know – sorry I was so slow on this occasion guys. I had read your mails and the article itself but, somehow, it slipped through the cracks.

According to FirstShowing.net both Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are set to join Jeff Bridges in the cast of the Coen’s forthcoming adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, True Grit.

No reader of YKFK will need reminding of Brolin’s cracking performance in No Country For Old Men but Damon would be working with the Coen brothers for the first time, he joins George Clooney and Brad Pitt from the Ocean’s gang in having worked with them. Neither will play the 14 year-old girl who is the focus of both the novel and the movie, Damon is set to play LaBouef, a lawman alongside Bridges’ “Rooster” Cogburn while Brolin, surprisingly I thought, is due to play the murderer.

EDIT: According to the original Variety article the movie is due to go into production in March with a release date somewhere late in2010 with Paramount Pictures. The Coens reteam with producer Scott Rudin who worked with them on No Country For Old Men but interestingly, Steven Spielberg is also producing…

Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest movie, A Serious Man, is up for two awards at this year’s Gotham Independent Film Awards. The movie is up against Katharine Bigelow’s ‘Hurt Locker’, Robert Siegel’s ‘Big Fan’, Cherien Dabris’ ‘Amreeka’ and Sebastian Silver’s ‘The Maid’ for the Best Feature gong. It is also up for the Best Ensemble Performance award. The awards ceremony takes place in New York City on 30th November.

Well you live and learn don’t you! Amy Landecker who plays Larry Gopnik’s naked-sun-bathing next-door neighbour in A Serious Man has provided a very frank and honest appraisal of the trials and tribulations of perfecting a 1960’s-looking lady garden in these times of Brazilian pubic waxes for her naked scenes…

“The first person who called me was the costume designer. And she told me, ‘Stop waxing,’ and I did. It’s kind of like plucking your eyebrows too many times: It’s not going to grow back in. I’ll never have seventies bush.”

“It’s been referred to in the past as a ‘pubic-hair wig,’ which I really take offense to,” she said. “Because if you google my name and you’re my grandparents, you will find ‘Amy Landecker’s pubic wig’ under my name. The correct term, by the way, is merkin. It comes from prostitutes,” Landecker explained. “Prostitutes with syphilis had to shave their pubes, and they would wear fake wigs for both aesthetic and protective purposes. Look it up. It’s in the dictionary.”

Landecker also gave her merkin a name: “Cousin Itt.” She keeps a photo of it on her iPhone. “I put it on, and it was like I had the world’s largest bush,” she said. Her primary fear? That her high-school boyfriend would see it and think, Why doesn’t she clip that thing? Or, As she gets older, is she growing more hair?

Making matters worse was the fact that her directors did little to put her at ease. “I think the Coens are slightly uncomfortable about nudity,” she said. “Joel even told me that on The Big Lebowski, the porn star in that sequence made him more uncomfortable than any of the other actors.”

“I’m very self-conscious about how I look,” Landecker said of the day she actually stripped down and shot her sex scene, “and I walk off, and Joel and Ethan don’t say a word to me, which makes me feel awful. So I said, literally, flat-out to Ethan, ‘So how did I look?’ And he goes, ‘It was very funny.’ It was funny?! That’s like telling your wife she looks ‘fine’ when she’s dressed up for you! You don’t say that to someone you’ve just seen naked!” Landecker says no one on set ever mentioned that scene again.

As for the merkin itself, Landecker is happy to be rid of it. “I mean, I peed on it,” she told us. “I’m not going to take that shit home.”

I now have a new word in my vocabulary- thanks Amy!

Watch a 5 minute interview with Joel and Ethan Coen. Watch them discuss A Serious Man. Observe them put the Lebowski/Jesus spin-off rumours to bed. View them chat openly about their plans for Old Fink- their much-mooted sequel to Barton Fink. See Ethan pick at his fingers.

Hit this link to view the clip (it has no embed options).

The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival has announced shortlists for all four of its awards, two of which are brand new, one of which the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man has been nominated for. In opposition for the newly created award are Wes Anderson’s awesome looking Roald Dahl adaptation “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”, artist Sam Taylor Wood’s debut movie about John Lennon’s life “Nowhere Boy”, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of the heart-breaking Cormac McCarthy (who wrote No Country For Old Men incidentally) novel “The Road”, Robert Connonlly’s “Balibo”, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Micmacs”, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet”, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” and Micheal Haneke’s “The White Ribbon”.

The awards will be, err, awarded on 28th October.