I have been trying to formulate this into an article myself but I only go as far as making some notes. Vanity Fair has done a much better job than I would have done with a fun article about the chronology of the Coen brothers’ movie output to date and observes that, while they love to trip through time and period, they are yet to make a movie set in the 1970’s. To wit;

1920’s – Miller’s Crossing

1930’s – O Brother, Where Art Thou?

1940’s – Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There

1950’s – The Hudsucker Proxy

1960’s – A Serious Man

1970’s -

1980’s – Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, No Country For Old Men

1990’s – Fargo, The Big Lebowski

2000’s – Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers (even though it feels older), Burn After Reading

Now, obviously some of these movies aren’t period movies at all but contemporary movies set during the time they were made. Interesting none the less.

What historic theme do you think they could tackle to fill this 1970’s-shaped void in their oevre? Watergate? The Beatles breaking up? The founding of Microsoft?

Over at Carter Burwell’s site you can listen to and download two short samples from two of the tracks from A Serious Man’s soundtrack. The first is called The Canal and the second, A Serious Man. He also had this to say about the process of creating the movie’s score;

“The milieu of this film is a Jewish community in the Midwestern United States in the 1960s. Every attempt to incorporate these elements (Judaism, the Midwest, the 60s) into the score was unsuccessful. I ended up using a polyrhythmic harp phrase repeating endlessly against various harmonic variations, but could only throw up my hands when I played it for Joel and Ethan – I liked it but I couldn’t say why.

Something about the relentlessness of this theme seemed right for the helplessness of Larry Gopnik against the unwinding of his life. And when music pointedly ignores the apparent proceedings of a film it implies that there’s something else going on. Something that may be more important than what you see.

The first piece of music written for the film was actually the piece that bridges the the black space between the opening story of the Dybuk and the 1960s Hebrew school of Gopnik’s son. The Coens needed some music against which to edit this transition, which begins in the Old World of the shtetl and travels through an undefined darkness to end in a boy’s ear canal, into which is placed a portable radio earpiece playing Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

In this space I placed wind, cowbells, drums, and then electric guitar and bass. When recording this piece, we used the same models of bass and guitar that the Airplace had used. Still, to be honest, it was difficult to reduce our overall sound quality to that of the original recording. We did our best.”

Enjoy.

Hi all, just a quick note to say that I’ve closed the last poll I ran to see which of the two proposed Coen brothers sequels you, as long time fans, would rather see made. The result is…

Old Fink – 61%

100 Minutes of Jesus – 39%

So some kind of Barton Fink sequel wins! Now it’s back to usual poll now with the addition of A Serious Man as a choice for your favourite Coen brothers’ movie.

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I don’t know about you but Michael Stuhlbarg certainly comes across as a jolly nice chap in all of the interviews he’s been doing to promote A Serious Man. Here’s a nice, long interview he did with Greencine.com where he discusses the casting process and the collaborative nature of a Coen brothers shoot. Read the interview here.

Also, I was delighted to read that he’s going to appear in HBO’s forthcoming Boardwalk Empire which I am looking forward to immensely! (It also features Stephen Graham, I like to see fellow Scousers do well. Good on him!)

Yep, another positive review of A Serious Man, this time by USA Today. It seems to be copy/paste proof so you’ll have to follow the link.

Have any YKFK readers seen it yet? Send in your reviews to and I’ll post them here for fellow fans to read.

One of the stars of A Serious Man, Richard Kind, who plays Larry’s dolt of a brother, has said that initially he wasn’t at all impressed with his part when he read the script. It was only during rehearsals that he realised just how good a part it was. Surely this is a first? Everyone who has ever spoken about a Coen brothers screenplay has done so exclusively in glowing superlatives. From straight.com…

“I didn’t think the role was wonderful when I read it. We did a couple of days of rehearsal, and when I got there I could see how important he was to the movie. When I was doing it I thought it would be larger, but everything I did was in the movie. I could see how layered he is and that the movie is layered, but I never realized it from the script.”

Of his character, he had this to say;

“Arthur believes that all of life’s options have been offered to Larry. But Larry has children and a job and accepts his fate. I don’t think Arthur will have many options in the future and that his sadness will continue. He is not going to get a job that will funnel what he does, and to keep from being bored, he flirts with impropriety. He is just a gentle soul, and that is what he has in common with Larry.”

Well known film critic Kenneth Turan has reviewed A Serious Man and likes it. You can read his written review here at the LA Times and watch a short video review, where he calls the movie “haunting” and warns that it will “stay with you”, below;

IFC.com have a very brief but, unusually for junket-style interviews, VERY INTERESTING interview with Joel and Ethan Coen. The interview took place during the Toronto International Film Festival where A Serious Man had it’s world premiere. It was particularly nice to read that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is still on (or at least that’s how it seems). Enjoy…

Between this film and your upcoming adaptation of Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” you’ve been steeped in Judaica for the past couple years. What sparked the renewed interest?

Joel Coen: “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” was a bit of a coincidence, actually, coming on the heels of this.

Ethan Coen: It just fell into our laps. The producer Scott Rudin had bought the rights to the book and asked us to adapt it, write a screenplay. We just read the book and liked it. But we had already written this, it was before we shot this that we agreed to do the script for that.

As someone who spent some time at a Hebrew school, I know that can be an experience some would never want to revisit.

JC: We have a little perspective on it now because we’ve been away from it for so many years, so it seemed more interesting or funny or exotic or something to revisit now that…

EC: It must be one of those things there are seven stages of…

JC: Of denial…

EC: With flight…

JC: [laughs] Yes, denial, acceptance…

EC: And one of those later stages.

JC: Rage. [laughs]

EC: Nobody goes to Hebrew school and doesn’t feel rage at some point. [laughs]

Was it the right time for this film because you have the perspective for it, or because as filmmakers you have the clout to tell this particular story the way you’d want to tell it?

JC: I think all of those things are part of it. We’re a little older. The clout to make it? That one maybe not, but maybe. We might not have considered it early on just because it would’ve seemed so iffy. On the other hand…

EC: Yeah, you’ve got to be kind of established to have done this movie. It’s really true.

JC: Although “Barton Fink” was pretty weird at the time. But we had already done a number of movies at that point, too. ["A Serious Man"] would’ve been hard to do as a first or second movie, unless you were willing to go much lower budget than we were.

Given your background, it’s easy to infer this is a personal story for you, but now that the final product’s emerged, do you now feel it’s more personal than any of your other work?

JC: Only in the respect that the story is set in a context and a place and a time that we’re very personally connected to because it [was] where we grew up. Going back to Minnesota and making the movie there, trying to recreate that place 30, 40 years ago — that felt differentthan what we’ve done before, but it doesn’t feel that much more personal in other ways.

EC: But that’s not nothing. How the movie looks is a big part of how you feel about it. It does give you something that the other movies don’t have.

If my math is right, Joel’s bar mitzvah would’ve taken place around the same time as Danny Gopnik’s in the film. Was the bar mitzvah in the film any way a recreation, perhaps without being under the influence at the time?

JC: Neither of us were stoned during our bar mitzvah. That was actually a synagogue near where we grew up, the one we shot in, but we weren’t bar mitzvahed there.

EC: We’d been in it, friends had been bar mitzvahed there. It wasn’t our shul.

JC: We were bar mitzvahed in a similar kind of ceremony.

EC: But neither of us were stoned. [laughs] Although maybe it’s just heightened. Your bar mitzvah is weird.

JC: Yeah, it was surreal.

EC: You get up in front of all those people and read the torah. It’s all odd. [laughs]

JC: In our synagogue, there wasn’t a Rabbi Marshak that you went and talked to, but friends of ours went to a synagogue that had a similar kind of ritual. So it’s drawn both from personal experience and what we knew from other people and friends and places.

After making this film, do you feel like it’s more pressure to be a filmmaker or a Jew?

EC: It’s tough being a Jew. [laughs]

JC: Yeah, right now, we’re feeling both.

EC: Bob Hope said to Charlton Heston after he met him on the lot, and [Heston] was bitching about how he’d spend three hours in makeup to be Moses, “Yeah, it’s tough being a Jew.”

Thanks to Lachlan for sending it in.

It just goes to show you that nothing is as it seems. Even a relatively straight forward period piece requires a lot of visual effects jiggery pokery these days. Here’s an article about the work that the VFX house the Coen brothers used for A Serious Man, Luma Pictures. The article contains the below picture of the old Jewish shetl from the movie’s prologue…

Peter Travers Rolling Stone magazine’s movie critic has added his tuppeny worth on A Serious Man giving it 3.5 stars…

“The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are getting personal. They shot their new film in suburban Minnesota, where they grew up as sons of Jewish academics. But if you’re expecting something warm and fuzzy, circa 1967, you don’t know the Coens, and A Serious Man is no country for you. This seriously funny movie, artfully photographed by the great Roger Deakins, is spiritual in nature, barbed in tone, and, oh, yeah, it stings like hell.

Front and center is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor who’s getting shit from every side. Unsigned letters to the dean question his ethics and threaten his tenure. His son, Danny (the excellent Aaron Wolff), days away from his bar mitzvah, is lost in a pot daze. His daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), is obsessed with getting a nose job. His unemployed brother, Arthur (a wonderfully kinky Richard Kind), is crashing on his couch. And his wife, Judith (a pitch-perfect Sari Lennick), is leaving him for slimy, silver-tongued Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), a serious man.

Larry is being tested like Job, with the Coens playing God and lobbing bolts at him, including a Jew-hating neighbor and a nude lady sunbather who stirs his libido. Larry’s divorce lawyer (a deadpan Adam Arkin) warns him to expect the worst. So Larry seeks counsel and comfort from multiple rabbis, who deliver silence or cryptic bromides. Grace Slick, on the radio, gets closer to the point, singing, “When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies/Don’t you want somebody to love.”

Indeed. No doubt the Coens will grin at accusations of stereotyping, self-loathing and box-office suicide. They march to their own mischievous drummer. Larry keeps asking, “Why me?” and stage actor Stuhlbarg, Tony-nominated for The Pillowman, is outstanding at showing the humanity that keeps the question urgent. Larry gets the worst of both worlds, sacred and secular. The film starts with a Yiddish-language prologue, set a century ago in Poland, in which a couple open their door to find a needy neighbor who may be a dybbuk (demon) in disguise. Larry is similarly bedeviled. But that sound you hear in this profane spellbinder is the Coens — chuckling in the dark.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 1st October 2009.

I’m so jealous that it is now out in the US all be it on limited release (whatever that means!) and I have to wait till 20th November!!! Boo hoo! If any of readers of YKFK have seen it and want to send in a review I would gladly post them up here for everyone else to read.