The Coen brothers’ latest movie, A Serious Man has been nominated for two awards at the 25th Film Independent Spirit Awards. The nominations for Joel and Ethan Coen in the Best Director category and for the ridiculously awesome, Roger Deakins in the Best Cinematography category. In addition the movie has been awarded their Robert Altman Award which is a special one awarded to just one film’s the director, casting director and its ensemble cast. The award ceremony takes place on Friday March 5th 2010.
The Coens have been successful at the Spirit Awards before. In 1997 Fargo won the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Female Lead (Frances McDormand), Best Male Lead (William H. Macy) and Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins – told you he was awesome!). In 1986 Blood Simple was nominated for Best Picture but was beaten by Martin Scorsese’s After Hours while that movie and Blood Simple shared the gong for Best Director, M. Emmet Walsh also won the Best Male Lead award for his creepy, slimey portrayal of Loren Visser.

The guys over at /Film have dug up the “international trailer” for Zhang Yimou’s Chinese “remake” of the Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple. Possibly titled Amazing Tales: Three Guns or possibly The First Gun. I really don’t know what to say… at all. Here it is;

I have no idea how this can be considered anything to do with Blood Simple but what do I know? Zhang Yimou has said “We have added a lot of things, and changed the whole feeling [of Blood Simple]… we brought in a lot of comedic elements and changed the relationship and personalities of the characters.” Also click the image below to be taken to /Film where they have two more;

Awesome movie blog /Film have posted up a UK update. Within it the writer, Brendon Connelly is giving away an A Serious Man poster signed by Joel and Ethan Coen. What you have to do to be in with a chance of winning it is follow him on Twitter and answer the three questions he will post over the weekend. As the poster below states, the movie is out in the UK on 20th of November. I managed to catch it at the Leeds International Film Festival on Sunday, read my review here.

Last night I travelled the 150 mile round trip to see A Serious Man at the Leeds International Film Festival. The screening was held at the Town Hall and was run by a mobile cinema firm called Reels on Wheels. The room was very large and decadent but, alas, the screen was not and the room was so big that the sound was lost in it to a degree. However, seeing the movie almost two weeks early (and without 40 minutes of adverts and trailers) made any shortcomings quickly disappear.

I don’t want to recount too much of the plot because the review would then inevitably contain spoilers, not to say that my words below do not- you have been warned!

Poor, poor Larry!

The movie centres around Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a university physics proffessor in Minneapolis during 1967 and he’s having a rough time of it. Misery after misery is piled upon him (cruel, cruel Coen brothers). His wife wants a divorce- she’s taken up with a family friend, his son is about to be Bar Mitzvahed but is experimenting with pot and has signed up for the Columbia Record Club under his name, he’s up for tenure at the university which has it’s own stresses, he may or may not be involved in an exam grades blackmail scheme, his brother is in a bit of trouble with the police and to top it all off he’s had a prang in his car.  All of these are factors are mostly beyond his control and form the perfect miserable storm, the result of which is he’s financially doomed, depressed and seeking the meaning of life. Plot wise, that’s pretty much the crux of it. How each trial pans out is where the movie and the humour lies.

First thing’s first A Serious Man is seriously funny. It’s a lot funnier than I was expecting. The Coens do a neat line in black humour but this movie isn’t really all that dark but nor is it goofy. It straddles the line between the out-and-out comedy mayhem of Raising Arizona or Burn After Reading and the should-or-shouldn’t-I-laugh bleakness of, say, Fargo. All of the characters are very Coenesque as are all of the situations. If you’re at all familiar with their oeuvre you will know what to expect in terms of tone. The writing is typically brilliant with some scenes containing hilarious overlapping dialogue and repeated phrases (“Out in a minute”). It is unobtrusively shot, that is there are no flashy camera angles, sweeping vistas or fancy-Dan pans, it’s all pretty conservatively done which allows the characters to come to the forefront.

The movie contains a lot of Yiddish. A lot. But happily it is easy to work out what is meant even if, like me, the words are entirely new to you. Sometimes they are explained to a character on screen (really for us I suspect) and sometimes it’s just very obvious what is meant by the context. Anyway the use of language is absolutely not a barried to enjoying and “getting” the movie. Either way you can see a handy glossary here.

"We're going to be fine."

I do have some comments about the movie which could be seen as short comings. Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind) busily works on a journal he calls “the Mentaculus”. Now my problem with this is that it is never really clear what this is. Two scenes mention the fact that it is a probability map and that Arthur has been successful during card games but beyond that it’s never mentioned. For such a large part of a character’s life it almost seems throw away. Certainly more screen time is spent on the draining of Arthur’s sebacious cyst than on his staggering work of mathematics. He’s a genius with a brilliant mind but this is never pursued.

Much has been said of the opening montage in the Polish shtetl and that it apparenlty makes sense come the end of the movie but I have to say, I am at a loss with this one. It was a funny little scene and I’m glad it’s there but I have no idea what it is there for. I suspect it’s the Coen brothers openly mocking their audience again but perhaps I missed something…

My main bug bear with the movie is the ending. So Larry gets some bad news about his health from his doctor, a tornado is fast approaching and the movie ends. That’s it? Why? What? Am I missing something here? For me the movie went from five stars to four in that one instant. A real shame there was no closure. Did Larry get back with the wife as was hinted at during the Bar Mitzvah? How ill is he? It was like the end of final season of The Sopranos – nothing! Perhaps it had something to do with the movie’s opening quote from Rashi- “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Perhaps we, the audience, are just supposed to accept how the movie ends and move on.

The pefrormances are really very good. There are no genuine stars in the movie but lots of faces you will recognise. Obviously the most recognisable of which is Spin City’s Richard Kind but you will also notice Adam Arkin and George Wyner. I particularly enjoyed the very brief and completely unexpected cameos by Michael Lerner (as Larry’s property lawyer) and Steve Park (as Clive’s father) both of whom make their second appearance in a Coen brothers’ movie and therefore qualify for my Family Tree section. Michael Stuhlbarg is in pretty much every scene and his performance is, as reported everywhere, tremendous. I’ll be very surprised if we don’t see lot of Mr. Stuhlbarg over the coming years. He plays Larry comedically but without overstepping the mark in to farce. You feel for Larry and empathise with the troubles he is facing. He’s put upon but admirably not down, he continues to function in his life. The other stand out is Aaron Wolff, who plays Larry’s son Danny who also knocks his performance out of the park. Two emerging talents to watch no doubt.

Proud parents

I always try to position a new Coen brothers move in amongst the others to see where it fits in my estimations. For me, A Serious Man, is not a masterpiece like Fargo, Miller’s Crossing or The Big Lebowski but nor is it disposible like the underrated Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, it sits somewhere between, perhaps in the top quarter of the table. It is hard writing reviews at the best of times but it is harder still to write them after seeing a film only once which is the case here. The LIFF hand out little scorecards on the way into the movie and collect them on the way out to establish which movie was the best of the festival. I really wanted to give A Serious Man the full five stars but in the end I gave it four primarily due to the unsatisfactory ending. Perhaps it will win anyway- the Coens might have figured this all out with Arthur’s Mentaculus.

5 4 stars

/Film writer and creator Peter Sciretta has reviewed the Coen brothers’ Toronto Film Festival new ‘un, A Serious Man. Sciretta has also put together a video blog with Steve from Collider.com where they both spout very enthusiastically about both A Serious Man and Jason Reitman’s Geroge Clooney starring Up In The Air.

“The Coen brothers’ A Serious Man is very comparable to Alexander Payne’s masterwork Election, which just happens to be one of my favorite films of all time. Both films are brilliant dark comedies about teachers who are trying to do their best, trying to do the right thing, and somewhere along the way, make one small bad decision which spirals out of control into the biggest mess you’ve ever seen.

A Serious Man is set in 1967, and centers on Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) a midwestern professor who is faced with divorce, and all the consequences that may bring to his Jewish family, which includes a son prepping for Bar Mitzvah while evading bullies at school, a daughter, and his crazy gambling brother who keeps getting into more trouble. Larry seeks answers from three local rabbi, none of which are able to give him any advice he believes to be of value. And things only get worse, because they certainly aren’t getting any better.

A Serious Man is my favorite Coen Brothers film produced in the last decade, the exact period of time since Ethan and Joel created the comedy cult classic The Big Lewbowski. It is not only a brilliant dark comedy which will have you laughing out loud, but a masterful character study filled with great performances, of a family in crisis, the moral decisions they face, and the horribly funny consequences that result. The ending will have you talking about the movie well after leaving the theater, which to me is one of the definitions of great cinema.”

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10 – Peter Sciretta

Here’s the somewhat rambling video blog;

TIFF Video Blog: A Serious Man and Up in the Air from /Film on Vimeo.

/Film have posted their short review of A Serious Man and it’s another 9 out of 10. Here’s the review…

A Serious Man is very comparable to Alexander Payne’s masterwork Election, which just happens to be one of my favorite films of all time. Both films are brilliant dark comedies about teachers who are trying to do their best, trying to do the right thing, and somewhere along the way, make one small bad decision which spirals out of control into the biggest mess you’ve ever seen.

A Serious Man is set in 1967, and centers on Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg) a midwestern professor who is faced with divorce, and all the consequences that may bring to his Jewish family, which includes a son prepping for Bar Mitzvah while evading bullies at school, a daughter, and his crazy gambling brother who keeps getting into more trouble. Larry seeks answers from three local rabbi, none of which are able to give him any advice he believes to be of value. And things only get worse, because they certainly aren’t getting any better.

A Serious Man is my favorite Coen Brothers film produced in the last decade, the exact period of time since Ethan and Joel created the comedy cult classic The Big Lewbowski. It is not only a brilliant dark comedy which will have you laughing out loud, but a masterful character study filled with great performances, of a family in crisis, the moral decisions they face, and the horribly funny consequences that result. The ending will have you talking about the movie well after leaving the theater, which to me is one of the definitions of great cinema.

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10