Just a quick update to link you all to the first reviews of True Grit…

Peter Debruge from Variety.

Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter.

Devin Feraci from Badassdigest.com.

Erik Davis from Moviefone.

Peter Hammond from Box Office Magazine.

So far it has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes!

The first opinions on True Grit are starting to seep through ahead of today’s embargo lift. Overwhelmingly positive so far…

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers;
True Grit’s a new Coen bros classic. A star is born in Hailee Steinfeld. Damon nails it & Bridges is killer good. The Dude does the Duke proud. Props to the Coens for sticking to True Grit as Charles Portis wrote it. The rich language runs thru the film like a vein of comic gold.

Sasha Stone (whose Twitter page also has a Coen bros theme!);

So @petertravers loved True Grit. I agree with everything he said. Except to also add that I found it surprisingly moving at the end.

Jeffrey Wells;

I was told two things yesterday about True Grit. One, that it’s a surprisingly emotional film (i.e., surprisingly for the Coen brothers, that is). And two, that while Jeff Bridges’s Rooster Cogburn performance is crackling and robust, Matt Damon “almost steals the show”in the Glenn Campbell role, and that he’s suddenly looking like a possible Best Supporting Actor nominee.

HHH;

This film delivers. The air was electric at the screening I attended and people were really taken with it in a big way.. Of course, it’s the Coens and no one had a doubt about it (except Wells, naturally).

@michealcastaldo:

i saw the screening of True Grit last night. another Coen brothers Film. there was a Q&A with Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfeld. A+++++

Sounds as great as I expected! Salivating at the thought of it being “the best western since Unforgiven.” I’m looking forward to the reviews coming through! Please let me know if you spot one!

Original piece from thefilmstage.com here. Thanks to Jospeph for sending it in!

Out in a mere 4 days the Blu-ray release of A Serious Man has received its first (to my knowledge at least) review. Blr-news.com gave it 10/10 for picture quality, saying;

“The level of details is of the highest quality on Blu-ray. Whether it be a close-up or wide shot, everything stands out and looks great. There are many wide shots in particular that are jaw-dropping. Even a grocery store shot from the air captures every little detail, everything pops and everything has dimension.”

The review also confirms the lengths of the three featurettes; ‘Becoming Serious’ is 17:04 long, ‘Creating 1967′ is 13:43 and ‘Hebrew and Yiddish for Goys’ is 2:14. All four are in “HD”.

Check out the full review here.

I can’t wait for mine to arrive!

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

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. *****

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.

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;

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.

Cartuna over at Ain’t It Cool has penned this review after seeing A Serious Man at TIFF…

“The short version:
A ridiculously great movie. Funny as hell. I really loved this one.

The long version:
This is a phenomenal film. Is it too much to ask that it become a big success? Is that at all possible?

Larry Gopnik is comfortable. He doesn’t get a lot of respect from many folks around him, but he’s achieved something and is maintaining it. He’s even up for tenure at the university where he is a professor. So it comes as a great shock to him that not everyone around him is happy with the status quo.

His wife wants a divorce, and has gone so far as to find his replacement (someone for whom she DOES have respect). Someone has been sending letters, urging the university against granting him tenure. He’s forced to move into a divey motel with his mostly useless brother and his sebaceous cyst. Things that seemed stable, are no longer.

And I guess that’s what the movie is about – what does one do, when the illusion of stability is taken away?

Michael Stuhlberg is a total revelation as the put-upon Gopnik. He is absolutely perfectly cast here, and turns in a smart, funny and sensitive performance. He has a silent movie star’s face and needs to be shot in black and white at some point.

The movie itself is screamingly funny at points. If you like the Coen Brothers’ sense of humor, you will revel in this film. They get everything right here. The ‘Tale of the Goy’s Teeth” in particular, is a killer sequence. The audience was in hysterics.

As a goy, myself, there were quite a few moments of jewish ephemera with which I was not particularly familiar, but none of it seemed to be need-to-know. I didn’t feel left behind at any point by some inexplicable practice. I don’t think the niche setting should in any way preclude a niche audience.

If there’s anything that keeps the film from being practically perfect, it is the inclusion of the accursed “all-just-a-dream” sequences. And not just one. Nothing kills the enjoyment of a movie more for me, than suddenly discovering that what I’d just seen was all just pretend. I have no issue with dream sequences – they can give more insight into what a character is going through, and give the filmmakers opportunity for visuals they may not otherwise get away with in the reality of their movie, but when we’re led to believe something is real, and it turns out it ain’t? Fuck that.

So, that brought my overall score down a bit, but in spite of that, I loved this movie unreservedly. I would make a long-term commitment to this movie if I knew it a little better. Maybe after a couple more dates? Who knows?”