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marantzo

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 7:41 am

Guest

Yeah, I just read it.

ehle64

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 9:30 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 7149 Location: NYC; US&A

People throw around the term masterpiece far too often, IMO.

I rented it due to its popularity in here (well, and it's the Coens). I have to say though, that even the trailers for the film turned me off, so we'll see.

marantzo -- the S-Man told me once that they grew up in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, is that St. Louis Park?

billyweeds

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 9:47 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

ehle64 wrote:

People throw around the term masterpiece far too often, IMO.

I hardly ever use the words "masterpiece" or "great." When I do I genuinely mean them. Marc's opinion of A Serious Man is not the first of its kind. Some mainstream critics felt the same way about it, some of them Jews who felt the Coens demonstrated Jew-hating. I think that attitude is ridiculous, but I'm not Jewish.

IMO A Serious Man is the Coens' second-best movie, second only to the incomparable Fargo. It far outstrips the slightly oversold No Country for Old Men, a fine movie in itself.

I repeat. In my opinion A Serious Man is a flat-out masterpiece. Masterpiece. Few movies are masterpieces. But in my opinion "masterpiece" describes A Serious Man.

IMO it's the best movie of 2009.

billyweeds

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 10:09 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

Must add that many people (some of whom I respect a lot) agree with me that A Serious Man is either the best or second-best of the year. It seems to polarize people a bit. That's okay. It's better to polarize than to leave indifferent.

marantzo

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:19 am

Guest

Wade, St. Louis Park is one of them, but there are many wealthy areas, and not a few that are wealthier than St. Louis Park, which is the main enclave of well-to-do Jews.

Billy, there are always certain Jews who see every criticism, satire etc as some form of Jew hating.

There is an old joke that Jews tell that has two friends that meet on the street and one of them, who has a terrible stutter (of course the joke is vocalized), and when his friend asks him where he is going, he says that he is going to an interview for an announcers job. The next day they meet again and his friend asks if he got the job. He replies, "N n n n o o, I I I d d d di d d n't g g g g g g et the j j j o o b. F f f f u u u ck k k ing ant t t t i s s s s sem m m mites!"

whiskeypriest

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 11:44 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 6916 Location: "It's a Dry Heat."

billyweeds wrote:

I repeat. In my opinion A Serious Man is a flat-out masterpiece. Masterpiece. Few movies are masterpieces. But in my opinion "masterpiece" describes A Serious Man.

IMO it's the best movie of 2009.

An opinion I share.

I assume marc had difficulties with the movie other than that it was set in a 1960's Midwestern suburb, but he has not clued us in.

Oh, also it wasn't funny - a serious problem, if you don't find it funny, you won't like it. Personally, the shaggy dog parable that meanders through the middle of the movie is one of the funniest things I've seen in movies in recent years, but everyone has their own tastes.

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billyweeds

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:09 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

whiskeypriest wrote:

billyweeds wrote:

I repeat. In my opinion A Serious Man is a flat-out masterpiece. Masterpiece. Few movies are masterpieces. But in my opinion "masterpiece" describes A Serious Man.

IMO it's the best movie of 2009.

Just to make sure I wasn't delusional the first time around, I have started watching A Serious Man again. Still great, still hilarious, still nerve-destroying. Still magnificently acted by the great Michael Stuhlbarg and his cohorts Fred Melamed and Richard Kind, with terrific assists from Sari Lennick (the wife) and Amy Landecker (the neighbor).

Marc

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:55 pm

Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424

I'd watch A Serious Man again just to see Amy Landecker. She's bewitching.

billyweeds

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:02 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

Marc wrote:

I'd watch A Serious Man again just to see Amy Landecker. She's bewitching.

On that we can definitely agree. She's bewitching and fall-down-funny as well.

lshap

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:47 pm

Site Admin Joined: 12 May 2004 Posts: 4248 Location: Montreal

I missed Marc's review of A Serious Man, but it sounds like I'd agree with it. My problem with A Serious Man is that it's just too unrelentingly depressing. I empathize with loss and hurt and longing and pain - that's the engine of almost every great story - but I DON'T empathize with a lead character who is apparently too dim to take the most elementary step to avoid them.

I feel sorry for the guy who stumbles over the edge of a cliff; I feel contempt for the guy who sees the edge but keeps walking.

billyweeds

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 2:34 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

lshap wrote:

It's weird. I see this movie and the character in a completely different way. To me, Larry is almost an optimist, thinking things are going to work out if you just do the right thing and take certain steps. Hence, for instance, the trips to the rabbis. Hence the attempts to reason with people--his children, his wife, lawyers. Hence his gentle, loving assistance to Arthur (Richard Kind's character). SPOILER (Even if it's only in a dream.) Larry can't help it if he's the modern equivalent of Job. That was a role forced on him by Joel and Ethan Coen. But he deals with it, over and over and over. I love him.

jeremy

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 4:30 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 6794 Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)

Lshap,

It might not make for great cinema, but it is true that some people are possessed by a life-sapping ennui that makes hard for them to change the course of their lives. Not everyone is the captain of their soul.

Marc is passionate about many issues and accordingly given to strong almost Pavlovian reactions. It does not always take much, a hint of complacency or dishonesty or laziness, for him to turn against something.

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lshap

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 5:03 pm

Site Admin Joined: 12 May 2004 Posts: 4248 Location: Montreal

Jer,

Life-sapping ennui is a tasty garnish to a well-rounded character, but I wouldn't want it heaped on my plate as the heavily-sauced main course.

I sat there for 90 minutes wanting to slap Larry Gopnik and tell him to grow up. A well-written, intelligently acted fucking idiot.

marantzo

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 6:34 pm

Guest

Sure, smack the meek Jew. Laughing

gromit

Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 6:44 pm

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9016 Location: Shanghai

No Impact Man is essentially a film about a gimmick that verges on being a sham, as the whole purpose of being a hyper-environmental family for one-year is ... to write a book. So the family will go without toilet paper so that the trees saved can be made into a few of the thousands of books that will be printed about saving trees and living naturally. Uh-huh. And that's really not a cheap shot, as he could have published an e-book, or a subscriber blog instead.

It's an interesting idea, a worthy project, a learning experience for this very urban family --- but it's also environmentalism for dummies. NI Man travels out to an upstate dairy farm to learn great lessons such as 'cows eat the grass, and then give us milk, and produce manure to help more grass grow.' Whoa, ecologically sound milk-machines. When the dairy farmer says that these cows have been here for (cow) generations, our guy is impressed and says "wow!" Very insightful.

The real problem is that this guy starts out with such limited notions of how to lower his ecological impact, and quickly learns there are many people miles ahead of him. And in fact the most interesting person in the film is one Greenwich Village denizen/hippie who farms a tiny plot there and has thought these ideas through.

But it's all a lesson in compromises. It's a one year project, but they enter into things gradually, in stages, to make it easier to adjust to, and no doubt more dramatic for his blog and the film and the book. Electricity gets switched off after 6 months (carefully avoiding chilly winter), yet the camera keeps filming (and they must go through dozens of candles a week). To keep his computer and blog going (publicity is a key part of this project), he uses a donated solar panel. And there's silly stuff liking walking upstairs instead of taking an elevator, though if it has other people and is going up anyway, his use would be none/negligible. There's also questionable behavior such as smashing all the flies that emerge from his compost box. Those dead flies sure look impacted.

Then there's also the fact that all of this hardship the wife feels is conveniently mitigated by spending 8+ hours a day in a modern office with electricity, a/c, etc. Plus she cheats regularly in small ways as well.
And when the wife wants to have a 2nd child (she's 40 and ticking), the hubby doesn't, but neither of them discuss the environmental impact. It's all about lifestyle and care-giving and their feelings, with not one consideration given to probably the worst environmental decision they could make. When she miscarries after a few months, she laments, without a trace of irony, losing the perfect ending for the family's no-impact project and the book/film.

For me, the best part was seeing how over-privileged, over-affluent, whiny New Yorkers live and behave, especially under the mild stress of role-playing living like the bottom 20% of the world's population for a limited period of time. Interesting sociology, or better yet anthropology. I'd almost bet that last year, post-project, I lived a less impactful lifestyle than the writer formerly known as no impact man.

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