New Coen Bros, A Serious Man

The friend who I saw it with hated it too - he said 'I feel like I've seen that shit a thousand times before', which I don't really understand, said it was boring with which I don't agree at all, and took issue with the ending, which I can comprehend at least. I think he was in a bad mood. I enjoyed it quite a lot, found it very immersive in fact.

aside from the usual slapstick nihilism of recent coen, i didn't really get much out of this beside trying to show up sam mendes and all those other goys who specialize in suburban hell movies. ella taylor's article was over the top, but I definitely felt a little queasy with the film's wallowing, though my jewish future-father-in-law from michigan was very "finally, a movie for me" about it.

lol mendes is half-jewish apparently

this is not remotely nihilist.

like you'd notice

Wait -- what does the film wallow in?

I didn't at all get the sense that this particular suburb was hell.

I live five minutes from this suburb, it seems fine

well we know what you think hell is. :)

xp

I grew up in this suburb, and all it is currently missing is a good sit-down delicatessen. Ella Taylor article just struck me as 'does not know what the fuck she's talking about'.

Suzy I think I drove by a sitdown deli yesterday??

forgive the shorthand guys, but I'm just referring to the genre of movies about suburbanites getting thrown through the wringer (mendes, payne, solondz), not that I feel the suburbs are actually hell.

WHAAAAT? A proper Jewish deli a la Lincoln Del (RIP)? Where was this? Are you counting Crossroads on Cedar Lake Road - because that's in Minnetonka/Hopkins/GV DMZ.

The difference with ASM is emphasis: the Villains of Krypton have a thesis they want to prove (lookit what prefab houses and perky wives to sensitive men), whereas ASM makes it clear that the guy's problems could have taken place in West Palm Beach or Brooklyn.

yeah, cuz the guy's problem was apparently, in large part, being Jewish.

I don't think the environment is directly causative of the guy's hell, it just happens to be the setting. (ie, he could just as well be in a shtetl)

xxp yeah

xp yes but not really. This is the film my jobless Irish Catholic ass most related to this year.

Suzy it was fishmans but I just checked and that is technically mpls

i really liked the opening dybbuk scene, the goy's teeth story, the stoned bar mitzvah, and the ending, but i think i disliked it overall cause i hate job stories.

opening dybbuk scene really reminded me of this:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_96uP6vDZMT8/SorEyk_9hzI/AAAAAAAACd8/W021WwNivBk/s400/BLACK+SABBATH3.jpg

I have no problem with Job stories featuring some kind of unternebbish.

LOL the deli's own site (which suggests amazing food) says it's in St. Louis Park - it's the new place that took over one of the Lincoln Del's old sites. But it is so close to being Mpls that it should serve as some kind of border marker.

I think it does, really. it's right where Minnetonka blvd splits off from 7, which I tend to associate with the beginning of slp.

History lesson: Jews were redlined to the suburbs north of 7 when they made the great exodus from North Minneapolis after WWII; south of there (where my family still live) are still many Jewish families but not in the same numbers, because synagogues are not nearby and Edina can be seen from my house.

always thought Edina was WASPy?

Oh god, I miss the Lincoln Del.

is Edina where the MST3K studio was? cuz I been there.

That was Hopkins, I think. Or maybe that's just where their fan club PO box was.

Edina is so WASP, its high school team mascot is a fucking hornet. Also forget living there before 1968 if you were black or Jewish.

Our corner of SLP is all about Excelsior Boulevard.

(the film I would make about Mpls. suburbs could well be a John Justen horrorshow called 'Schmucks versus Cake Eaters' BTW)

In the time period ASM covers, my suburb was still mostly farms, I think.

I was also wondering if this film took place over six days in 1967.

Eric, which was your suburb? If it was Eden Prairie, my dad used to take us to a farm there when I was TINY to play with the horses of a farmer whose name I swear was Crank.

i keep thinking about this movie. the two keys for me are the opening scene -- a (fake?) folk tale, supposedly with a meaning and a lesson but providing neither really -- and the second rabbi's lesson of the goy's teeth -- ditto. who cares?. and that's the structure of the whole movie. more things happen. and then, this, and then, another thing. he has a dream. and then, the doctor calls. how does it end? it doesn't.

in memory, i can hear the second rabbi as the narrator of the whole thing; "his wife says, 'i have begged you'. his daughter asks about the bathroom. larry asks what's going on. nobody answers him." what happens? "who cares? oh, then there was a tornado"

Burnsville

That's where the other Eric on this thread (Eazy) grew up, IIRC.

Didn't realize Eazy was even a MN-ite. I don't follow the hastings thread enough, apparently.

It ends, goole; he and the kids die like the rest of us.

but, he had kids, presumably his kids' kids are the ones on this thread, or any thread, or in the theater, it goes on...

it's about a moment in the past worth commemorating (do you take advantage of the new freedoms?) which presupposes a future where the remembering happens!

ACCEPT THE MYSTERY

this film owned, hard-style.

for the record, I was such a rebel that I'd sit in hebrew school class with an earbud in my ear listening to Pink Floyd and the Doors.

Just got back from this. Could not stop laughing at the bar mitzvah scene. Growing up in Michigan, some parts rang really true like the tornado, the huntings neighbors, and the guy going to escape to Canada by rowing a canoe across a lake.

i really enjoyed this film

I also liked the almost zen parable feeling of the goy's teeth scene - though the person I was with took it as critical of rabbis, it actually reminded me of all the things I like about the Jewish tradition - the kind of shrugging, comic unknowingness of it.

^ This. Was my favourite sequence in the film. I really felt more in line with the haters than the ravers on this one; felt like a movie about how Jews fuck up, in the divine sense. All the mistakes they make, these lazy or venal errors, caring about the forest instead of the trees. And while I think the movie does essentially believe in God, and about some kind of truth out there, and isn't suggesting that the characters are bad or evil, this vision of the world felt ungenerous. The Rabbi's teeth story felt like the only representation of the main element of Judaism that I cling to, now, older and non-practicing - about living well, happily throwing yr arms up at the unknowable (or nonexistent).

Wish I could see this just as a character/setting/historical study, as many here have, but very much felt like a Commentary On Jews As Jews.

what's wrong with that, though?

oh, nothing - like it's not a critique of the film in itself, just an articulation of why i didn't like it. (and also why i didn't like its worldview. which makes me realise: a dislike for a film's ideology often functions as a critique of the film: see common debates over Slumdog Millionaire, Rachel Getting Married (which i loved), etc.)

I really felt more in line with the haters than the ravers on this one; felt like a movie about how Jews fuck up, in the divine sense.

Well, they killed the Saviour.

seang, just look at the parking lot.

Hey, does the Directors Guild have a rule that only brothers can receive dual credit?

Nope. The two directors it took to bring Little Miss Sunshine to the screen were rewarded with one nod.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directors_Guild_of_America_Award_for_Outstanding_Directing_-_Feature_Film

so what was the big deal about rodriguez quitting the DGA so that frank miller could get co-credit for sin city?

Second viewing holds up. lol Rabbi "Scott"

The second viewing really brings out the lols.