Lots of great Lost analysis out there.  Click here for EW’s Jeff Jensen’s in-depth write-up of the season 6 premiere.  I’m a big fan of “Doc” Jensen’s weekly Lost write-ups — they’re always insightful and ridiculously detailed.  Click here for Mr. Jensen’s interview with Lost masterminds Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindeloff, and click here for collider.com’s interview with Mr. Lindeloff.  Both contain some tasty morsels of hints about what awaits us in season 6.  (And here’s a great interview with Mr. Jensen himself in which he discusses Lost’s final season.)  On a less serious note, check out this very funny (and also super-detailed) review of the season 6 premiere from bestweekever.tv.  (The graphic of Jacob’s note to the Temple-Others is phenomenal.)  Lastly, this review of the premiere from chud.com is worth your time.  This dude has a Lost re-watch blog that I often checked out while conducting my own Lost re-watch project.  I hope you all enjoyed my extraordinarily lengthy list of the burning questions left hanging after Lost’s first five seasons.  Can’t wait for tonight’s episode!

Click here for a terrific interview with comedian Patton Oswalt.  Click here for the Onion A.V. Club’s interview with Aziz Ansari.  Both are great conversations with two very smart and funny individuals.

Speaking of interviews, for anyone out there who loved A Serious Man as much as I did (read my review here), you MUST read this phenomenal interview with Fred Melamed.  Mr. Melamed is the actor who portrayed Sy Ableman, one of the my favorite new characters that I saw created on screen in 2009.  The interview is a hoot, particularly when Mr. Melamed declares his effort to “bring the pompous, Jewish, overweight, rabbinic figure back to the center of American sexuality.”

Bill Waterson, the amazingly talented creator of Calvin & Hobbes, is well-known for having pretty much disappeared from planet Earth following the end of his beloved comic strip.  He hasn’t granted interviews, he hasn’t appeared at conventions or other gatherings of comic strip artists, and he hasn’t allowed any licensing of his characters.  So die-hard Calvin & Hobbes fans like myself took notice when he agreed to an e-mail conversation with a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Click here for the question-and-answer exchange!

This is very disturbing. Back to the Future Part III is officially ruined for me forever.

That’s all for today!

This, my friends, is how you follow up a Best Picture Oscar win.

After No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers released the wonderfully bizarre Burn After Reading (read my review here). Less than a year later, they have bestowed upon us the even more wonderful (and even more bizarre) new film, A Serious Man.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnik, a mild-mannered Jewish physics professor living in Minnesota. Despite (or perhaps because of?) his seemingly gentle, meek nature, trouble upon trouble piles atop poor Larry’s head, as if he were an American suburban reincarnation of the prophet Job. Larry’s son is constantly getting into trouble in Hebrew school, and seems less interested in preparing for his Bar Mitzvah than he is in watching TV and listening to records. His daughter rushes out of the house whenever she can. His wife has informed him that she is having an affair with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed, creating one of the most stand-out characters I’ve seen on the big screen recently in just a few scenes). Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind, a familiar face from Spin City and Curb Your Enthusiasm), who might be a genius or who might be completely mad but who definitely has problems, has moved into the house with them. Meanwhile, Larry is up for consideration for tenure, but the head of the university board has informed him that someone has started writing them letters that are enormously critical of his teaching abilities. Also, a Korean student failing his class has attempted to bribe him for a passing grade and becomes belligerent when Larry tries to turn down the offer of money.

The Coens (ably assisted by terrific performances across the board from their cast) do a masterful job in creating a slow-burning feeling of powerful dread. It seems clear from the opening frames that things are not going to go well for this Jewish suburban family.  Although this is a very funny film, it is also one that does not shy away from examining the small miseries that can accumulate in a modern life. In addition to the Coens and their actors, credit must also go to the haunting score by Carter Burwell. (There’s a short theme of several notes on a piano that recurs throughout the film that I found to be at once poignant and also evocative of coming doom.)

The narrative is strengthened by the Coens’ care in ensuring that the troubles that beset Larry aren’t over-wrought typical “movie” problems, but more mundane (though no less crushing) sorts.  I particularly appreciated the fact that (small spoiler ahead) a scene that shows us that Larry has engaged in a fling with the gorgeous pot-smoking housewife-next-door didn’t actually happen — it was just a dream.  (Otherwise I’d have felt that I was in The Ice Storm.)

The film is filled with fantastic vignettes that have stayed with me long after the end credits rolled. The “goy’s teeth” story might rival the commode story (from Reservoir Dogs) in terms of mid-movie show-stopping hilarity.

I also loved the opening scene in the shtetl. What a fantastically unusual way to open a movie! It is true that, after the movie ended, I had to spend some time pondering what the heck that sequence had to do with the rest of the film, but I must say that I LOVED that the Coens didn’t feel the need to spoon-feed us those answers.  Plus, I think that if you paid attention to the themes of the film, the connection of that introductory vignette to the rest of the story is fairly clear. (My conclusion: it was an illustration of the “it’s a matter of perspective” differences seen so often in the rest of the film.  To the wife, the elderly visitor is clearly a dybbuk, and to the husband he’s just an old guy. Neither one can find any way to comprehend the other’s point of view.)

As for that ending — boy, I guess the Coens really love ending their films about 15-20 minutes before you expect them to!!  Though this wasn’t quite as much of a fuck-you ending as that of No Country For Old Men (whose sudden ending really sunk what had until then been a phenomenal film for me), but I was equally shocked here when the lights came up.  HOWEVER, while I was startled that the movie was just OVER all of a sudden, I do think that the ending (with both literal and metaphorical tornadoes of further trouble on the way for the Gopniks) did seem fitting for the narrative of the film as a whole (which I did NOT think was the case with No Country.)

I should also mention, if you haven’t figured this out yet, that A Serious Man is an extraordinarily Jewish film. Apparently, the Coens have based much of the story on their own childhoods. To whatever degree that may be, this film is steeped in the experience of growing up Jewish and middle class in suburban America. I mentioned above the Coen’s willingness to avoid spoon-feeding their audience (with a clear explanation of the opening sequence). They similarly demonstrate a brave determination not to over-explain (or, frankly, just to explain even once) most of the Jewish terms and phrases (Hashem, dubbuk, tikkun olam, get, etc. etc.) that pepper the film. I thought this worked wonderfully, as it allowed me to fully enter this world the Coens were creating (or maybe I should say re-creating, from their youth in the ‘60s) without getting bogged down in boring explanatory exposition, though I wonder whether a non-Jewish audience member would have trouble following all of the details.

But speaking for myself, I absolutely adored A Serious Man. It is another triumph from the Coen Brothers, and the type of unique, I’ve-never-seen-a-film-quite-like-it idiosyncratic work that I’m always on the look-out for when I go see a movie. Wonderful. It may not have gotten a very wide release, but do check it out if it’s still playing at a theatre near you.

There are a few writer/directors whose new films, which we seem to get on a pleasingly regular basis, are always a must-see for me.  I’m thinking about talents like Woody Allen, David Mamet, and the Coen Brothers.  With artists like that, I know that a new film will always be interesting.  Sometimes I might love what I see, sometimes I might be disappointed, sometimes I might be indifferent —  but I always know that what I’m watching will be a unique, personal vision.

I’ve been a bit of a late-comer to the films of the Coen Brothers.  Their first film I saw was Fargo, soon after it came out in 1996, but I didn’t quite “get it” back then.  I think it wasn’t until a few years later when I first saw The Hudsucker Proxy on tape in college that I really started to take notice of these filmmakers.  (I just re-watched Hudsucker last week, and it remains one of my absolute favorite films.  More on this below.)

It always seems for me that the Coen Brothers films that everyone likes, I don’t — and the ones that get passed over are the ones I really dig.  Everyone went crazy about O Brother Where Art Thou?, but I found it to be a dull, rather obvious take on the storylines of The Odyssey.  Conversely, I think I’m one of the few people on Earth who really dug the screwball comedy and rat-tat-tat dialogue of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Intolerable Cruelty.  And as for No Country for Old Men, which got such acclaim last year… I was thoroughly engrossed in the film for most of its run-time, but ultimately I felt it just didn’t earn the message given by its title, and Tommy Lee Jones’ monologue in the last scene.  What was it about the death of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) that so affected Sheriff Bell (Tommy lee Jones)?  For a man who had clearly been involved in other cases that involved murder and death, what was it about this particular event that shook the Sheriff so deeply?  The film’s title — No Country for Old Men — and the way the end of the film focuses on Tommy Lee Jones, while we never get to see Llewelyn’s tragic end, indicates that the film was really the Sheriff’s story, not Llewelyn’s.  But I, as a viewer, was invested in Llewelyn!  And having the end of his story cut off by the finale (we never see Llewelyn’s final confrontation with Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh) really pulled me out of my enjoyment of the film.

Which brings me to Burn After Reading, the newest film written and directed by the Coen Brothers.  Disgruntled CIA employee Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) decides to write a memoir, but a disc containing his manuscript winds up in the hands of two rather clue-less gym employees:  Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt).  Not surprisingly, things go badly from there.

The film is marvelous — I was tickled from the first scene straight through to the last.  As the misadventure piles up, we spend some time with an array of bizarre and interesting characters.  All three actors listed above are wonderful, and they’re joined by Tilda Swinton as Cox’s wife Katie, who is having an affair with Treasury agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney, in the sort of delightfully tic-filled performance he seems to consistently give in Coen Brothers films).  

One of the things I most enjoyed about the film (and, indeed, about most Coen Brothers films), is that it can’t easily be labeled.  There are a number of truly funny moments — but also some edge-of-your seat suspense and a few moments of quite horrifying violence.  This is definitely the Coens working in “quirky” mode (in contrast to a film like No Country for Old Men), but that doesn’t mean that the story and the characters don’t have dramatic heft.  Quite the contrary, I found myself getting very involved with the wacky band of loons we follow through this film, and the unfortunate ends that quite a few of them meet left me saddened indeed.  

But what sticks with me about the film is the comedy.  Linda and Chad trying to sell Cox’s memoirs to the Russians, or their hapless attempt to blackmail Cox over the phone.  Harry’s invention.  The car chase.  And I must mention David Rasche and the great J.K. Simons (Spider-Man, Juno) as CIA agents trying to make some sort of sense out of the whole crazy story.

This is definitely a film worth checking out.

Oh!  And I mentioned above that I’d recently re-watched The Hudsucker Proxy.  If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it.  Broke, niave, idealistic Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) finds himself the head of the enormous Hudsucker Industries.  He’s been set up to fail, but one great invention is all Norville needs to turn things around.  It sort-of sounds like the set-up for an Adam Sandler movie (a moron is picked to run a business empire!), but its actually a sweet, loopy farce.  Robbins is great as the endearing Barnes, and Jennifer Jason Leigh gives the performance of her career as the fast-talking no-nonsense reporter gal Amy Archer.  And Paul Newman is compellingly duplicitous as the gravelly-voiced Sidney J. Mussburger, who, as the acting head of the Hudsucker board, is the man who tapped Barnes to head the company.  Newman is absolutely magnetic — when he’s on screen he is a stunningly powerful presence.  I re-watched this film only a few days before he passed away last week, and I was really glad to have had the reminder of his incredible abilities.  There other familiar faces to be found, as well:  Charles Durning (check out imdb to see his looong list of credits) plays company founder Waring Hudsucker, John Mahoney (Martin Crane on Frasier) plays the newspaper chief, and the amazing Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead, and cameos in all three Spider-Man movies) plays Amy’s reporter-partner Smitty.  Everyone seems to be having a lot of fun — and I know I do, every time I watch this.  Give it a try.