Word: coens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...limited release, A Serious Man got the Job done, with $252,000 in six theaters in New York, L.A. and the Minneapolis suburbs, where the movie is set. How this Jewiest of Coen brothers parables will play in more gentile climes, only God knows. More Than a Game, the inspirational sports drama (is there any other kind?) starring NBA titan LeBron James, was no winner, earning less than the Coen movie in twice as many theaters. The real specialty buzz was for Paranormal Activity, a Blair Witch-y haunted-house thriller that reportedly scared the pants off Steven Spielberg. Paramount...
Intermovie n.--A film within a film, a technique used by directors such as Joel and Ethan Coen...
...feel-good democratization is politically correct, it fails in practice. Populist American optimism tends to cut the legs out from beneath potent terms like “genius”; the harsh truth is that not everyone is capable of producing works of incredible beauty or sublimity. In the Coen brothers’ 1991 movie “Barton Fink,” a studio boss dresses down his star scripter: “You think you’re the only writer who can give me that Barton Fink feeling? I got 20 writers under contract that...
Stay through the end credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man and you'll find the disclaimer: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." That statement is open to dispute, since most of the film's characters are Jewish - residents of suburban Minneapolis in 1967 - and just about all of them, it seems, are out to harm the Coens' hapless hero, college physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), either intentionally or just by ignoring his mostly mute cries for help...
...that the Coen brothers - who were raised in an academic Jewish family in Minneapolis, and were 13 and 10 respectively when the movie takes place - are self or other-hating Jews. But as filmmakers (and Oscar-winners, last year, for No Country for Old Men), they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity...