A Serious Man

A Serious Man (2009)

Well, Dad would have loved this movie. He loved the Book of Job (enough so that a verse from it is on his headstone) and this is a fairly good retelling with a few skirmishes into Jefferson Airplanes and other things. We enjoyed it very much. Here's a few things to think about:

In one Jewish tradition, Job does sin. He is placed in Pharaoh's court prior to the Exodus as an advisor. He remains silent when asked his opinion about killing the Hebrew boys. So all the bad things happen to him because of his sin of silence (he gets everything back anyway). A less accepted tradition is that Job was not one of Pharaoh's advisors and therefore did not sin as he claims in the story. One of the stories says that his wife and children didn't die, that they just got caught up in a windstorm and then blew back at the end.

Look up Schroedinger's Cat in wikipedia. It will help in understanding what the professor is talking about. Think about the idea of knowing the math but not the story in this recent incident I had at school: we were taking a walk with my students. One of my assistants wanted to cut across the grass to make it shorter as she knew the math behind the Pythagorean theorem. My other assistant said it was shorter staying on the sidewalk since he knew the story behind not walking in dog poop.

Also re-listen to all your Jefferson Airplane cassettes or 8-tracks. The lyrics are important clues into Kabbalalistic humor. Also into what one witty reviewer said about Coen Brothers' movies: They're either a parable or a joke. Maybe both.

The opening sequence with the dybbuk is crucial to the rest of the movie. Especially the hilarious response that the Korean father has to the professor. Compare the husband's denial of the dybbuk with the wife's acknowledgement of it. Their differences seem to be the main mystical motif throughout the movie.

The movie credits mention the "last of the just." Look up "Lamed Vovnik" in wikipedia. Also read an incredible book called The Last of the Just by a French author who happens to have the incredible last name of Scharwtz-Bart. Can't get any more incredible a name than that. Unless you leave off the first part.

The No Country for Old Men movie by the same Coen Brothers had a disclaimer at the end of the credits about the movie having a zero (or some other really low number) carbon footprint due to their ability to plant trees somewhere. The Serious Man has a disclaimer about "no Jews having been harmed in the making of this movie." Except the movie was made in the Coen's childhood home around Minneapolis (the grocery store scene was shot in Coopers grocery just two miles from our house). I'm hearing many reports of Jews in the Twin City burbs screaming about how the Coens are just making fun of them. Well, it ain't hard. The scene of the nude neighbor with the mezzuzah on the wrong side of the door is a pretty good joke on the silent assimilation of the Jews of the '60s. Except they got the mezzuzah joke from current events. In the nearby burbs. Maybe the sin of the silence of assimilation is what the Coen's are really getting across  in this really good movie.

The Maiden Heist (2009)

Straight-to-DVD (due to bankruptcy of production company) very beautiful, funny, sweet, well-casted comedy with Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken and William H. Macy. Marcie Gay Harden is wonderful as Walken's wife. I loved the movie. Just a feel-good, laughter, art-inspiring movie.

Very funny joke for people who might be from Denmark. Or maybe it's funnier if you're not from Denmark, like most people. Of course, it helps to understand the joke if you know where the hell Copenhagen is. Took me a few minutes. I think Denmark type people might like the ending setting.
Wait, raise your hand if you are from Denmark.

Murder in the First (1995)

Murder in the First (1995)

Kevin Bacon has a performance well worth watching in a fairly good movie about an Alcatraz prisoner and his experience in solitary confinement. Unfortunately, the movie made us feel very sympathetic to Bacon's character which the movie led us to believe was based on a true story. The true story was almost the opposite of what happens in the movie. It's one thing to reinterpret a story but  manipulating the audience's emotions is another thing.


Knowing (2009)

Nicholas Cage tries to be an astrophysicist. I ain't buying it. The movie, either. Poor. Interesting, though, is that Discover Magazine had an article last year about what might still be around at the end of the world. The author said that what has been around the longest is usually what will survive to the end. He said that numbers and laughter were probably the first things in existence but that laughter probably came first and would probably out-live everything else. I didn't completely understand it but there it is. At least it gave me something to think about while watching this.

District 9 (2009)

Sci-fi meets apartheid in South Africa. Good movie. Intense. Well worth the time. An article said the title is a play on the real District 6 in Johannesburg which is a "vibrant mixed-race community."

Julie (2009)

So-so movie about a whiny blogger (aren't we all). Except she got hers turned into a movie. How in the hell did that happen? I want a movie. Also, I wouldn't mind a reader besides myself.

& Julia (2009)

Great movie about my favorite cook. Look for the OSS connections. I loved watching her on TV although I was always a Joy of Cooking cook on the ships. It was funny to see Irma Rombauer portrayed in this film. She mentions the trouble she had with the index when getting Joy of Cooking published. I became a Moosewood cook after settling in Portland. The first edition didn't have an index which infuriated me. I wrote to Mollie Katzen and complained (actually I whined). She wrote back and said the next edition would have an index. I have all of her cookbooks. Why don't all of us make all the recipes in all her books and blog about it and then watch the movie offers roll in?

Across the Universe (2007)

Wonderfully sweet musical using Beatles songs.


Vals Im Bashir (2008)
 aka "Waltz with Bashir"

Intense, hard to follow, graphic animation film about the writer's experience in the Israeli army during the Lebanon War. Couldn't finish it.

State of Play (2009)

Highly rated suspense film when it came out this year. OK movie. Not too predictable. Not too boring.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

Wow! This is amazing. Paul Muni (yes, you know him from the Yiddish theatre circuit) plays the true story of a man who did escape. The commentary is exceptional. Almost a necessity to watch. Interesting that while the real story was almost more horrific than what is portrayed, Warner Bros. made his wife into a bad woman. It seemed to sell more at the time.

20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang (1933)

One of the special features on the DVD for I Am a Fugitive. Very funny. If you've ever wondered why chain gang uniforms were striped then this will help. Also, Lassie as an alternative to bloodhounds. Along with other breeds.

The Soloist (2009)

The Soloist (2009)

Wonderful movie. Great acting on everyone's part. More than a few people wrote in IMBd identifying themselves as either psychiatrists or as someone with a mental illness and said that Jamie Foxx realy captured the schizophrenic character. The  director said in the commentary that he meant for the film to be viewed as almost a realist drama of the way a person with mental illness interacts with the world. And, of course, Robert Downey, Jr. does a great job being sardonic. Many other fine performances. The IMDb says that many of the people in the Lamp Community scenes were people with mental illnesses who lived there.

There's a scene where the young Nathaniel Ayers sees a burning car roll slowly by his basement bedroom window. This was in his hometown of Cleveland in 1969 (and filmed in Cleveland). Cleveland's Cuyahoga River  catches fire in 1969 so the burning car could have been a result of that or perhaps of the riots that Cleveland had at that time. Or a way to show how Ayers' early life, while having a very loving family, still had a very difficult environment. The scene parallels nicely with the fire in his basement bedroom and with the later scene in the newsroom of the reporter being escorted out of the building due to all the firings and budget cuts which shows both Ayers and Lopez having their own issues. Some of you may know Randy Newman's song Burn On which is about the river burning.

In Lopez's book, he says that Ayers got verbally angry with him but never physically as shown in the movie, but then Lopez is also, in real life, happily married. And Ayers was not a cellist at Julliard but a double bassist which just looks like a big cello to me. Nope, sorry, it must be the cello they used for the Jaws (1975) soundtrack.

In late-breaking news, and of some relatedness to the movie at hand, and of special interest to any reader who knows where Columbia University is, your alert NYT obituary reader caught this one last week:

"Mrs. Hutchins was known for her pragmatism. In 1957 her friend Virginia Apgar, a doctor and amateur violinmaker, began to covet a shelf made of perfect maple. The shelf was in a phone booth in the medical school of Columbia University, where Dr. Apgar taught.

One
night she and Mrs. Hutchins stole into the building with some tools and
a replacement shelf, stained to match. As Dr. Apgar stood guard, Mrs.
Hutchins set to work. To their dismay, the new shelf was a quarter-inch
too long.

Mrs. Hutchins had a saw, and there was a ladies’ room nearby. As The New York Times reported afterward, “a passing nurse stared in astonishment at the sounds coming through the door.”

Dr. Apgar could think quickly. (She had, after all, devised the Apgar score, used worldwide to measure the health of newborns.) “It’s the only time repairmen can work in there,” she said.

Spirited out of the hospital, the shelf made a magnificent viola back."

You can read the entire obit here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/music/09hutchins.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

In more late-breaking news, yesterday was the anniversary of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987.

   The world might be at peace today and living large messianically speaking if it had not been for some schmo in Portland who couldn't follow what was going on while he was sitting in the giant circle in the giant waterfront park in Portland with a whole bunch of convergencers. There was a secret message being whispered around the circle but I (I mean him) couldn't understand what the person next to me (him) said which meant that the next person got a garbled version of the truth. Maybe next time I'll (he'll) get it right.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)

This is one time where I have nothing cute to say. This was one of the saddest movies I've seen in a long time. I haven't cried this hard since Whoopie Goldberg danced with Demi Moore and Patrick Swazye in Ghost (1990). I'm serious. This is a sad movie, but beautiful and funny. It constantly reminds us  throughout the film that WWII is about to begin and that there are only two people in the whole movie who have any idea what had happened just 20 years earlier. The ending was overwhelming especially when I realized that the title really meant she was just living for each day as it came and that particular day happened to be the day England declared war on Germany. It just brought up more emotion than I had felt for a long time. I might have felt a little more emotional since we had just watched The Edge of Love and the scenes of England at war made it all very fresh. England had just been through a terrible war but everybody except two people in the movie acted as if tragedy couldn't happen again. It's obvious who one of those characters is but I would be giving away to much to say who the other one is.

The director is from India (and pronounces his first name "Bart") and says in the commentary that he hoped people would see the drama unfold throughout the movie. He had just finished a TV documentary on the tsunami that hit SE Asia in 2006 and said his own personal experience with tragic loss helped him see what the English might have felt. He changed a detail in the original 1938 book and had the day in question be the day that England declared war in 1939 (although that day was actually a bright sunny day, according to Wikipedia). He also cast a  male character to be of an age that would mean he was probably going to be shipped off to war very soon. He  wanted to show the disregard most other people had for the impending war and the then-current Depression by creating an extravagently elegant apartment, even spending 40,000 dollars on the wallpaper for the bedroom (which got cut up after the filming).

The Edge of Love (2008)

The Edge of Love (2008)

Not an overly bad film about the friendship of the two women who were in love with Dylan Thomas, one of which was married to him. Most of the film is fairly accurate which makes Thomas look like the jerk he tried to be. His line in the movie about why he acts the way he does: "because I'm a poet . . ." He also sucked the life out of everybody else around him. But goodness, his poetry is beautiful. I've had two cassette tapes since I was 16 of him reading his poems.
But the movie really isn't about him. Keira Knightley stars. The screenwriter is her mother. The producer is the granddaughter of her character and either Thomas of her husband. Hard to tell  from how the article phrased it.

The rating is R and somewhere it says partly due to "constant historical smoking." That's an understatement. The extras include a fairly funny "gag reel" which shows the cast trying to act while having to smoke so much. The commentary extra is fairly worthless.

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (2008)
 aka "I've Loved You So Long" -

Kirsten Scott Thomas is great as a just-released-from-prison woman who goes to live with her sister and the sister's family. The ending seems a bit overdone until you realize the prison sentence is about Thomas' response to her actions. In French with subtitles. Her bio quotes her as saying one of the benefits of e-mail and text messaging is that people aren't as afraid of subtitles as they used to be. Oh, she smokes a lot in the movie but then she's lived in France longer than she lived in her native England. The commentary on the deleted scenes is worth watching.

July 5 is the birth anniversary of Cl...

Yesterday was the 233rd  anniversary of the independence of our country. Happy Birthday! Since hitting the Restore button isn't going to work, let's be grateful for what we have and that what we have, even with all the mistakes and bad stuff, is not Iran. Or England. Or the bottom of Brule Lake in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota.

July 5 is the birth anniversary of Clara Zetkin (1857), women's rights advocate who is credited with being the initiator of International Women's Day.

It's also the annual cherry pit spitting contest in our backyard. It would be watermelon spitting but that summer tradition is extinct since seedless watermelons become the dominant life form in the grocery store. Apparently nothing is sacred not even my writing which apparently some people are reading in the bathroom on their IPhone. So if the IPhone drops into the bowl and no one can read the words, is it still a metaphor?

We are also concerned that some people feel that my whining about the rain and wind in the Boundary Waters was a little too much. Let me remind you that this is Minnesota in June which means it was also cold. Ha! How's that for misery?

Seven Pounds (2008)

Will Smith's latest. It's a tearjerker. Woody Harrelson is great. The factual errors are obvious but really doesn't seem to matter that much which is an incredible thing for me to say since I get upset if the wrong camel gets used in a movie.

Whoops! It's late. Time for bed.

More Virgin Spring

More Virgin Spring

My earlier post was a little hasty. Here's the link from Wikipedia for the original 12th or 13th century Swedish ballad which Bergman used for The Virgin Spring. Also, I had said that the foster daughter did not seem to have found redemption. I forgot that she's the first one to drink from the miraculous spring that comes up after the family finds their daughter. The symbolism is almost enough to hit you over the head but, I thought, still very effective as a movie device. It's interesting to read the original story. Bergman didn't write most of the movie version which some reviewers thought made it less of a good film along with the heavy-handed acting by several characters. Still, all in all, a fascinating film to spend an hour and a half with especially for me since I was confused as to who Bergman was and since it was in black and white I thought I was watching a film from 1920. It never occurred to me to wonder how the sound came out of their mouths. There is an option to listen to it in dubbed English which one reviewer made an interesting case for that being preferable to subtitles in every foreign language film.

"Töres dotter i Wänge" ("Töre's daughter in Vänge"), "Per Tyrssons döttrar i Vänge" ("Per Tyrsson's daughters in Vänge"), etc., is a medieval Swedish ballad on which Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is based,^[1].

Oh, I finally decided to actually read a certain sibling's FaceBook page and found out whose birthday is whose. Wow! How clever of me!