Things get serious quickly for Larry Gopnik in Coen brothers' black comedy
A SERIOUS MAN (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)
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The Coen brothers take their unique brand of dry, black comedy to a whole new level with A SERIOUS MAN. Poor Larry Gopnik (a remarkably even-keeled Michael Stuhlbarg) just keeps getting dumped on: His wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), wants to leave him for, of all people, touchy-feely Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed); his brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), keeps hogging the bathroom so he can drain his cyst; his son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), won’t stop complaining that F-TROOP isn’t coming in clearly and is constantly on the run from the school drug dealer (Jon Kaminsky Jr.); his daughter, Sarah (Jessica McManus), wants to get a nose job; one of his students (David Kang) has bribed him for a passing grade; his possible tenure appears to be in jeopardy; and he gets no help at all from a series of funnier and funnier rabbis. But Larry keeps on keepin’ on in the Jewish suburbs of Minnesota in 1967, trying to make a go of it as his woes pile higher and higher. Joel and Ethan Coen have crafted one of their best tales yet, nailing the look and feel of the era, from Hebrew school to Bar Mitzvah practice, from office jobs to parking lots, from the Columbia Record Club to transistor radios, from television antennas to the naked neighbor next door. The Coens get so many things right, you won’t mind the handful of mistakes in the film, and because it’s the Coens, who’s to say at least some of those errors weren’t intentional? A SERIOUS MAN is a seriously great film, made by a pair of seriously great filmmakers. And while you don’t have to be Jewish and from Minnesota to fall in love with it, it sure can’t hurt.
Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, who played with the zombie genre in their feature-length debut, 2003’s UNDEAD, dig their teeth into vampires in their follow-up, DAYBREAKERS. It’s 2019, and the world has been turned upside down — one infected bat has led to ninety-five percent of the population being vampires, living in a nocturnal society that shuts down during the day. At night, the vamps put on their suits, board the subways, and go to work, getting their blood at coffee shops and acting fairly normal. But with the dwindling supply of human blood — as humanity itself is on the brink of extinction — some vampires are turning into evil, bloodthirsty winged creatures ready to tear apart anything, including themselves, for a shot of the red stuff.
The first half of Corneliu Porumboiu’s POLICE, ADJECTIVE is as dreadfully boring as detective Cristi’s (Dragos Bucur) assignment, tailing a student, Victor (Radu Costin), who enjoys a joint with two of his friends every day after school. While Cristi wants to nail the kid’s supplier, the cop’s boss has him on a tight deadline, insisting he arrest Victor if the investigation continues to go nowhere, but Cristi strongly disagrees with putting the teenager away for up to seven years for a crime he believes will soon be abolished by the government. However, the film picks up considerably as Cristi seeks help from various contacts, getting caught up in red tape and public servants who would really rather not be bothered. And when he gets called in by the chief (Vlad Ivanov from 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, and 2 DAYS) and gets a long lecture in linguistics, well, you won’t be able to control yourself from laughing out loud. Porumboiu (12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST) keeps the pace very slow and very steady, but hang in there, because the end is a riot. POLICE, ADJECTIVE won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, screened at the New York Film Festival and at MoMA as part of the “Contenders, 2009,” series, and is Romania’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award.
