A Serious Man

This is the sort of movie I would have found incredibly profound back when I was eighteen and wanted to appear deep (now I just want to wallow in blow and hookers). This is the Coen Brother's second follow up to the Academy Award Winning No Country for Old Men (O-Ver-Ra-Ted), and while it does better than its immediate predecessor (the dreadful Burn After Reading) it still left me unsatisfied. The film's plot (such that it is) follows a physics professor in the 1950's as his life gets progressively worse - then it ends (the film that is not the character's life). The films biggest problem is that it plays more like a loosely related collection of sketches as opposed to any kind of coherent narrative. This isn't to say it wasn't entertaining, many of the bits are pretty funny and the ending punchline is clever, but the whole exercise ends up feeling self indulgent and a little pointless (which as I alluded to earlier would have greatly impressed me about ten years ago). I could go on and compare A Serious Man to the Coen's previous work (the majority of which I greatly enjoyed), but instead I think the logical comparison is Transformers II. In both films a lot of stuff happens that is only tenuously related, they both made me laugh, and I left them both feeling some level of frustration (granted in the case of Transformers it was frustration with humanity for helping it earn roughly a billion dollars). Thankfully for the Coens, A Serious Man also exhibits aspects that Transformers didn't - namely competent acting, some semblance of a script, and excellent cinematography. So there's that. Like I said before, the film isn't unwatchable, it just ends up feeling empty and makes me wish the creators turned their energy to something a little less myopic (I suggest the Third Twilight Film...or your mom).