To TRULY discuss the film, I’d need to dive massively into spoilers, and nearly all of the review would in some way deal with the ending. But I’m a good person, I won’t do that. I will say that the film often mentions the idea of parables, the idea that you can tell a story about someone you’ve never met, whose name you don’t even know, who lives through an exceptional circumstance that he learns a great deal from, but this concept can sometimes be difficult to apply to your own life. There’s a whole scene in the film that says just that.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor who, early in the film, uses the parable of Schrödinger’s cat to explain concepts to his students, but he admits that he has no idea what the story of the cat means or really its exact application. It’s an offhand remark, but it goes a long way towards what the Coens are getting at.

I will also say that the Coens have, in my opinion, never made a completely serious film. As much as I despise the age of irony we’ve found ourselves in, the Coens use irony to make their work lighter and deeper at the same time. The films remain essentially unknowable; they keep a distance from their characters that many have tried to label as contempt. Whether or not that’s true (I don’t think it really matters), the result has been a body of work that can be seen many different ways, but is ALWAYS entertaining.

A Serious Man is, in my estimation, their best work since Barton Fink, because it is totally serious and completely dedicated to not giving away anything, remaining totally entertaining and involving while doing so, and perhaps even adding up to their greatest joke yet. Fargo, their 1996 film, opens with a statement that the film is based on a true story, a claim they maintained for some time after its release before admitting that they just tacked it on there, almost on a whim. I’ve always thought this artistic flourish, and the way they’ve explained/dismissed it says more about their body of work than anything else. Whatever they present us is complete fiction, and any application to the real world you try to give it will come up empty. And, somewhere, Joel and Ethan Coen are laughing.

Midway through the film, things are looking pretty bleak, and Larry explains the uncertainty principle to a class full of college kids. According to Wikipedia (I am not a quantum physicist, for what it’s worth), the uncertainty principle “states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known…[it] is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher's ability to measure particular quantities of a system, it is a statement about the nature of the system itself as described by the equations of quantum mechanics.”

What does it all mean? Why does it open with a prologue that has no direct bearing on the rest of the film? You might as well ask what was in Barton’s box. Or where Chigurh went after Ed Tom busted into the motel room. In discussing Barton Fink, Ethan said, “What isn't crystal clear isn't intended to become crystal clear, and it's fine to leave it at that,” to which Joel followed up, “The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.”

Indeed.

Discuss this here.

So it’d be easy to, yes, look back and scorn the powers-that-be for inflicting upon us another summer of nonsense, but that would be to look past the truly awesome Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the only blockbuster all summer that carries a true directorial vision) and The Hangover, for my money the best of the major summer films, near-great films like Up, interesting-but-highly-flawed works like Funny People, and a slew of independent and foreign films ranging from the truly incredible (Summer Hours, The Hurt Locker) to the exceptional (The Girlfriend Experience, Goodbye Solo, The Headless Woman, Humpday, In The Loop, Lorna's Silence) to the pretty good (500 Days of Summer, Moon, Three Monkeys, Paper Heart, Away We Go) to the absolute messes (Cold Souls), all the way to the always interesting reaches for greatness that never quite get there, but you gotta give them credit for trying (Tetro, The Limits of Control, The Man From London).

And of course…Inglourious Basterds, a film so apart from the rest in every way, and one of the most important films of the decade, though too flawed to be one of the best.

Now, when you look at THAT list…this summer turns into something different altogether. It shows that apart from some of the more hyped films, some truly interesting, original voices were heard. So, no, I will not take the easy way out and look back disappointed that Hollywood could not produce an action film worth getting excited about all summer (although we did get Crank: High Voltage earlier this year, so it’s not a total loss), tempting though that may be. I will remain thankful that these voices remain, and are more accessible than ever – I saw The Girlfriend Experience and The Man From London through my cable box. In HD no less! It’s been a damn good summer, just not in the way it often is.

Was it worth it?  Not for fans of art-house movies. But do they even watch summer flicks? "This is exactly the movie fans wanted to see, if not critics," says Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com. "The Michael Bay formula works, especially for this kind of movie. You had the title and the toys for adults, and the action for the kids."

(click here to read the rest)

There you have it. Perhaps the leading figure in box office analysis (which requires about as much talent as being the leading figure in telling time) has announced outright that adults only saw the movie for the title and because they remember the toys. And his phrasing suggests that this is a good thing.

You know...I'm not that old, but I remember, as a kid, dying to see the movies my parents were seeing. Now adults want to see whatever their kids are watching, and not as a way of being involved in their kids' lives. This is where they find their entertainment.

Bill Maher is absolutely right.

Good.

Look, like all guys who got into film in their mid-to-late teens, I love Martin Scorsese. But after The Departed (a fun, pulpy crime flick), the promises of Shutter Island (a fun, pulpy, horror-shock flick), and the announced Frank Sinatra biopic (aside from watching Scorsese's direction, that film couldn't interest me less), I've found the Martin Scorsese of late to be exactly as interesting as the Steven Spielberg of late (Indiana Jones 4, Tintin, the announced Harvey remake). Granted, Spielberg made on of the best films of his career in 2005 with Munich, and Scorsese made one of the best films of his career in 2004 with The Aviator, but unlike Spielberg's, Scorsese's last great film didn't feel nearly as vital as the best of his work.

Vitality is, by its very definition (full of life, full of spirit), often the province of younger filmmakers, and while my knee-jerk reaction is to point to Francis Ford Coppola's last two films, which, as uneven as they may be, are clearly the work of a man who needs to make these films. There's something deep within Coppola screaming to get out. Now, granted, not everyone has this in them, especially after forty years and twenty-one narrative films. Fewer still are given the financing to unleash this. But I find it difficult to believe that Scorsese, one of the most thoughtful, creative, and inspired filmmakers in American history, really has this little left to express.

Especially since his real next film is, by all accounts, Silence, an adaptation of a novel by Shusaku Endo, about the persecution two Jesuit priests face trying to bring the gospel to 17th-century Japan. Also, he's been working on this for over a decade.

This could be the project that reinvigorates Scorsese, or at least our view of him, as Shutter Island's Oscar prospects go from "distant" to "almost impossible" and the film can play as it was meant to (and as The Departed should have) - a one-off, a clever genre film from a man capable of much more.