Good Is The New Bad – Film Reviews And More

Stupid is as stupid does.

I realize that anything in the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section is like shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes you need to test fire the guns. And on a closer read, it would appear that the New York Times ran this solely to agititate the masses, that’s how dumb an idea this is.

The New Cavemen Lifestyle Has Found a Home in the City – NYTimes.com.

The writer has dug up a small clique of imbeciles who believe they should be eating like our Paleolithic ancestors – gorging on raw meat every 36 hours and eschewing anything involving acutal preparation.

Here’s why this really irks me. They’re just dumb hipsters in their 20′s, so it goes without saying that they’re dumb. And everyone’s allowed to be dumb somewhere. It’s human, and it happens. But the worship of ignorance is something else entirely.

As soon as someone puts a stupid idea on a pedestal and organizes their life around stupidity, it’s time to step in. Take the topic sentence that summarizes the caveman ‘lifestyle’:

Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.

This isn’t a diet involving the basic principles of science, or with any concept of organic chemistry. This is a glib ethos, lifted from Fight Club with some fifth grade social studies theory as justification. Just like people who believe Obama isn’t a citizen or that vaccines cause autism, this is pseudo-science for suckers.

[Read more →]

The New York Times just ran a story about the push to make 3D televisions, and how that’s going to change the whole television and consumer electronics industry.

Television Begins Push Into the 3rd Dimension – NYTimes.com

To this, I say bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. 3D is no closer to being a viable home technology than smell-o-round

Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. … But programmers and technology companies are betting that consumers are almost ready to fall in love with television in the third dimension.

You’ll note that the article doesn’t quote any of the skeptics. Nor does it quote any actual consumers or people who might be willing to pay over $2,000 for the privilege of being a 3D television guinea pig.

In fact, the bulk of the article is little more than a pro-industry press release, cheerleading the greatness of 3D television. Well, I’ve got some advice for you, little buddy… nobody in the near future is going to trade up. Certainly not in the numbers these executives are salivating over.

This is my favorite quote in the whole article:

“I think 90 percent of the males in this country would be dying to watch the Super Bowl and be immersed in it,” said Riddhi Patel, an analyst at the research firm iSuppli.

Nimrod. This guy, like most analysts, doesn’t have a clue. On paper, perhaps, you could find a bunch of dudes who would say that watching football in 3D would be cool. On paper you’ll also find that 90 percent of guys want a Ferrarri and a supermodel. In practice, though, 90 percent of guys also know that Ferrarris and supermodels are way too high maintenance to be worth the cash they’ll have to lay out. [Read more →]

The English language has two known masters of dialogue. William Shakespeare, and the Coen brothers. Adam Bertocci has now bravely combined the two, creating a full length text called “Two Gentlemen Of Lebowski”. His text opens with a softly strumming lute, and the chorus chanting:

In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geoffrey Lebowski called, yet
Not called, excepting by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any other name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebowski, then,
Did call himself ‘the Knave’, a name that I,
Your humble chorus, would not self-apply

You can almost hear Sam Shepard scratching himself in his tights as he reads this. Bertocci is an aspiring writer, and the project began as a string of Facebook updates. Once the clever idea took hold, the project came together surprisingly quickly.

LEBOWSKI
Make me to understand, sir, for you are slow of speech as I of step, and I am unsatisfied in motive. When any rug is micturated upon within these city walls, must I stand accountable? Or are you as one of a thousand rogues, fishing for sixpence betwixt another man’s pursestrings?

The vast majority of the film is incredibly well presented in Shakespearean meter. Bertocci’s translation is meticulously detailed, finding the nuances of a joke in one idiom and expertly representing it in another. The whole piece is hilarious, and like the actual film The Big Lebowski, once you start reading, you just get sucked in, finding one new favorite line after another.

WALTER
On our most holy Sabbath I am sworn
To keep tradition, form and ceremony.
The seventh and the last day rests the Jew;
I labour not, nor ride in chariot,
Nor handle gold, nor even play the cook,
And sure as Providence I do not roll.
Hath not a Jew rights? Hath not a Jew hands,
Organs, bowling-balls, Pomeranians?
If you schedule us, must you not do right?
If we step o’er the line, do we not mark it nought?
The Sabbath; I’ll roll not, God-a-mercy. [Read more →]

So you’re not Jewish, and you’re not from the midwest. You were born after 1970, and you don’t care for Jefferson Airplane. Despite the fact that A Serious Man is constructed almost entirely from those elements, it’s one of the most engaging and thought provoking (in its own oblique way) films of the year. Don’t let the seemingly small scale or odd period-piece nature of the film put you off, this is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking films of the year.

In fact, except for The Hurt Locker, there wasn’t another movie I saw all year that lingered in my thoughts the way A Serious Man did. It’s one part Barton Fink and one part The Big Lebowski, and a wholly original creation. It’s the story of Larry Gopnik – a physics professor and a family man. All his life, he’s tried to be a mensch, and suddenly in middle age, his whole world is falling apart. His tenure is threatened. His wife wants a divorce. His wife’s lover wants Larry to move out. His daughter is stealing money from his wallet. His son is only interested in getting high and watching TV. His neighbor may or may not be trying to seduce him. And one of his students may or may not be bribing him for a better grade.

Larry wants to be a good man, a serious man. Since he’s also a religious man, he turns to a succession of rabbis to help him understand the trials that Hashem (the Hebrew term for G-d) is placing before him.

A Serious Man is the first comedy that’s equally inspired by the biblical Book of Job and the paradox of Schroedinger’s Cat. It’s either the most whimsical movie to ponder the relationship between mankind and the Almighty, or it’s the grimmest comedy ever made. The stroke of genius here is that is it simultaneously both of those things, and neither of them.

The story of Job is an attempt to present the quandry of why bad things happen to good people. It’s a parable meant to help people contemplate the paradox of having faith even when the evidence contradicts it. The thought experiment of Schroedinger’s Cat is even more maddening in its insistence that reality exists in contradictory states all the time. The way the Coen brothers combine the two, a stream of profound, and profoundly unanswerable questions flows forth. Is G-d out there, watching over us? Does he care? Do our good works appease him? Or do they make no difference? For that matter, what is goodness? Is it good to suffer if G-d commands? Or does G-d not even notice?

Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg tries to be A Serious Man

Movies by the Coens usually traffic in some levels of ‘unknowability.’ Some of their strongest detractors always hammer away at the aloof and elusive nature of their films. I had this complaint about No Country For Old Men:

The Coens create perfect but perfectly airless pieces of cinema. They’re unsympathetic, emotionally distant observers disinterested in sharing their inside jokes with the world at large

And that movie won the Oscar for Best Picture.

A Serious Man is a vastly better film. The Coens’ penchant for cryptic, emotionally distant storytelling finds a perfect subject in the unknowable nature of G-d. The film begins with a ten minute prologue set in a turn-of-last-century Polish shtetl. A husband tells his wife about a man he invited over for dinner. The wife replies in horror that the man died months ago, and the husband invited a demon. When the guest arrives, the wife stabs the man and he stumbles out into the snow never to be seen again. Who is the demon? The wife who stabs a man unprovoked, or the mysterious guest? Was he human? Was he a demon?

That’s the perfection of A Serious Man. Like Schroedinger’s Cat, every trial that Larry faces, every oblique event that the filmmakers present is an embodiment of that paradoxical unknown. Is this a test from G-d? Or is this happening at random? It’s surrealism of the mundane.

Don't you want somebody to love?

The funniest scene in the movie follows Larry’s son at his Bar Mitzvah. After the Torah reading, his son – who is stoned out of his gourd – is granted a brief audience with the wizened, senior Rabbi Marshak who rarely speaks. Larry’s son is suffering from ‘stoner’s paranoia’, and Marshak, an impossibly old man, slowly leans forward to present his precious few words of wisdom. In a gravelly voice, he cryptically intones “When the truth is found… to be lies…” (which are the opening lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody To Love”) while sliding a confiscated transistor radio back to the boy.

Larry’s son stares at the Rabbi with slack-jawed incoherence and gratitude. Is this wisdom from ancient Torah scholars? Is the Rabbi into Jefferson Airplane? Is this what all the hype of becoming a man is about? Is this mystically incomprehensible, or just a polite pat on the head? It’s weird, oblique, almost pointlessly unknowable, and so precisely controlled that it’s hysterically funny.

Everything is a question without an answer, and when you question the question, you only get more questions. The rabbis that Larry turns to for help offer little solace. The junior rabbi is useless. Marshak won’t speak to him. And Rabbi Nachtner only increases the paradoxes with a bizarre tale of G-d possibly planting messages in a goy’s teeth. Larry has to angrily deny that he ordered the Santana album “Abraxas” from the Columbia Record Club, but knowing that Abraxas is a Gnostic term for G-d, is Larry denying that he bought a record, or denying the role of G-d in his life? Which is it? Are the filmmakers presenting clues to the existence of G-d? Or just a massive, improbable set of coincidences?

Movies are a medium for concrete answers, they work best in presenting clearly designed, specific truths. Creating a satisfying film where the very heart of it is an impenetrable non-answer is an incredibly difficult proposition. Very few films achieve this – Lynch’s Lost Highway is probably the most notable, and to a lesser extent so does Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

That’s appropriate, because with A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers become the first filmmakers to stake a legitimate claim at being Kubrick’s true heirs. It’s unfortunate that the Coen’s won their Best Picture Oscar for the completely inferior No Country For Old Men because A Serious Man is the high water mark of their career to date.

Maybe if Cameron used a blue crayon, it would be more original.

(EDIT – Weds 1/6: My original rant on Avatar is here. And I wish I could link this pic directly to the creator, instead of this graphic via HuffPo. Still, to whomever Matt Bateman is, kudos!)