“Coen brothers go home with 'Serious' tale - Daily Freeman” plus 4 more

Coen brothers go home with 'Serious' tale - Daily Freeman
Demme Documentary on Young at Woodstock Film Fest - ABC News
bloody blast - Tulsa World
Michael Moore has a capital idea - Tulsa World
'Time Traveler's Wife' author refuses to see movie on novel - Aiken Standard

Coen brothers go home with 'Serious' tale - Daily Freeman

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 12:07 AM PDT

Ethan Coen, left, and Joel Coen are photographed at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. (AP photo)

Joel and Ethan Coen took the title of their latest film, "A Serious Man," from the dialogue they created for the characters in their surreal, darkly affectionate look at a Midwest Jewish community.

In one scene, a rabbi giving a eulogy refers to the deceased as a serious man. Later, the Coens' desperate hero calls himself a serious man as he tries to gain an audience with his synagogue's elusive senior rabbi.

The phrase is the brothers' take on the Yiddish word mensch, an upright man, someone of substance and decency.

Would the Coens' qualify as serious men themselves?

"I don't think either of us would," Ethan Coen, 52, said in an interview alongside his 54-year-old brother, an Ulster County resident, at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "A Serious Man" played ahead of its theatrical release today.

"I don't know," Ethan continued. "It's just, you know, the weakness for fart jokes and the like."

People in Hollywood would differ. In their early years, the Coens were taken seriously by critics and the growing cult of fans they gained from such oddball films as the crime stories "Blood Simple" and "Miller's Crossing," the baby-snatching comedy "Raising Arizona" and the dark Hollywood tale "Barton Fink."

The commercial and critical success of their kidnapping-murder story "Fargo," the roots-music romp "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and their Academy Awards champ, the crime thriller "No Country for Old Men," have established the Coens as very serious men, people of consequence, in Hollywood.

Able to do pretty much whatever they like at this point, the Coens chose to explore a familiar setting, a Midwest Jewish community in the late 1960s, a time and place akin to their own Minnesota upbringing.

With a cast dominated by local newcomers and stage actors generally unfamiliar to film audiences, "A Serious Man" tells the story of physics professor Larry Gopnik (the Tony Award-nominated Michael Stuhlbarg) enduring his own trials-of-Job hardships as his home and academic lives unravel. The Coens' parents were college professors, but the characters and events are fictional.

"We knew the Midwest sort of Jewish community setting. Our mother was a very observant Jew, and we knew the academic world from our parents," Joel Coen said. "But the events in the story were made up. Our parents, their relationship and their story didn't have anything to do with this family."

The story is not exactly the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster, even by the standards of the Coens — who followed their directing, writing and best-picture Oscar wins on "No Country for Old Men" with last year's George Clooney-Brad Pitt caper "Burn After Reading."

"We really knew that nobody was going to see this, because it's enough that you're doing a movie about Jews," said Richard Kind, the "Spin City" co-star who is one of the few well-known faces in "A Serious Man," playing Gopnik's freeloading brother.

"And then they say, 'We're going to have no famous people in it. No stars.' It's really just, they're laughing in the face of economics. ... What do you do when you've won an Oscar? When you have power? You do what you want to do."

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Demme Documentary on Young at Woodstock Film Fest - ABC News

Posted: 30 Sep 2009 08:38 AM PDT

Jonathan Demme (DEM'-ee) can't stop making movies about Neil Young.

Three years after releasing the concert documentary "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," the director of "The Silence of the Lambs" is at it again. This time, Demme shot a more off-the-cuff movie titled "Neil Young Trunk Show." It offers an intimate look at the rock star playing in a small hall in Pennsylvania.

"Trunk Show" gets its U.S. premiere during the 10th annual Woodstock Film Festival, which runs Wednesday through Sunday.

The Woodstock festival typically features some music-oriented movies. Another music-related documentary showing at Woodstock this week is "When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors."

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bloody blast - Tulsa World

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 12:21 AM PDT

Z
any, brainy and drop-dead funny, "Zombieland" is a marvel that might be this year's best horror film as well as its best comedy, rolled into one ooey, gooey mess.

For those who can stomach the sick sense of humor and graphic display of undead creatures making human victims look like value-menu choices, "Zombieland" is a bloody good blast. All others: You've been warned, but get over it and go have a good time.

With a camp comedy quotient every bit as high as "Planet Terror" and similar to "Shaun of the Dead" in tone, the picture features dialogue that is witty and performances that are brilliantly realized — two factors rarely seen in the horror genre.

Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland") will no longer be judged an indie film darling, a poor man's Michael Cera. Not after mastering his performance as a phobia-filled hero against all odds that centers the film's comic tone: Imagine a young Woody Allen running scared from zombies.

This is in a world overrun by the undead, in deserted cities and on car-crash-cluttered highways, where almost no humans are left. Columbus (Eisenberg) is an unlikely survivor, motivated by fear.

Like many movie heroes of the past, he is a man who lives by a code. His is hilariously revealed with floating subtitles as he encounters gnarly, slime-drooling guys and ghouls.

"Rule No. 1: Cardio,"

he narrates as he zigs and zags from zombies, outrunning them and eventually figuring out a way to escape. This is preceded by an image of an obese victim-to-be pursued down a football field. He's at the 30, he's at the 20, he's being eaten at the 10.

The curly-headed, slight, boyish Eisenberg has sarcastic chemistry with Woody Harrelson, who as Tallahassee (they figure they won't grow too close if they go by hometown names) bears a gun-toting resemblance to his "Natural Born Killers" character.

But not in personality or catch-phrases ("It's time to nut up or shut up"): This is a tough-guy who's faced personal demons, but who might be temporarily soothed if he could find even one surviving Twinkie. Columbus' Rule No. 18: "Take time to enjoy the little things."

Director Ruben Fleischer and a pair of scripters — all newcomers to major studio releases, with credits in reality TV — stage this terror yukfest (and yuckfest) with a genre-busting freedom, and the script delights until a concluding set piece that has a few holes.

These kinds of films don't usually generate memorable romances, but the connection between Eisenberg's character and Emma Stone (who has a sisterly bond with fellow grifter Abigail Breslin) is both virginal and electric. It's cool.

"Zombieland" is an outrageously entertaining slay ride, with a cast of likable, movie-quoting characters, that makes the zombie apocalypse look something like "Mad Max" meets Looney Tunes.

Michael Smith 581-8479
michael.smith@tulsaworld.

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Michael Moore has a capital idea - Tulsa World

Posted: 02 Oct 2009 12:21 AM PDT

Michael Moore is back, bullhorn in hand, and he's calling for action — from you.

If 1 percent of the population possesses 99 percent of the wealth in this nation, and have earned it on the backs of grunts doing much of the work, Moore is saying, do the math, people: Change is possible. Workers of the world, unite.

To which too many Oklahomans will likely respond, sight unseen: Michael Moore sounds like a socialist. Such simplistic thinking would be a mistake.

The documentary filmmaker's newest manifesto is an energetic advocate of democracy. It is also a grandstanding sideshow with occasional Marxist leanings. "Capitalism: A Love Story" is vintage Moore: It is informative, blustery and entertaining, and he takes on everyone — especially both political parties.

While his look at our financial debacle delivers facts that may be dubious at times, there is an education to be had. While Moore's "Love Story" shows him to be as in love with his own voice as ever — he is the star of the show — the material is no less provocative.

The film is too long in part because some of his broken- system examples are repetitive. But Moore's talking points are always personalized with the American afflicted. Moore's ego never gets in the way of putting a face on tragedy.

Watching a man and his children talk about their wife and mother's death — which left them with huge hospital bills, while her employer (Wal-Mart, among many blue-chip companies that Moore reports

has, in thousands of cases, taken out life insurance policies on their employees without their knowledge) profited from her death — made me mad. I think it will most people.

A mountain of evidence regarding the deregulation of banking industries and corporate takeovers certainly forced me to consider how the idea of capitalism has been manipulated in just a half-century.

A system of free enterprise in which the guy who makes the best widget gains market share seems far removed amid political forces involved at the highest levels of Wall Street.

Or perhaps that's best put in reverse, as Moore points out that the U.S. Treasury Department was, under both Clinton and Bush regimes, led by former executives of since-bailed-out Goldman Sachs. The inclusion of Bill Black (a regulator who helped to expose the 1980s savings and loan scandal) is invaluable in setting the complex scene.

Moore revels in setting up photo-ops (wrapping the Stock Exchange with crime scene tape), and it makes for tiresome scenes we've seen before in "Sicko" and "Bowling for Columbine." These roadblocks have the negative effect of hijacking some points the filmmaker is making with facts alone.

While he delivers a sensory overload of financial details in "Capitalism: A Love Story," he entertains enough to create an economics lecture that will make you clutch your cash rather than put you to sleep.

This is a man who tried to warn General Motors they were making bad financial decisions 20 years ago in "Roger and Me." Don't think Moore isn't going to get the last laugh, on behalf of thousands of laid-off, pensionless employees, at a bankrupt company's expense.

Michael Smith 581-8479
michael.smith@tulsaworld.com

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'Time Traveler's Wife' author refuses to see movie on novel - Aiken Standard

Posted: 01 Oct 2009 05:45 AM PDT

"The advice of everyone who ever had this experience or been near was to just let go. Once you sign on the dotted line, you have no control. ... I decided it would probably be best if I just did that."

The movie stars "Hulk" actor Bana as Henry DeTamble - born with a genetic disorder that causes him to time-travel unpredictably - and Rachel McAdams as his much-suffering artist wife Clare Abshire.

Niffenegger said she was occasionally sent a copy of the script when Gus van Sant was being touted as director - it was eventually directed by Robert Schwentke - and she imagined "The Pianist" star Adrien Brody along with Lauren Ambrose ("Six Feet Under").

She said, however, she originally wrote Henry's character with Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who died in 1918 at the age of 28, in mind.

The book - which Niffenegger said she set out to write as "a beautiful love story with a nihilistic center" - has enjoyed a cult following, sold millions of copies and again tops the New York Times fiction list six years after its release.

Although billed by a divided audience as either romance or science fiction, Niffenegger said her original version was much darker as she never intended Henry and Claire to conceive a child.

"I realized that I was writing something so dark that no one would want to read it; even I didn't want to read it," she said.

"But once I decided they would have a daughter it brought a better balance of light and dark into the book."

"Her Fearful Symmetry," Niffenegger's second novel, is a ghost story in which Highgate - in particular its Victorian cemetery - plays an integral part.

She is presently working on a third novel: Set in Chicago, it's about a 9-year-old girl with hypertrichosis - excessive body hair - and has the working title "The Chinchilla Girl in Exile."