Have you seen "A Serious Man"?

Not yet, but I intend to. I’m a big Coen Brothers fan, and I’m from St. Paul, MN. One of my favorite restaurants was taken over by the Coens last summer for about a week, they completely redid it inside to make it look like a 50s style cafe. I went in there after they finished filiming but before they had it remodeled again to make it look modern once again, and it was really cool, I can’t wait to see it just to see the restaurants scenes.

I would suspect one does not need to be Jewish to see it or enjoy it any more than you would need to be Jewish to enjoy Schindler’s List.

No, but this morning I saw a guy who was frowning a lot.

I’m also a big Coen brothers fan but haven’t seen it yet. Not sure if this one will be a top of the list favorite, the critics have been pretty harsh up until now. David Denby of “The New Yorker” said it was “hell to sit through” and “unbearable.”

Then again, most critics hated “Ladykillers” and “Intolerable Cruelty”, but I enjoyed, and still enjoy, them both.

Finally just saw it tonight. It was VERY Jewish, so much of it really felt foreign. And the movie itself was very much a movie without much of a plot, without much action, not a whole lot happened. But I still enjoyed it. Essentially what it was about was a man who thought his life was one thing and found out it wasn’t, and began to search for answers…but ultimately he never finds them. It has a very Zen feel about it, kind of the whole point of the film seemed to be that you take life as it comes. At heart, it’s definitely a period piece, that was set in a very specific time and place within a very specific sub-culture, a culture that really is somewhat hard for a non-Jew to understand certainly. But the film is done in such a way that it’s almost as if there are a lot of things that only Jewish people would catch, a lot of “in” jokes as it were, but even from an outsider’s perspective, one never felt confused as to what was actually happening. Some unfamiliar terminology was used, but it was fairly easy to assess the point through context. And there were some very surreal dream scenes which gave the film a very interesting feel. Overall, if you’re into movies that are more about the destination than the journey, and don’t insist that all (or in this case any) loose ends be tied up in the end, you’ll like it. But if you’re the typical moviegoer it will feel like watching paint dry. I liked it, but I honestly don’t know a single person to whom I could actually recommend this movie.