Bear Flag Blog

A Serious Man - 3/10

It was like slowly poking an icepick into my brain. And then running electricity through it.

There was a real dearth of interesting movies this fall. The miracle of babysitting arrived one Friday, and we wanted to see a film, but nothing exciting was playing. A Serious Man was 87% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and I really enjoyed some Coen Brothers films (Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Barton Fink, although I don't like Fargo), so it seemed like a good bet.

Turned out it was pretty much distilled essence of 'The Winter of my Despondancy', albeit in Yiddish. It was like a black comedy with absolutely nothing funny in it. Bad stuff happens, then more bad stuff, then things take a turn for the worse... yet totally lacking in irony somehow. Like someone telling you at length and in detail about a relative's ultimately fatal bout with Crohn's Disease.

Hell, that might have been preferable to watching this movie. (The retelling, not the disease.)

The film suffered deeply from the fact that almost all of the problems faced by the main character stemmed from the fact that he's an utter doormat. No spine whatsoever. And that makes it really hard to sympathize with him. Impossible, in fact. Nor would he have ever attained the things he had in life - family, job, etc - given how utterly pusillanimous (coupled with clueless) he seems to be in the film.

So I hated it. Top 10 worst films list. Right up there with critic-beloved films The Thin Red Line and There Will Be Blood.

Pirate Radio - 5.5/10

Another choice from a long spell of unattractive films, this time my wife's pick. The premise was, well, very promising.

The film not so much.

It had interesting characters. That's pretty much the high point. The plot barely existed, there were at most minor flareups of conflict, and in the end it was little ado about very little indeed.

What's really bothersome is that the premise - "pirate" ships broadcasting rock n' roll radio to Britain - had so much potential, and damn near none of it was capitalized on. Not only could I have made a better film, I am confident that you could have as well, and almost but not as confident that my four-year-old son could have.

At least it wasn't A Serious Man.