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A Serious Man

seriousman

When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
Don’t you want somebody to love?
– Jefferson Airplane, ‘Somebody to Love’

So goes the song at the center of A Serious Man, the extraordinary new film by The Coen Brothers, and those lyrics sum up the plight of main character Larry Gopnik quite nicely. Gopnik is a physics professor, a few weeks short of tenure, whose life begins falling apart around him through no fault of his own. A Serious Man traces his attempt to find a way out of the darkness. Anybody familiar with The Coen Brothers’ filmography can guess how that goes.

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Song of the Day #463: ‘Here We Go’ – Jon Brion

punch-drunkIf you can be a huge fan of somebody without owning a single one of his original albums, then that’s exactly what I am when it comes to Jon Brion. Over the years, Brion has put his distinctive stamp on so many things I adore.

As a producer, he has been the guiding force behind some of the best work ever recorded by Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann (not to mention Kanye West and Elliott Smith). And as a composer, he has scored such wonderful films as Magnolia, I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

He also released a solo album called Meaningless in 2001 that I’ve always wanted to own. All the songs I’ve heard from it are great, but it’s difficult to track down. Amazon has a copy on sale for $20 that takes several months to ship… that doesn’t seem right.

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Song of the Day #462: ‘Metamorfose Ambulante’ – Raul Seixas

cityofgodThe end of the first decade of the 21st century is rapidly approaching and I’ve been thinking lately about my list of the best movies of the 00s. This final year has proved to be a stunner already, with Inglousious Basterds, Up , Where the Wild Things Are and A Serious Man in the mix for that decade list and a host of potential candidates left to see.

One thing I know for sure is that Fernando Meirelles’ City of God will show up very high on the list. In the seven years since I first saw it, it hasn’t diminished a bit in my estimation — on the contrary, it’s only grown in stature. I remember waiting months for the film to come out on DVD and then being pleasantly surprised when major Oscar buzz pushed it back into theaters. That was probably the only time I drove 45 minutes to an art theater to see a film for the second time.

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Where the Wild Things Are

wildthingsWhere the Wild Things Are director/co-writer Spike Jonze has said his film is not a childrens’ movie but a movie about childhood. It’s a distinction that sums up what’s wonderful about this adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic book. This isn’t a crowd-pleaser; it’s an art film. But it should connect with anybody who knows a child, or remembers the restless emotional energy that comes with being a child.

Sendak’s book is famously brief, made up of about a dozen pages some of which have no words. In adapting the work, Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers smartly chose not to expand too much on the plot (which boils down to: a boy named Max gets in trouble, is sent to his room, imagines a fantastic journey to an island of scary-friendly “wild things,” then returns to the comforts of home). They have added a big sister who abandons Max for a group of her friends and they have interpreted the lack of a father in the book as a sign that Max’s parents are divorced.

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Song of the Day #461: ‘Lucha de Gigantes’ – Nacha Pop

amoresperrosAlejandro Gonzalez Iñarrítu isn’t really known for the use of music in his films. He’s a modern filmmaker, certainly, but not a modern pop filmmaker in the way Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson are. He’s far more meat and potatoes, even as he explores boundary-pushing narrative techniques.

I read an interview where he was asked how much of a debt his debut film, Amores Perros, owed to Pulp Fiction (both films follow three storylines out of sequence) and Iñarrítu said that, though he’s a fan of Tarantino, he never made the connection… he was too busy trying to steal from William Faulkner.

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