"A Serious Man" Sorta Review

F*ck the Coen Brothers. Seriously. F*ck them in their stupid ears. After the obscenely overrated - Best Picture, my ass! - No Country For Old Men, they followed up with the mildly amusing Burn After Reading, but now have completed their journey back up their excretory tracts with the insufferable A Serious Man.

How terrible is this movie?

I turned it off after 20 minutes and the last 7 of those were spent with my girlfriend shouting, "I'm calling Amnesty International and telling them you're waterboarding me!", in the background. (Note: Slight exaggeration.)

With the Academy Award field expanded to 10 Best Picture slots, the outrage isn't that The Blind Side got in, but that the Coens' inheriting of Woody Allen's "Automatic Nomination For Whatever The Bearer Pinches Off In The Previous Calendar Year" card got this steamer nommed over (500) Days of Summer or, heck, All About Steve.

The fact that 87% of Rotten Tomatoes critics praised it indicates herdthink and synchronized chin-stroking at odds with reality are the rule amongst these supposed arbiters of taste. I haven't seen this much wrongness since Tristam Shandy, a horror of a film that was in the mid-90s and that I refused to review for the site I was working for at the time because it was bad enough I had to watch the damn thing once, much less write about it.

The horror...the...horror.......

Score: F*CK THE COEN BROTHERS/10! Go watch Fargo or anything they made before that again.

UPDATE: A reader writes, "A funny review... but you never said what was wrong with the movie."

I didn't go into the plot because after 20 minutes, there was absolutely no hint of what the plot was. As an aspiring screenwriter, the lesson of "always grab the reader in the first 10 pages (if not sooner)" is constantly hammered upon, but when you're reached the Untouchable status of the Coens, it appears the rules don't apply and woe to the viewer who expects anything resembling coherence or the least bit of respect from the filmmakers as they jerk off self-indulgently.

Here's what I made it through:

• The cold opener has an apparently Polish Jewish couple in an indeterminate time (perhaps late 19th Century) being visited by an old man who may or may not be a zombie.
• We then cut to a teenager in Hebrew school listening to a transistor radio in class. The teacher confiscates it and the kid has to go to the principal's office. He had money stashed in the case and it's lost.
• The kid's father is a teacher or professor and a Chinese student comes to his office to complain about failing a test and leaves an envelope full of money.
• We get to the family home and a daughter is complaining about an uncle hogging up the bathroom and her mother tells her (and us) that he needs to drain his sebaceous cyst.
• Dad gets home and complains about his neighbor mowing part of his yard.

20 minutes. (I timed it.) A third of an hour of oddball Hebrew piffle that comes off as the Coens having a joke at everyone's expense. The reviews called it a "black comedy" but for that to be true would require something resembling , oh you know, HUMOR, and there isn't anything but lame weirdness. (The War of the Roses; now that's a black comedy.) Imagine the most self-indulgent navel-gazing moments of David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch and then multiply them by a factor of suck and you're approaching the teeth-gnashing awfulness of this movie.

We tried, we really did try to watch it. It's just that bad and it's not like I'm getting paid to suffer it. I wonder if the critics are praising it in order to lure unsuspecting chumps in to suffer too?