Most Underrated film of the 2000s

>>79851547
Was it "thrown away?" I always see people naming this as one of the best films the Coens ever did, and I agree. /tv/ likes it, at the very least.

Yes, everything is about the Jews. Here's a cookie.

I like it to not seem like a pleb for liking No Country for Old Action Flick

>>79851547

He was liked...

But not well-liked

>>79851636
there are some on here who rank it and Barton Fink as their best, but it seems like those who don't end up ranking it as one of their worst.
Plus I just never hear it mentioned as one of those great movies, which I think it is

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>>79851547
>>79851636
Please. Accept the mystery.

>>79851666
...it's literally about Judaism.

Too subtle for most people

there are jewish letters in place of regular letters on the chalkboard behind him

>>79851547
On the goy's teeth, why didn't the dentist just ask the patient directly? "Hey, what's up with the carvings in your teeth?" That simple, 10 seconds top, no restless nights. What does that say about the rest of the movie? Stop trying to figure shit out by yourself and just ask? Isn't that what he was doing with the rabis in the first place?

>inb4 muh nihilism

>>79851547
Burn After Reading
Syriana
Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind
Michael Clayton
Good Night, And Good Luck
The Ides Of March

I know Ides is 2010 but goddamn that movie flew under everybody's radar.

>>79851869
Here is another cookie.

>RT 89% with a 7.9 average
>79 metacritic

>underrated

Fucking hell, does NOBODY understand what underrated means? It means it's be rated or valued at less than it actually is. It doesn't mean its obscure, overlooked, unknown, "thrown away" or forgotten

Please explain this movie to me

>>79851910
probably a jewish thing, he can't fraternize with the goy

>>79852077
This is defamation!

>>79852084
Accept the mystery.

>>79851547
>a movie about jewish neurosis

boring

>>>>79851910
Because the Jews in the film obviously don't like goys

"What happened to the goy?"
"Who cares"

The deeper meaning he was looking for wouldn't have been found from the goy.

>>79851910
Jew here. The Old Testament is full of dumb shit like that where big grandiose enigmas and issues could've been solved very quickly and simply if the characters just treated each other like real people. But they didn't, because they're not. It's just a story

Look at the parking lot.

blue balls: the movie

>haha random things happen and there's no explanation how novel
literally adventure time tier

>>79852224
So is the film about a real person stuck in a fictional world?

>>79852224
I'll take your word for it, if that's true it gives the film a lot more meaning than I thought.

>>79852224
Can you provide an example from the old testament? Or are you just talking out your ass?

>>79852084
Man believes that if he follows God's rules of being a "good man," he will be rewarded with a good life. He always does his best to be selfless, to put others first. They take full advantage.

He notices that the other people in his life don't seem to care about following God's rules, they take what they want and try to build a good life in their own way, and yet despite their selfishness they seem to be more respected and well-liked than he is.

He concludes that maybe God's rules aren't so important after all, maybe it's not so bad to look out for yourself every now and then. So he accepts a small bribe and changes a B to a B+.

And God promptly deploys a tornado to kill his son.

>>79851910
He was asking the rabbis, but the rabbis are not the ones with the answers to his personal life, that would be the people he is actually involved with like his family. In the same way that the dentist was "asking" himself, his books, his wife's teeth, even the supermarket he called, but not the guy with the marks on his teeth.

I don't know, just my two cents coming from your interpretation.

>>79851547
Why wasn't Clooney in this one?

>>79852763
at least he got to bang that 10/10 MILF

>>79852763
And what am I supposed to take from all of this?

>>79853038
No he didn't, that was a dream.

>>79852956
because they made enough money off of bullshit like Burn After Reading to make a good film, so they got good actors

>>79853179
If you ever figure that one out, the entire God-fearing world would love to hear it

JUST LOOK AT THE PARKING LOT

ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL!

>>79853179
You don't want the answers you're actually looking for.

>>79852301
>>79852330
>>79852610
I can't really get into too much cause it's late for me, but I would recommend finding as much as you can on Harold Bloom's analysis of the Old Testament.

Basically, the person who compiled the original set of stories that became the Old Testament is a person referred to by scholars as "J." Bloom proposes that J is a Hittite slave-wife of King David named Bethsheba. She was allowed access to King David's court, and she loathed the ancient Hebrews. She found their customs silly, their great men incompetent, and above all she thought their beliefs were just ass-retarded.

The oldest surviving edition of this OG Old Testament is called the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the tone in which the stories are written are far more Voltaire satire than they are Gospel. That's why Jews have this funny relation with God and the big unknown, because the religious text we use was originally written by someone who thought our people silly, and because no one understands satire, that original tone got lost in translation.

Imagine if people 3000 years from now used some modern day satire as the basis of a whole belief system.

>>79851931
>tries to joke about being obsessed with one of the most boring leading men of all time
>leaves out Up in the Air, the best performance he's ever given
You dun goofed.

>>79853208
it's my dream

>>79853179
Maybe being in God's good grace doesn't mean you'll be happy or successful in the way you wanted.
Maybe God doesn't exist, he's seeing all these events as "punishments" and "rewards" because of his own expectations, when in fact they are just events.
Maybe God gets angry when a loyal servant turns away, and doesn't care at all about the people who never even tried to serve him.

Who knows? How can you expect a movie to answer these questions when none of us can?

>>79854302
I've yet to see Up In The Air.

>>79853179
Please. Accept the mystery.

>>79853221
>Implying

>>79851910
In Rabbi Nachter’s story, the Goy with the special teeth is treated as a mere vehicle for those teeth. The Jews in this movie are comfortable in their sense of … well, if not superiority, then certainly that they have a special, intimate relationship with God that the non-Jews do not; en masse, they sleepwalk through their communal life as Larry has sleepwalked through his marriage, unaware that this covenant, this union with God that they take as a given may have long ago disintegrated. Why? Who neglected whom? Whatever the answer, either the Jews or God may have taken on a new paramour; perhaps both.

We ask the wrong questions and look for answers in the wrong places.

Rabbi Nachter’s “true story” involves a Jewish dentist who discovers Hebrew characters carved into the back of a Gentile’s teeth (he is referred to only as “the Goy”). The characters spell out “help me, save me.” What does it mean? Who made those carvings? Whose cry for help is it? The dentist goes on a long scholarly quest, but eventually gives up trying to find the answer. However, even while seized by the fever of mystery and unable to sleep at night, at no point does he ask the Goy about the stuff on the back of his teeth. The thought does not occur to Nachter or Larry, either. To an outside observer, asking the Goy would be the most obvious step, but those IN the story are blinded by their preconceived notions and assume that, because the Goy is a goy, the inscription on the back of his teeth can’t possibly have anything to do with him. Even though it’s on the back of HIS teeth. Don’t feel smug just yet, viewer: you too fruitlessly search for answers in your life in a way that’s hopelessly handicapped by biases imbibed since childhood. For this reason, we can never understand. Through a glass, darkly; animal shadows in a cave — we can never know the truth or understand God’s plan. Our only role is to follow the rules revealed to us.

>>79856118
This is defamation!

>>79856118
>>79852763
Sounds like the themes of No Country mixed in with bits about how our prejudices affect the way we interact with the world. Will give it a watch.

>>79856118
yeah, I've heard A Serious Man called one of the most anti-semitic movies ever made.

maybe that explains why i like it so much

>>79852763
Viewing the doctor ringing Larry with bad news and the tornado coming towards the school as God’s punishment is exactly the opposite of what the Coen Brothers are saying, in my opinion. Larry was x-rayed at the start of the film, and obviously the doctor was planning on ringing him anyway with the bad news. This would have happened regardless of whether Larry changed the grade or not. Changing the grade DID NOT lead to the doctor ringing Larry with bad news . The two events happening in the sequence they did are mere coincidence. However, we know from Larry’s quest for meaning in his life that he will view the two things as related.

A lot of the events that happened to Larry in the film are mere coincidences. He is involved in a car crash the same time as Sy is involved in a car crash, and he feels guilty that he survived while Sy died, as if he had somehow caused Sy’s death. In fact, it’s more likely that Sy caused Larry’s crash. Sy caused traffic to slow while he waited to turn into a driveway; Larry crashed because he wasn’t looking when the cars in front of him had slowed down. It’s never made clear that the slowdown in traffic ahead of Larry was caused by Sy slowing down ahead of them and causing a tailback, but by positioning the two incidents in the way they did the Coens are at least suggesting the possibility of it. So while Larry feels responsible for Sy’s death for no logical reason, it’s more likely that Sy was actually responsible for Larry’s car crash. Larry could not know that, of course, but his tendency is to blame himself for everything and seek meaning in random, unrelated events, a tendency which causes him to believe the opposite of what may actually have happened.

>>79856676
To view Larry changing the grade at the end as having some causal relationship to him receiving bad news from the doctor and even the tornado coming at the end is to make the mistake Larry has made all throughout the film – to try and impose meaning on unrelated events in an attempt to make sense of the world.

I think the Coens don’t believe in God, at least not a vengeful Old Testament God, and they are merely satirising how a believer like Larry would interpret two unrelated events – him changing the grade and him getting the bad news about his health. It’s a satire of the neurotic, guilt-ridden mindset that 2,000 years of religious conditioning has given him.

The prologue at the start foreshadows this. Either the visitor is a dybbuk, and inviting him into the home was the start of the curse, or the visitor was not a dybbuk, and stabbing an innocent man was the start of the curse. But whichever interpretation you make of this – he was a dybbuk; he wasn’t a dybbuk – leads to the exact same conclusion – their descendents have been “cursed”. It’s a catch-22. You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. What the Coens are saying, I think, is that if you have the tendency to believe in a curse, you will always find evidence to justify that belief.

>>79856676
>>79856778
The film, just like real life, gives & withholds just enough evidence to support either interpretation.

>>79851748
its a shame because no country is clearly their best

>>79856118
>>79856676
>>79856778
good posts anon, i agree with your interpretation

>>79856676
>>79856778
Please. Accept the mystery.

>>79858198
Isn't that just intellectual suicide?

>>79858567
This is defamation!

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>>79858888
Can't argue with those quads.

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>>79851547
It's a brilliant work of Structuralism, but you have to consider the role of math within the narrative...then it becomes mind-blowing.

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Check out some analysis videos on YouTube

>>79853970
>Imagine if people 3000 years from now used some modern day satire as the basis of a whole belief system.

One day, A Serious Man will actually be taken as a serious work and will inspire a dead serious cult.

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>>79853390
JUST LOOK AT THESE DUBS, LARRY

It was forgotten because it's low-key anti-semitic

>>79851547
one of my favorites. It's more patrician than shit like Synecdouche IMHO.

>>79860749
It pokes fun at religion as a whole, they use Judaism because of how ritualistic it is over most other religions, also because the Coens are Jewish themselves.

>>79860749
This is defamation.

>>79860749
there's actually something to this

The Coens are two secular Jews (who made another slightly critical film about Jews, Hail Caesar) commenting on the tyranny of the Rabbis and the imposed confusion and separatism of Judaism.

It's not only what the film is about, but it is about that.

>>79856118
Excellent post.
That point kind of rubbed me the wrong way but I really like how you explained it.

>>79851901
>not knowing mathematical context of aleph

>>79861094
I've also seen arguments that it's anti-semetic because so many of the characters are totally oblivious to 'the coming storm' as it were.
Larry doesn't notice his marriage is falling apart. He doesn't notice the implied fact that he has cancer (or some other bad medical condition).
Sy doesn't notice the car coming that hits him, just as Larry doesn't notice the car in front f him slowing down.
The lawyer doesn't notice the signs he might have a heart attack.
In the dream Larry doesn't notice the hunters who shoot his brother.
And of course the son and school fail to notice the twister until it's too late.

What come's down to is in many way the movie doesn't acknowledge the Jews as special or chosen. All the rabbi's advice turns out to be bullshit, and no answers are actually derived from anything. I think it's meant to imply that there really isn't anything especially special about Jews, despite the fact they carry on like there is.

>>79853970

Nah. Most of the tanakh was compiled after the jews came back from exile in persia, and the stories were just ancienct jewish folk tales tweaked to turn Judaism into Zoroastrianism lite.
First temple Judaism was just another polytheist religion.

>>79861834
that's used in math for the completeness of infinite sets

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>>79862222
Very nice.

>>79851547
Best Cohen brothers film, and one of my favorites.

I like the film analysis some anon copy pasta'd on this thread as well.

>>79852763
This is wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTfSicq0uvk

>>79858567
Scientific truths and Meta-truths are not either or.

You can be intelligent without completely removing any non-materialistic view out of the picture.

>>79861912
>>79861094
>>79862222
This is defamation!

>>79862293
If you're >>79851901, why say "Jewish letters" when there's only alephs and so much else is deployed meaninglessly that the use as "replacement" isn't rhetorical?

>>79851547
yes but not in the way you maen it


it's a very personal film

it's a faith film where faith is mocked repeatedly

the ideal audience are people who grew up in a strongly religious family and ended up losing faith somewhere along the line and people who grew up in a jewish family. If you don't fit one of those it won't work as well.

the young pope kind of feels similar, i really loved it but i don't think people who didn't grow up catholic would enjoy it the same way tha i do

>>79862877
Please. Accept the mystery.

>>79852289
I'm sure you hold the same criticisms with Camus' the Stranger

fucking americans

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>>79859449
I think Structuralist films deserve to take precedence over navel-gazing Post-Structuralist works, like the recent crop of Oscar nominees.

>>79864755
This is defamation!

I'm surprised to see a discussion about jews on /tv/ that's kind of in-depth and isn't just people shouting "kike" and "stormfag" at eachother

>>79866701
That would be defamation.

It was forgotten, because it had no box office success and didn't get a lot of awards. Only things that matter until they don't. when you like a movie and can defend it with reasons instead of box office results, reviews and awards ... whatever

>>79851789
CULTURE

>>79862877
There's not only an "aleph" behind him. Don't try to speak confidently when you don't know what you're talking about. There are 4 different hebrew letters there which translate to the equivalent of "X" if it was pronounced. That's also the reason those letters appear next to the x-axis.

Does it have any meaning? Don't think so. Never seen a school that teaches math and doesn't use the same notation as the rest of the world.

>>79867603
CULTURE CRA

>best Coen movie by far
>people like Inside Memelyn Reddit better

Plen genocide NOW

>>79867819
So what was the point?

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>>79867956

>>79867956
The point of what? Including the 4-letter equivalent pronunciation of "X" as a way to mark the x-axis instead of just writing "X"? I GUESS it was an attempt to portray how math would be taught in jewish schools. Either way, I doubt there's anyone in real life that uses such a notation, even if it's to teach kids.

>>79868258
Just a red herring, then? Alright.