JustASC

This is the trailer for the new Coen Brothers film, A Serious Man, a black comedy set in the Jewish Minneapolis neighborhood of their late ’60s youth. With the possible exception of The Big Lebowski, I’m wary of the Coens’ forays into straight comedy, which can be way too arch (see Intolerable Cruelty) or intolerably cruel (Fargo almost lost me when they played the all-too-real-seeming hostage scenes for laughs). And for all their wit with a camera, they seem fairly tone-deaf when the laughs are supposed to be intentional.

The trailer itself offers a queasy mix of violence and arch yuks, but I’m still looking forward to seeing what they do with the period and Jewish themes.