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	<title>Screen Machine &#187; Stand still, I&#8217;m trying to smite you: A Serious Man</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Long live the new flesh</description>
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		<title>Stand still, I&#8217;m trying to smite you: A Serious Man</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
There’s a line in Down and Out in Paris and London where Orwell describes a friend of his as “the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him”. I think the Coen brothers would like that a lot. (Incidentally, there’s an interesting debate out there about whether or not Orwell was an anti-Semite. Consensus seems to be heading towards, yes, probably, a bit.)
Not that A Serious Man is atheistic exactly. You get the impression the Coens are saying yes, there is a God—and he hates you. No really. You. Personally. And one day he’s seriously gonna fuck you up. But there’s nothing you can do about it, so quit your whining.
For two people so apparently determined not to answer questions about their work, the Coen’s certainly pose a lot of them. The ambiguity of their films is so striking you have to wonder if the meaning is so big you can’t see it, or if perhaps there’s nothing there at all. No wonder the Coens are regularly accused of nihilism.
Certainly they seem to revel in their brutal universe. They love putting their characters through the cosmic wringer in an orgy of petty misfortunes and malign coincidences. Nothing is getting any better, and nobody’s coming to fix things for you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a sense of humour about it.

In A Serious Man, as in all their best work, the humour is pitiless, the aesthetic crisp and the dialogue obscures more&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/11/30/stand-still-im-trying-to-smite-you/</link>
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