The second movie I watched this week was "Serious Men". At 3:30 p.m. on October 16th, Mr. Wang Zhimin gave his lecture ""You Yo Lu Ming" and the Aesthetics of Film Montage". It was a lecture that had a confused start, was drowsy in the middle, and ended up making me want to think about it. The blandness of the content and various escapes made it impossible for me to capture and immediately understand the connection with my shallow knowledge. But after watching this movie, I suddenly had a little feeling in my heart.
This film is co-directed by Ethan Cohen and Joel Cohen, starring Michael Stuart, Richard Kind, Sally Lenick, and tells the story of a Jewish community in the United States in 1967. The Story of Everyman, released in the United States on October 2, 2009.
Seeing the director's name, you can guess that there must be a unique enough classic montage aesthetic in this film. In addition to the short story before the title that far exceeds the usual title length of other films, the main content tells the story of a university professor Larry Gopnick whose life was once a pool of water.
As a university professor who studies quantum mechanics, he lives every day teaching physics at the university, and is about to be named a tenured professor. Every routine examination of his body is also good.
Suddenly, one day, a Korean international student asked Larry to change his F grades to pass. He insisted that he understood Schrödinger's cat and the small picture he drew, but he didn't expect that the physics exam would take mathematics. , so he got a failing grade, which is unfair because he didn't know he could take maths. Larry naturally refused his unreasonable request, but after he left, he found that the envelope left by the student contained a large sum of money to bribe him. Back home, Larry was asked by his wife Judith to discuss the divorce, saying that he and the widower Sai Eberman were in love with each other. His wife Esther had just died, but his own wife said she had been dead for three years. Larry suddenly found out that the neighbor had been helping to clean his yard, but because the neighbor thought it was his chassis, Larry had to find a lawyer, while talking about the divorce and the yard dispute with the neighbor, but as the measurement expert The sudden death of a heart attack, this thing became a dead end. Colleagues in the college suddenly told themselves that because the college committee received a bunch of anonymous letters reporting Larry's moral corruption, his tenured professor decided that there might be a certain problem. The son kept complaining that his TV couldn't receive a signal, and the daughter kept chattering about not being able to wash her hair because the restroom at home was occupied by unemployed Larry Brother Arthur, who was still at home with a cyst. Larry's brother Arthur also gradually got into more and more trouble. From his initial participation in gambling, to going to North Dakota to instigate sodomy, the police came to the house several times.
Larry, who had never experienced so many questions, and a young rabbi, Reverend Scott, on the advice of family and friends, did not ease any of her anxiety or give herself any answers she wanted. At the insistence of his wife and for the sake of the children, Larry took Arthur to live at the nearby Pirate Flag Hotel, leaving the house to Judith and Cy Abbotman. Because of poor rest at night, Larry, who got up early to drive to work, had a car accident. After such a shock, the first call Larry received when he arrived at the office was from the record company, urging him to pay the record fee for half a year. It turned out to be His son has been ordering in his name, one per month, without interruption. Under the series of blows, Larry found the second priest, the priest of Nachne. Nachner tells Larry about a dentist who was making denture molds for one of his patients and found the Hebrew words "Help me, save me" engraved on the inside of the patient's teeth. The story didn't help Larry either. Even more desperate, at the same time that Larry had a car accident in the morning, Se also had a car accident and even died. The wife makes a request for Larry to take care of Se's funeral. Having done all this, Larry was completely devastated and asked to see a third priest, the priest Marshak, but the priest refused to meet him.
In the midst of the turmoil, son Danny's coming-of-age ceremony ended smoothly, and Larry's tenure-track position seemed to be fulfilled. After experiencing self-struggle, Larry erased the foreign student's F grade and changed it to C-. Just then, the phone rang, and Dr. Shapiro, who had been examining Larry, called and said that in order to talk about the X-rays taken earlier, an interview was necessary. A tornado is coming, where will the characters go?
After watching a movie, it's hard to say anything. Suddenly I came into contact with a brand-new realm. In this realm, the frog at the bottom of the well looked up at every shining star in the bright galaxy. They were so numerous, so dazzling, and so addictive. There are so many people in the galaxy that can be admired and learned, waiting for us to pick and taste one by one.
While I was writing this, I quickly rewatched the film. When I know all the plots, the details that I couldn't understand when I watched it for the first time emerged in the second time. This film gives me the feeling that it is a well-designed form. From Huafu Dao to the lines and scenes, everything echoes. Narrative, light and shadow, sound, time, and a variety of film languages render the plot vividly and make the most of the value and meaning of film symbols.
A very interesting detail. Baidu said that the time background of the film is not very clear. In Larry's office, the calendar shows 1967, but the albums provided by Columbia Records were published in 1970. of. But I have a slightly different view. As I mentioned earlier, Cy's wife, Esther, had just died, but Larry's wife said she had been dead for three years. Maybe everything was deliberately done by the director and the screenwriter. All the stories in the whole film are one after another, uncontrollable step by step pushing Larry's life forward, the lower and the lower, the more incredible things emerge one after another. At first, Larry said that Astor had just died, and his wife refuted him; the lawyer later said that Astor had just died, but Larry refuted that he had been dead for three years. Perhaps everything was written by me after listening to Mr. Wang Zhimin's lecture just before the first interpretation: Do you believe that seeing is believing, or hearing is believing?
Perhaps, the whole time stone was out of whack, when Larry didn't start all the things that the film shows, when he was in 1967. Everything was smooth and stable. I didn't find my neighbors helping me weeding, I didn't have my unemployed brothers who stayed at home, I didn't have a wife who wanted to divorce me, and I didn't have any children to worry about. He is that enviable university quantum physics teacher quietly waiting for tenure. However, it was suddenly unknown whose hand, perhaps God's hand, put such a serious, meticulous, and eager to live life on the right track, and everything was calculated by numbers, into the time and space of 1970 three years later. This is a parallel time and space, in which everything is deviated from the track, that is, the existence presented in the film.
But who can tell whether life in 1967 was real life, or life in 1970 was real life? No one can tell. Just like Schrödinger's cat, no one knows whether it is alive or dead, unless we can see through that little dark room, unless we are all gods. Yet neither of us. We are all just little people controlled by God, living in this unique time and space for us, enjoying ourselves, living the only kind of life we should have. Just like Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" and Robert Zemeckis' "Back to the Future", everyone tells stories of magical realism, but it just depicts reality, not magic.
If possible, I will watch this movie several times.
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