In the view of Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman, Joel and Ethan Coen “should seriously consider making a gloriously skewed pop musical.

“I’m more convinced of that than ever having seen the spectacular use they make of the Jefferson Airplane song ‘Somebody to Love’ in A Serious Man,” he eexplains. “This is one of those pop-music epiphanies worthy of Tarantino, Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson — and the strange thing is, it’s just there, so unlikely yet so sublime, sitting right in the middle of the Coens’ highly personalized movie about a nebbishy Jewish family trying to make its way in Middle America in 1967.

“A Serious Man opens with an old Yiddish parable (a fake, it turns out — the Coens just made it up), in which a kvetching couple in what looks like a 19th century Eastern European village invite an old man into their home who may or may not be a dybbuk (i.e., a malevolent spirit). This prologue introduces the movie’s grand theme — which is not, as many critics have said, an update of the Book of Job. Rather, the theme is a question: When bad things happen, are they the actions of God, or are they the result of people anxiously overreacting to what God does?

“At this point the screen goes dark, and we see what looks like a golden ring, which is the outline of a mysterious tunnel that we’re suddenly whooshing through. The whole audience is traveling — through space? time? — with nothing to guide it but a familiar, gathering sound. It’s the thrashing ’60s beat and desperate, do-or-die romantic ferocity of Grace Slick, exhorting her listeners to find ;somebody to love’ in a world where that may be the only salvation left.

“So what, exactly, is a vintage Jefferson Airplane anthem doing in this movie? In A Serious Man, the Coens use ‘Somebody to Love’ in two fascinating and resonant ways.

“When we first come out of that tunnel, we’re staring at a hard white piece of plastic — it’s a close-up of an earpiece, plugged into the head of 12-year-old Danny (Aaron Wolff), who is listening to ‘Somebody to Love’ on his transistor radio in Hebrew school. What’s more than a bit trippy is that as the camera travels down that earpiece wire, it seems to be completing the journey out of the tunnel. In what is basically a realistic drama, the Coens present the leap from the peasant shtetl to the tract-house anonymity of Midwestern America as an act of science fiction.

“It’s as if the Jews of the old world weren’t just being transplanted — they were getting beamed up. The movie uses ‘Somebody to Love’ as the sensuous electric pulse of the society they were now joining. And yet…it’s science fiction because, in some part of their hearts, they’re still in the shtetl. They’re in two worlds at once.

“Late in the film, the song comes back — this time as high comedy. Danny has just completed his bar mitzvah (while stoned out of his gourd), and as a reward he gets an audience with the community’s chief rabbi, an ancient, wizened wizard of a Talmudic scholar who sits in his room like a Yiddishe mafioso, surrounded by musty texts and eerie things in bottles. The inaccessibility of the rabbi has been a joke throughout the film (Danny’s father, who could use some guidance, can’t begin to get a meeting), and so our curiosity about what he’ll finally say has reached the boiling point.

“Slowly, in his thick accent, the old man begins to speak, mouthing what sounds like it could only be a centuries-old Jewish proverb: ‘Ven da truth is found…to be lies. And all da joy…vithin you dies.’ Yes, it’s the lyrics of ‘Somebody to Love.’ Except that the rabbi, instead of voicing the song’s next line (‘Don’t you want somebody to love?’), substitutes his own, more existential version. He asks: ‘What then?'”

A just-released official Obama family photograph by Anne Leibovitz, snapped in the White House Green Room on 9.1.09.

A high-resoluton version delivers much better clarity and tonalities than my 460-pixel version.

Everyone had heard or suspected that Mira Nair‘s Amelia would be bad, but I was nonetheless stunned by the boredom and general flatness that leapt — seethed? — out of every scene and frame. Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan‘s script is amazingly drippy and mundane. The roteness of Nair’s direction is suffocating. This is probably the last American-funded directing gig she’ll have in a long time. Put her in movie jail and throw away the key.

Hilaryu Swank, Richard Gere in Mira Nair’s Amelia.

Call it a mildly agreeable time-waster if you want, but if you truly enjoy Amelia or even express a degree of genuine enthusiasm — “Not too bad! Nice aerial photography!” — there’s really something wrong with you. With your taste buds, I mean. Amelia is a film diseased and poisoned and deadened with schmaltz. It’s a major embarassment all around.

Hilary Swank‘s performance as the legendary aviator is mildly okay in itself (it’s mostly about her white teeth) but she’s trapped in a lethally dull film so she goes down with the ship regardless. Richard Gere‘s George Palmer Putnam — the suave money guy who married Earhart — is also mildly acceptable. Ewan McGregor‘s Gene Vidal, an aviation instructor and would-be infidel, reminds you McGregor has a nose for crap and opportunities for career deflation.

How did Fox Searchlight, an operation synonymous with smart classy films and clever, aggressive marketing campaigns, get saddled with this thing?

I heard mild moanings coming from a critic sitting behind me at last Monday’s screening on 55th Street, and I heard at least two throat-clearings from other critics sitting nearby.

The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond recently wrote that “in some ways Amelia is reminiscent of Out Of Africa, which has the same combination of sweep, adventure and romance this film incorporates.” Be careful, Pete! The ghost of Sydney Pollack has read that line and is now on the haunt, looking for you.

Hammond also claimed that “if this were 40, or even 20 years ago, Nair’s meticulously mounted effort would be deemed a front-runner for awards and a certain thing at the box office.” No, it wouldn’t. Dramatic mediocrity has been a recognizable thing for centuries, and no self-respecting Oscar handicapper in the late ’60s or late ’80s would have given Amelia a shot at anything, even out of politeness.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett, who damaged his cred when he raved last year about Mamma Mia, recently claimed that Amelia “ranks with recent real-life portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman and could be similarly awards-bound.”

Bennett added that “the classically structured bio will appeal to grown-ups, history buffs and lovers of aeronautics, but in showing how the flier was one of the most lauded celebrities of her time, it also might appeal to youngsters.” The mind reels!

The once-legendary Soupy Sales, an immensely likable josher, has died at age 83. This video reminds that the best part of the New York-area Soupy Sales Show (also called Lunch with Soupy Sales) was the offscreen laughter from the crew. Sales’ career peak happened during a live engagement at the Paramount theatre during the 1965 Easter holiday. I’d love to find a YouTube of Frank Sinatra‘s visit to Sales’ show the same year.,

Here’s a tip-of-the-hat to whomever makes the in-flight video programming decisions for Continental Airlines. All airlines program contemporary crap (i.e., Land of the Lost, Transformers 2) but very few include classic films. I’m just saying it was enormously comforting to watch John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath and Howard Hawks‘ Bringing Up Baby during Wednesday’s JFK-to-LAX flight. It mitigated an otherwise close-to-hellish experience (i.e., stuck in a cramped seat on a seemingly interminable flight).

Dogwood Entertainment and Freestyle Releasing have pacted on a limited theatrical release of Scott Teems‘ That Evening Sun, which reputedly boasts an award-level performance by Hal Holbrook. Pic will open in New York on 11.6 and in LA on 11.20. Holbrook will reportedly make appear at each theater on the film’s opening nights in New York and Los Angeles.

Variety‘s Joe Leydon has called it “an exceptionally fine example of regional indie filmmaking [that] deserves savvy handling by a venturesome distrib to maximize its potential to attract auds and win prizes. Pic’s major selling point is Holbrook’s career-highlight star turn as an irascible octogenarian farmer who will not go gentle into that good night. But this deliberately paced, richly atmospheric drama also boasts first-rate work by a splendid supporting cast and impressive production values that would pass muster in a much pricier production.”

“As everyone knows before I started making movies I was working in a video store. I made my first movie is ’92…well, ’91. And somebody asked me the question, ‘In 1988, if someone had told you [that] you were going to be getting the Kirk Douglas Excellence in Filmmaking Award, given to you by Kirk Douglas… would you have believed it? And it actually stopped me completely in my tracks on the red carpet. ‘No,’ I said. ‘That would have been unfathomable.”

Diane Kruger, Kirk Douglas, Quentin Tarantino at last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival presentation of the Kirk Douglas Excellence in Filmmaking Award ceremony.

This was Quentin Tarantino‘s opening remark last night on the occasion of his receiving the KDEIF award in Santa Barbara. He then told a good story about watching a fragment of The Vikings when he was six years old (i.e., the part when Tony Curtis kills Douglas with a broken sword) and then watching Spartacus a few months later and figuring it was the same film, etc. (Watch it on the YouTube clip below.)

Tarantino was gracious and amusing and very much the debonair gentleman. Douglas (who will be 93 in December) looked happy. Inglourious Basterds costar Diane Kruger was there. Producer Lawrence Bender was there. Dennis Miller, who charmed the world with his Sonia Sotomayor “La Cucharacha” joke on Bill O’Reilly‘s show a while back, was there.

Ditto Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling (wearing a Brad Pitt/Inglorious Basterds haircut), SBFF publicist Carol Marshall and numerous well-heeled ladies and gents representing the creme de la creme of Santa Barbara society.

It was a black-tie event, and I had flown to California under-prepared. I had my black pants, socks and shoes and a nice tuxedo shirt…but no black suit jacket. So I asked L.A. Times/Envelope columnist Pete Hammond, who was also planning to attend, if I could borrow a black evening jacket, and he obliged. Except Pete’s arms are shorter than mine and my white shirt cuffs were sticking out like crazy. It looked absurd. So I started telling people that short jacket sleeves was a new avant-garde fashion thing.

Another problem was that I was still on my New York clock, plus I made the mistake of accepting two Metropolitans early on. By the time the dinner had been served and eaten and the program began (a span of roughly two hours) I was feeling a little groggy. I had my pen and note pad at the ready but the energy wasn’t there. I felt it best to slip out before the end of the show.

My infinite wisdom led me to decide it would be best to not drive back to Los Angeles with vodka in my bloodstream. I stayed at a Motel 6 in Carpinteria, which has been spiffed up in recent years.

10.22.09, 6:10 pm.

10.22.09, 6:55 pm.

10.22.09, 10:35 pm.