Today’s hangover isn’t really a hangover. That’s cheating, surely! Well yes, but I still feel like shit: tired, wobbly, discombobulated, pre-menstrual, undervalued, overlooked, restless, heavy, bored, a bit pathetic and dusted with the slight early-morning fuzziness proving receipt of a large glass of wine over dinner. So I feel perfectly justified.

Anyway! The point really is that after dinner, we went to see A Serious Man, the latest Coen Brothers’ film. On the way home, my partner in law-abiding events and I discussed the film. Now, I like Coen Brothers’ films. Like anyone who ever inhaled, I loved The Big Lebowski; apart from the gratuitous cow violence, Oh, Brother Where Art Thou? is an unparalleled joy from beginning to end. And I like the weird ones too: Barton Fink; The Man Who Wasn’t There; the stark, brief, uncompromising Blood Simple with its few flashes of quite horrible, real-somehow violence.

The Coen Brothers – it’s entirely down to them that I became cinema-savvy enough to start caring who made my films. Alright, so my entire canon is basically them and Quentin Tarantino, but it’s a start, hey.

So – we concluded that it was a sideswipe at tradition; an affectionate yet unflinching look at the ridiculous ineffectuality of organised religion; a gentle tribute to those who always try to do the best as they see fit, in accordance to the ways that they have been taught, despite the fact that it gets them precisely nowhere.

We decided this after having first got our first initial thoughts out of the way: Why did the fat kid’s face only appear at the end? What was with that hurricane? What is the significance of the members of Jefferson Airplane?

And primarily, first of all, before all others – what the fuck??!

As we exited the cinema, I heard one confused soul turn to his girlfriend and slowly say: “well... it was billed as a comedy...”