Went to see the film yesterday with friends (folkies -- one USian, his wife a Scot) and found it was a very INTERESTING film...

Cinematography was excellent, but I'm still trying to figure out, though, the intended meaning of that loop -- Llewyn getting beaten up at the beginning of the film and then the reprise (but with a different sound track) at the end. Dylan was the soundtrack to his downfall as a musician, perhaps?

As a history of the time and place -- lousy. So much so that figuring out who characters were "supposed to be" is more or less meaningless. It's fiction set in a known location and time.

I found Llewyn to be quite unlikeable...and, until that last song he performed, he seemed to have no real interest or passion for the music. (But he wasn't cold and calculating either. In fact, he seemed to lack business sense.) One wondered what he was actually doing there; what was he looking for? Maybe a story that made sense could have been made if the Coens had focused on how he was feeling after his musical partner suicided off the bridge.

Got this from a quotes site: < Llewyn Davis: "What, quit? Just exist?"
Joy tries to talk some sense into Llewyn, to urge him to seek out a real job and try to give up his music career. Llewyn sees it differently. Without music, he simply exists rather than contributes.">>

No. He doesn't ACT as if making music means anything to him, that it is better than any other "job", or that without performing he would be simply existing.

There were some very funny moments and great lines -- "Where's his scrotum?!?" I think I'm going to get some mileage out of that line. (Hmmm...it could probably be asked of the film itself...)

I'm not sure what the Coen Brothers wanted the film to be... It was a dark existential story of some sort... But it COULD have been a comedy with a few minor changes. Parts of it were reminiscent of the Jim Jarmusch film "Stranger Than Paradise" in that regard.

Some anachronisms and some things gotten entirely WRONG, such as the scene with the abortion doctor. Nope. Wouldn't have happened like that. What part of "illegal" don't the film makers understand? And the cops in the Flatland (Indiana? Sure looked like northern Indiana... "Welcome to Indiana. Still Flat" or "Welcome to Indiana - "Flatter Than Ohio") would NOT have taken the driver and left the occupants and the car there by the side of the road. AND, the word "fuck" was not (in my experience, at least) used much at all by anyone, even musicians, in the early '60s...or in the late '60s and early '70s. At least not in all the nuances of meaning as used in the film. For the sex act alone, perhaps. But that's it. Other words were used much more -- god damn, shit, son of a bitch, bastard... Back in the early '70s Bob Canney from Alfred, Maine was arrested while speaking at an anti-war rally in Florida for saying "God damn war." He was still fighting it, but had been released from jail, when I lived in the next town a few years later.

I'm glad I saw "Inside Llewyn Davis". And, if it comes closer (it was Hookset where we saw it; Cinemagic, the most comfortable theater I've ever been in), I'll probably see it again with Jeri.

Linn