It’s Friday, we all know that you dont want to be doing work so why not spend 10 minutes on our wonderful quiz looking that the lives of The Coen Brothers? Below, we have 10 questions that you’ll love if you’re a fan (or even not a fan) of the Coen Brothers’ work.

Their latest movie, A Serious Man is released on Blu Ray and DVD this Monday and we currently have a competition where you can win a copy of this awesome movie on Blu Ray. Click here to enter or check out our review of the movie here. If you want even more then we can oblige as we have an exclusive look at A Serious Man from behind the scenes which you can see here.

So, this Friday, pass this onto your friends and get playing in your offices around the world, then roll on the weekend!

To coincide with the release of A Serious Man on DVD / Blu Ray this Monday 15th March, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment have sent us this exclusive clip from the DVD extras.

It’s a wonderful behind the scenes look into the making of A Serious Man which includes interviews with the writer / directors The Coen Brothers and with the main cast.

A Serious Man is a truly wonderful, crazy movie which will have you laughing throughout. You can see Jon’s review of the movie here and also check out our competition where you can win the movie on Blu Ray.

The Coen’s latest film was a surprise hit of last year and has garnered deserved praise for its wit and outstanding central performance from Michael Stuhlbarg.

I was lucky enough to catch this at the London  Film Festival last year, and if you can read my take here. It’s another wonderful film from the Coens, and one that will continue to reward with multiple viewings, and we’re giving three lucky readers the chance to win a copy of the film on Blu Ray

A SERIOUS MAN is available to own on Blu-ray and DVD from 15^th March. Academy Award®-winning directors* Joel and Ethan Coen return to their comedy roots with this original and darkly humorous story about one ordinary man’s quest to become a serious man.

Synopsis: Physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) can’t believe his life: His wife is leaving him for his best friend. His unemployed brother won’t move off the couch. Someone is threatening his career. His kids are a mystery, and his neighbour is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family, delinquent behaviour and mortality.

Click here to watch the trailer

To celebrate the release of A SERIOUS MAN we’re giving away 3 copies of the film on Blu-Ray. To be in with a chance of winning, simply answer the following question…

What is Larry Gopnik’s profession in A SERIOUS MAN?

1. PE teacher
2. Physics professor
3. Gynecologist

Use the form below to enter.

The small print:

• This competition is open to the UK only.
• Only one entry per household will be counted.
• The competition will close Monday 15th March (release date) at 23.59 GMT.
• The winners will be picked at random from entries received.

The usual T&Cs can be found here.

Legendary directors, Ethan and Joel Coen were in London town last week to promote their new movie, ‘A Serious Man’ which is out in cinemas on Friday (20th November).

We’ve managed to get some audio snippets from their interview which you can listen to below. If you’ve not already seen it, check out Jon’s review from the London Film Festival here.

[gplayer href="http://www.heyuguys.co.uk/audio/a_serious_man/coenbrothers_mono.mp3"] Interview: [/gplayer]

Interview conducted by James Kleinmann.

Here’s a couple of nice little clips (embedded below) from the Coen Brothers latest, A Serious Man. Jon was lucky enough to see the movie at the London Film Festival (review here) and he loved it. The movie stars Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus and Adam Arkin.

“A Serious Man” is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and “F-Troop” is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

A Serious Man is released 20th November.

A Serious Man is the Coen brothers’ darkest comedy to date and perhaps their most personal film, set as it is in the Jewish-America suburbia of Minnesota in the 1960s. Their purposefully erratic filmography is a definite advantage as with most Coen films there is no indication of which direction the wild wind will blow, and Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlberg) has very rough weather to contend with, to prove he is a serious man.

Larry is a physics professor seeking tenure, and when we meet him we quickly see the fruits of his labour are rotting in the sun-soaked suburban sprawl of middle America. His family is a mess, with his chronically sick brother Arthur sleeping on the couch, conducting deep mathematical investigations to aid his secret gambling habit, his son’s bar mitzvah’s is approaching and only his confiscated pocket radio, the TV aerial and a burgeoning marijuana habit on his mind, a failing student attempts to bribe him and his wife wants to discuss their imminent divorce. This all happens in the first ten minutes of the film. And things only get worse for Larry.

The Coens have hidden complex questions on the nature of faith, mortality and the constant onslaught of meaningless adversity that befalls us, in amongst some beautifully observed and truly hilarious vignettes. It is their trademark oddness which elevates this story and the prologue, a small piece of folklore with a Grimm twist in its tale (told entirely in Yiddish), is a suitable introduction to the inventiveness and confidence of the Coens. A Serious Man is a film about staring into the abyss and hearing a deafening, endless silence.

The characters are where the Coens excel, and their films guarantee unique, memorable personalities and this film, though it centres primarily on Stuhlberg’s character, has a brilliant cast which populate Larry’s social and emotional disintegration. His wife’s lover is a fantastically outsized Coen creation called Sy Ableman (yet another perfectly named character), whose deep, hypnotising drawl is a masterpiece of passive aggressive behaviour and Larry, in his moral quagmire, is no match. Of course, this being a Coen brothers film, the unexpected chaos comes quickly to Sy, and the twisting gale of calamity which orbits Larry closer and closer gathers pace until he is forced to finally make a decision. Once he does, and all the pieces of this particularly diabolic puzzle are in place, the film cannons out another volley of curveballs and the film ends on a beautiful and necessary note.

There is no order in the chaos of Larry’s life, no answers or reassuring moral messages from the succession of Rabbi Larry consults. The story of the Goy’s teeth is a perfect and hilarious illustration of the meaningless of asking questions in order to get answers. Larry, standing on his roof to fix his TV aerial has the unlooked for advantage of a new perspective over his everyday suburbia, and just as we think he’s making progress he is distracted and entranced by his neighbour sunbathing nude. Larry’s only absolute understanding is of the Uncertainty Principle, writ large in oversized detail on his classroom blackboard. This is entirely in keeping with the confusing nature of the film, as is the moment when the ghost of a main character rams Larry’s face into the blackboard again and again and again.

A Serious Man is not so much a love letter to the Coen’s past as a fabulist reworking of remembered scenes and tall tales, dysfunctional families and mass of meshugas (and that’s enough Yiddish from a Goy like me”¦). It is a rich and esoteric film of impeccable detail and many cruel laughs. The Coens have become masters of the unexpected and have made a personal and mature film that sparkles with enough inherent brilliance to make it worth your time.

As a final note, in case you missed it, I wanted to include the outstanding trailer for A Serious Man which is as sublime and original as befits a Coen brothers film. Check it out below and there is an excellent article here on the creation of this piece of work, which is considered by many to be the best trailer of the year.