Forward.com

Casting Call: Coen Bros. ISO Bar Mitzvah Boy, Nose-Job Seeker, Wise Rabbi

Minneapolis’s Star-Tribune reports that native sons made good (filmmakers), the Coen brothers, are holding a casting call at the JCC in their hometown of St. Louis Park:

Their new film “A Serious Man,” about a Midwestern Jewish family in the late 1960s, will hold an open casting call to fill those roles with performers from the community. No acting experience is required.

The roles are Danny Gopnik (a boy preparing for his bar mitzvah), Sarah Gopnik (a typical teenager obssessed with getting a nose job) and Rabbi Marshak (the wise emeritus rabbi at the synagogue).

The paper has the details.

Michael Chabon Is ‘Over the Moon’

The JTA has a great story fleshing out the recent news that the Coen brothers will be making a movie based on Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”

“Naturally, I am over the moon about this,” Chabon wrote in an e-mail to JTA. “They are heroes of mine.”

All in all, it has been a pretty great week for Chabon. Barack Obama has been winning big in contest after contest — and Chabon seems more than a little over the moon about him.

Writing in The Washington Post a few weeks ago, Chabon described his preferred candidate in almost Christ-like terms:

To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.