So “I don’t have the energy to do anything other than watch TV” day continues with a Coen Brothers film.

I’ve seen people say good things about this movie, in the relative context of the Coen Brothers oeuvre, but I really don’t see it. It’s about a folk-singing loser (Poe Dameron as the titular Llewyn Davis), who just losers up his loser life over and over again. And that’s it.

Everything he does, he fucks up. The movie keeps providing points where he could do something differently and fuck up less, but nope, he always just ignores them and keeps going forward, fucking up the same tomorrow as he did yesterday. This is clearly intentional — there’s a lot of deliberate symmetry between the beginning and end of the movie — but an arcless character arc certainly doesn’t give you any reasons in itself to keep watching.

So for that, you’d hope to lean on the Coens typical wit and weird side characters, but this movie is flat af until John Goodman shows up as a jazz musician, and then goes back to being dull as soon as Goodman’s off the screen.

AND it has the problem that Altman’s Nashville had, of actually playing a lot of the goddamn music. Folk music is fucking terrible and there’s probably a good 30+ minutes of it in this movie, just sitting there listening to Poe sing about stupid bullshit while he strums a guitar.

Maybe there’s an interesting movie to be made about failure and about being unable to change, but this isn’t it; only recommended if you really like folk music for some reason. Definitely bottom-tier Coen.