The Big Lebowski (1998) **

A plethora of who’s who comprises the cast of this 1998 Coen Brothers comedy about a case of mistaken identity gone terribly awry.  The Big Lebowski is chock full of memorable performances and has a far-out plot loosely based on the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep (which was first made into a movie in 1946, starring Humphrey Bogart as Detective Philip Marlowe). Like many early Coen Brothers’ films this was not a commercial success; however, over the years it has become a cult favorite. While I’m not a huge fan of this, I do admire the acting and the bizarre plot.

Jeff Bridges plays “The Dude” (AKA Jeffrey Lebowski), a white Russian-drinking and pot-smoking slacker who likes to bowl.  The Dude’s world becomes complicated when a porn kingpin named Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara) sends his goons to the wrong Jeffrey Lebowski’s house looking for payment of Jeffrey’s wife Bunny’s (Tara Reid) debts. The thugs soon realize they have the wrong Lebowski, but not before one of them urinates on his rug. Why is this important?  Because after relaying this story to his bowling buddies one of them, a crazy Vietnam vet named Walter (John Goodman), convinces him that he should make the other Lebowski pay to have the rug cleaned. This is how The Dude meets the Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), a wheel-chaired millionaire married to a slutty trophy wife.  Soon after Bunny is kidnapped and The Dude is asked to serve as the bagman for the ransom. What ensues is one of the most peculiar story plots in the history of motion pictures—but what should you expect, it is the Coen Brothers after all.

What I like about most Coen Brothers’ films is that they are always unique in their own special way.  This one has a quirky hippie vibe—what with The Dude always smoking a doobie and Walter constantly referring to ‘Nam—but it also has a biting edge to it, especially when depicting the art world and nihilism.  Somehow these people from completely different social spectrums meet and create a chaos that is, well, rather paradoxically, a form of artistic nihilism.  While the story has some fat that could be trimmed (specifically the two appearances of Sam Elliott as “The Stranger”), overall most of the pieces of the messy plot come together in the end.

As for the acting, just about every character is memorably played by some of the finest actors in Hollywood today. However, there are three performances that standout above the rest.  First, John Turturro is virtually unrecognizable as Jesus, a bowling rival of The Dude’s team.  Playing a Latino with a heavy Cuban accent who went to prison for exposing himself to an eight-year-old girl, Turturro plays on every stereotype you can imagine.  Jesus’ clothes are way too tight, he is overtly sexual, and his machismo is beyond measure.  For such a small part, it turned out to be one of Turturro’s most memorable.

The second standout performance has to be Julianne Moore as Maude Lebowski, the Big Lebowski’s estranged daughter.  When you make your entrance in an overhead harness completely nude you must have gusto.  Playing an avant-garde artist with no inhibitions, Moore makes you pay attention to every word that comes out of her mouth in a clipped, faux British accent.  Maude would be pretentious if she weren’t so damn serious!  Some of the words that come out of Moore’s mouth would sound so wrong if they weren’t delivered by an actress who knew how to play her part to the fullest.

Finally, while I know Bridges is the star of the movie, it is Goodman who is the standout.  I don’t know what it is, but he has a habit of stealing whatever film he is in—even as a co-star or in a cameo performance.  His Walter is the most memorable thing about The Big Lebowski. Extremely gifted when it comes to voice inflection, body language, and most definitely facial expressions, Goodman turns what otherwise would have been an irritating idiotic sidekick into an exasperating psychopathic wingman. Whether he is jumping out of a moving car or interrogating a teenage boy, or most memorably throwing a paralyzed man to the ground, Walter is outrageously believable.  For me, if there is one reason to watch The Big Lebowski it is Goodman—he is most assuredly not an amateur.

Overall, this is a typical Coen Brothers’ comedy: uniquely written and strongly acted. Other than a few standout performances and an unusual plot there is nothing that makes me want to watch The Big Lebowski over and over again.

True Grit (2010) **

True disappointment is more like it!  Three great actors and two Coen brothers would seem like a recipe for success, but something went wrong with True Grit (2010).  I suppose I am in the minority here, as I read many critics’ reviews that praised this Coen venture.  In addition, it garnered ten Academy Award nominations (at least it didn’t win any!). Now, it’s not like I am one of those rabid John Wayne fans who thought there was no way the 2010 version could compare to the 1969 one, because I didn’t think that was that good, either (though Wayne does give a fine performance).  No, I just found it an average, run-of-the-mill Hollywood picture—without the aliens and huge explosions.  That’s not to say there is anything wrong with average—I tell my students average is fine, as most people are “C” students—but with all the hype surrounding this film I expected more but got less.

An adaptation of the 1968 Charles Porter novel of the same name, the film is about one girl’s unyielding need for retribution for her father’s murder.  More mature than any fourteen year old I ever met, Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) wants to hunt down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) and bring him to justice for killing his boss and her father.  She may be matter-of-fact and businesslike, but she lacks the necessary skills to venture into Indian Territory (this film is set way before the PC age) and apprehend him herself.  So, she hires a Deputy U.S. Marshall known for a shoot-first mentality and, well, true grit.  Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) might have true grit, but he’s also a drunk and unpleasant person.  Along the way they team up with (and occasionally break off from) Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who is after Chaney for killing a Texas state senator.  What follows is a drawn out (literally) search of a half-witted, pseudo-psychopath, with a few side encounters with odd characters and reprehensible reprobates. 

The acting is passable to good. As usual, Brolin gives a strong performance in his very limited screen time.  In addition, this is one of Damon’s best roles in years.  The young Hailee Steinfeld was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, which I don’t understand, as she is clearly the focal point and star of this film.  It is difficult to believe that this was her first feature film, as she stood up well against three highly respected male stars. As for Bridges, who was nominated for Best Actor, I thought he hammed it up too much and made Rooster into a caricature.  Without a doubt, John Wayne’s Rooster is the more superior of the two.  The nuances that won Bridges the Oscar for his portrayal of Bad Blake in Crazy Heart (2009) are MIA—perhaps he had to top his award winning turn or was afraid that his career would end once people saw Tron: Legacy (2010).  Who knows? I just wasn’t into it.

I’m usually a fan of the Coen Brothers’ work, but they have a habit of making really good films (No Country for Old Men [2007], O Brother , Where Art Thou? [2001], and Fargo [1996]) and then making really average (and sometimes crappy) ones (Burn After Reading [2008] and The Ladykillers [2004]).  True Grit falls somewhere in between the good ones and the crappy ones.  It may have been their choice to have the characters speak in an exaggerated manner that irked me the most.  No one, not even back in the 1800s, spoke like that unless they were on the stage.  And, these characters are most certainly not on the stage—no matter how resolute their personal agendas. 

The one thing I truly enjoyed about the film were the scenes between Mattie and Colonel Stonehill (veteran television actor Dakin Matthews).  The true exasperation that the poor Colonel encounters at his business dealings with Mattie are funny and entertaining.  When he says, “I do not entertain hypotheticals. The world itself is vexing enough,” I couldn’t help but laugh.  Had the rest of the film been a bit more like these scenes I might have liked it better. 

Top Ranked Films of the Coen Brothers

Joel and Ethan CoenPhoto by Pascal Le Segretain, © 2011 Getty Images

These are all the films of the Coen Brothers, Ethan and Joel, that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. They usually share both directing and screenwriting duties, so I lumped them all together here, and they had 10 titles make the top 1000 in all.

Frances McDormand won a

REVIEW: Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *

*But Were Too Afraid To Ask

(dir. Woody Allen, 1972)

It's always a treat to see the early work of a famous artist.  Be it Blood Simple by the Coens, Mean Streets by Martin Scorsese, or Following by Christopher Nolan, it manages to show the greatness that lay ahead (or in many cases, the shock that the person who would later make this could have ever made that).  And this is what brings me to Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Too Afraid To Ask, Woody Allen's 1972 vignette comedy about all things sexual.

Based loosely--and by loosely I mean they share a title and the theme of sex--on David Reuben's advise book, this work of Allen's foreshadows decades of self-conscious penis references, nebbish men nabbing hot girls, and askew takes on everyday predicaments.  I'm actually quite fond of Allen pre-Annie Hall work (which is saying something, since said films are few and hard to come by) with Play It Again, Sam being one of my favorite movies of all time.  It panders not only to Allen fans, but Casablanca fans as well.

But back to Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Too Afraid To Ask. It opens with a somewhat overall weak vignette with Allen as a court jester in Medieval England.  Anthony Quale makes a hilarious cameo as a sex-crazed king, which allows Allen himself to shine as the horrible fool of court.  His deadpan delivery is as priceless in 1972 as it is in 1986, for I often wonder if anyone can deliver a bad joke as well as Allen, and only because he also knows it's bad!  Here, Allen makes awful jokes seem like zingers to the viewer, as we giggle at just how awful the joke is.  Not to mention, he compares Lynn Redgrave's chest to a pair of "tomatoes."

Baaaaaaaaaaad Romance

The following acts are hits a misses.  Gene Wilder as a sheep-loving doctor is probably the best performance in the film, if only for Wilder's ridiculous commitment to the part. The faux-Italian cinema spoof with Allen playing a macho man unable to bring his wife to coitus doesn't really ever get going. Another scene with an accidental transvestite is a riot, and only because Allen knows when to cut the joke and end the vignette. Another scene featuring the quote "I don't know if you've read my book, Advanced Sexual Positions: How to Achieve Them Without Laughing" and an "enormous tit" terrorizing the countryside is pure Allen. And the finale, and probably the film's most famous scene, is the inner workings of a man's mind during a date and eventually during sex.  Needless, and not surprisingly, to say, Allen plays a Sperm cell.


Overall, a choppy movie, but a clear direction of where it's going and what it wants to do.  The acting is what it needs to be, without many standouts even with a stellar cast.  Wilder's acting and Allen's script are the highlights, and it's a nice treat for lovers of Allen.  GRADE: B




.

TRUE GRIT

Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Starring Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin

Rooster Cogburn: I'm a foolish man who has been dragged into a goose chase by a girl in trousers and a nincompoop.

To have grit, one should have an indomitable spirit. For that grit to be true, one would need to subscribe to the theory that grit can achieve some sort of altruistic state of constant existence but that’s just not how grit goes, far as I see it. From where I’m standing, grit is something that, for those fortunate enough to have it inside, shows itself when life requires it, in those situations when you suddenly find yourself needing to get through something you can’t imagine getting through. In TRUE GRIT, directors Joel Coen and Ethan Coen exhibit a whole whack of grit getting through their first “remake” but I’m not convinced they ever reached any real truth along their journey.

TRUE GRIT is said to be an adaptation of the Charles Portis novel and not the 1969 Henry Hathaway film that starred John Wayne and won him an Academy Award for his performance as Rooster Cogburn. The role has now been appropriated by another Oscar winner, Jeff Bridges, and, while I cannot comment on the how the performances differ having not seen the original film, I can say that Bridges definitely lays down the law as a dirty boozer of a U.S. Marshall who has agreed to help one feisty, young lady (Hailee Steinfeld) find the man who killed her father, so that she can have him brought to justice. Matt Damon plays a bounty hunter who is also looking for the same man and so the three reluctantly embark on their mission. This is a western though so the pace of this mission is much more trot than gallop, leaving a lot of time to talk about the weather. The performances drive the film but not fast enough to have kept my interest in achieving the goal.

The Coen Brothers are indisputably two of the most talented contemporary film directors around and this is abundantly evident in TRUE GRIT. They take their craft very seriously and have clearly done their homework here. That said, the aimless nature of the western genre might have been too much for them as it seems to have exacerbated their philosophical tendencies to the point of meandering ramblings. The film can be gorgeous, thrilling and engaging but it took a little grit of my own to get through the leaner parts.