The Big Lebowski

Bunny Lebowski Is Missing

The Big Lebowski
USA/UK 1998
Written and Directed by The Coen Brothers
Universal Ltd Edition Blu Ray Book Zone B

I remember the first time I saw The Big Lebowski. It was at the end of April 1998 at the Metro Cinema on Rupert Street in London. The cinema is, sadly, now deceased but I remember I was alone and all through the film I was just in awe of what is, frankly, one of the greatest movie comedies ever committed to celluloid... I just had nobody to talk to about it. When I left I realised that the film was one of those rare beasts that is, as I exclaimed to myself at the time, ‘pure cinema’. This is the kind of amazing spectacle that completely justifies the art of film to anybody who would question the validity of the medium. It blew me away and I pretty much dragged a fair few people to see it over the course of the next month. A truly brilliant piece of magic.

I’ve now just got around to watching a limited edition book set I picked up maybe four or five years ago and, although I haven’t had time to watch the supplementary material (as I rarely do), it is packed to the brim with extras. And, more importantly, the film itself really stands the test of time. From it’s opening narrative from the great Sam Elliot to his address directly to the audience at the end of the picture, the film is a pure joy as we follow the exploits of a week or so in the life of Jeff ‘The Dude’ Lebowski, who is set on a mission by his millionaire namesake to be the ‘delivery guy’ for the ransom of The Big Lebowski’s wife Bunny. A job which turns into a convoluted mess of a plot which is an absolute joy to follow as the overly relaxed and accommodating, Fletch-like character becomes inexplicably embroiled in a bizarre double cross of a blackmail plot which is itself exploited by the potential victim of that plot.

I’ve mentioned Fletch above as perhaps being close kin to certain aspects of the character but perhaps only because of the similarity of the tropes of the genre The Coens are following here. This is pure Raymond Chandler/Dashiel Hammet style, hard boiled detective noir but shot through with a slobby but 'adrenalin rush' jab of broad humour and some nicely surrealistic moments... uniting in a work which is an experience first, a film second.

Played expertly by Jeff Bridges, Lebowski is aided or, frankly, more abetted by his companions Walter and Donnie, played brilliantly by John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. During his adventures he meets more and more bizarre characters played by the likes of Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reade (as Bunny, who was also perfect in the remarkable Josie And The Pussycats), Peter Stormare and John Turturro, who reprised his role earlier this year as ‘Jesus’ in his film The Jesus Rolls.

The plot is not something I’m going to dig into here... it’s a standard mystery with various reveals but it’s totally not important... the film is completely character driven and though it certainly needs a story to tie the whole thing together (just as Lebowski needs his rug to tie his room together) it is the brilliance of the characters, the people who perform then and the witty script which really maketh the movie here. Being as it’s by Joel and Ethan Coen, who I still find a bit hit and miss on their projects, the whole thing looks great too... and no wonder when they’ve got cinematographer Roger Deakins on board. I especially liked the very sharp focus, brightly coloured and contrasted stuff he shoots the second dream sequence, the Gutterballs porn parody, with. It looks fantastic and brings that whole sense of ‘epic’ to the silliness of the premise. This is a work of genius here, make no mistake.

I also love the way the dialogue kind of keeps refuelling itself from scene to scene too. I think the first two or three times I saw this it took a while to sink in but, the more you see it, the more you realise that a lot of Jeff Bridges’ dialogue is culled from things he’s heard other people say in a prior sequence. It’s amazing how somebody will say something to him in one scene and he will then say the exact same phrase he’s picked up to somebody else in a later scene. This kind of eclectic approach to the dialogue is fantastic and, though it’s obviously very rigid in the way it evolves in the writing, Bridges makes it feel so off-the-cuff and natural that... well, as I said, you might not even notice it for a while.

There are a lot of little sly references to other pop culture elements in the film but, with the structure of dialogue and the way the piece folds in on itself by building on its own foundations, some of these do kind of get lost in the mix on first or second viewings and, even if you do spot them, like the various overt shout outs to the TV show Branded (The Dude even sings the theme tune when he’s drunk), they are often fictionalised with, in this case, a fake writer and a ‘way off’ episode count.

Probably my favourite reference, though, is the fact that the nihilists fronted by Peter Stormare, who are among those who give The Dude and his friends such a hard time in the film, were also part of a once famous, fictional ‘euro pop’ group who are so obviously a version of the group Kraftwerk. Even their album cover features a nice parody of exactly the style of 70s/80s artwork the band would use as their front jackets and the name of their group is the name of one of the band’s famous hits, Autobahn.

Oh, saying that I also love the Lenin/Lennon confusion moment with Donnie repeatedly saying... “I am the Walrus.”

And I think I’ll leave it there. I could probably go on to say quite a lot about the movie if I had the time but I don’t want to get into a full blown analysis of every minute of the film on here and, frankly, if you’ve never seen it before, I certainly don’t want to spoil it for you. All I will say is that, despite a mainly needle-dropped soundtrack comprising of songs and only a few minutes of Carter Burwell score, The Big Lebowski is still an absolute masterpiece and, probably still, the greatest movie The Coens ever put together. This is one of those films that deserves another look every seven years or so, for sure. Recommended for absolutely anyone who loves cinema.

Hail, Caesar!

Hot Hail

Hail, Caesar!
2016 UK/USA/Japan
Directed by The Coen Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Ha! You know, when I first saw a trailer for this movie on the internet sometime last year, I thought the idea of this one looked promising but I was in no way expecting this to be a good movie. It looked like a whole bunch of actors and film-makers having a whale of a time and, quite often when this happens, you often find the people making the movie are going to have a far better time than the audience who are going to be watching this. I might cite the 1967 version of Casino Royale or 2015’s Mortdecai (reviewed here) as examples where this tactic seems to seriously backfire on the studio.

Another problem I have, and which made me fairly wary is that, much as I love some of the Coen’s movies dearly, I do find them a bit hit and miss and, over the last five or six years, I have found their movies definitely in the miss category, for me. I love the Coens of The Big Liebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn’t There but some of their other stuff seems to be less emotionally involving to me.

Well, I needn’t have worried on either count, as it happens, because although it took me 20 minutes or so to warm up to their latest opus, Hail, Caesar!, I absolutely loved it, once it got going. The film stars Josh Brolin as famous Hollywood ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix, a fictional version of the real person who works here in a made up studio where thinly disguised ‘Coenised’ movies from Hollywoodland’s rich legacy are in production. When famous film star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a kind of Charlton Heston via Victor Mature type, is kidnapped from the set before the completion of his latest movie Hail, Caesar!, it’s up to Eddie to get him back while still trouble shooting other problems with various stars who work for the studio.

In a nice touch to the William Wyler version of Ben Hur, the fictional Hail, Caesar! shares the exact same subtitle of that movie, A Tale Of The Christ. There’s even a hilarious scene where Clooney is trying to channel the same look of reverence that Heston does in Ben Hur, when Christ gives him water on his journey to be a galley slave, although the roles are slightly twisted around here, just like a lot of other stuff in this movie is nicely subverted... such as the gay subtext highlighted with a joke in the sailor’s song and dance number performed by Channing Tatum as Burt Gurney, this film’s equivalent of Gene Kelley.

Other people who populate this film are Tilda Swinton in a kind of dual role playing a kind of ‘twins’ version of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Ralph Fiennes as Laurence Laurentz and Scarlet Johannson doing a kind of earthy version of famous water dancer Esther Williams. The character which made it completely watchable for me though, is the role of Alden Ehrenreich as ‘singing cowboy’ sensation Hobie Doyle. I don’t know who this guy is but he’s phenomenal. Sure, he gets some good laughs in scenes with Ralph Fiennes character as the studio attempt to ‘change his image’ but it’s his other role in the film which really help bring this all to life.

Hobie is obviously a parody of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autrey cowboy stars of yesteryear and can perform some neat tricks as demonstrated here. He even has his very close parody of a Gabby Hayes style sidekick who, obviously, gets all the laughs from the fictional audience when he takes his date to see one of his films. And about that ‘date’. This movie is very much a film watcher’s movie... like a Quentin Tarantino piece, a lot of the pleasure in watching it is derived from how many famous movie references you can pick up on. A real movie spotter’s pursuit, is this. We only hear her name teased a few times in the movie, for a while, and as soon as I heard her name, Carlotta Valdez, my brain was on fire. I spent the next twenty minutes or so of the movie agonising where I’d heard it before until it finally kicked in and I realised that this was the name of the fictional, historical figure that Kim Novak is pretending to be channeling for the benefit of James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, are they going to go the whole hog and make her look like the ‘Portrait of Carlotta’ right down to the iconic hairstyle in the Hitchcock movie?

As the film wore on and I realised the Coens weren’t taking the strength of their parody too seriously (I’ll get to that in a minute) I then started thinking that maybe they were going to have Hobie dating a parody of the Mexican Spitfire, Lupe Velez, herself. As it happens, it turns out Hobie is dating a version of the famous actress Carmen Miranda and, it has to be said, Veronica Osorio, the wonderful actress playing her here, makes it more than apparent who she’s supposed to be in her very first scene. She is an absolute delight in the role and her scenes with Alden Ehrenreich, as Hobie entertains her with both a real lasso and, later, a spaghetti lasso, are just so charming they will probably win your heart right over. However, Hobie’s solo scenes as he goes after the kidnappers are equally great and... I’ll briefly mention those in a little while.

George Clooney, of course, is also brilliant in his role and when it turns out he’s kidnapped by communist writers, his scenes with them are pretty funny too. And it was nice to see Patrick Fischler as one of those writers... I always wondered what had happened to that guy who played the video store clerk in Ghost World and... here he is. He has a very distinctive face which makes him a good person if you want someone to stand out and add texture to a crowd. Clooney is marvellous, though, and the more stuff he makes these days which border on almost parodying himself, to an extent (with a little bit of stretch), forces me to admire him more and more as both an actor and a star as the years go by. Some people might be afraid to take on this kind of role but, as usual, Clooney gives it his all.

Now there are some problems with the parody in this movie, to be sure, and I’ll highlight those soon enough, but one of the things which made me stop worrying about the authenticity of a lot of the stuff on show in the movie is that, it soon becomes obvious that the Coen’s just don’t worry too much about making it all authentic. These are broad strokes which create a brief impression rather than full blown homage and, as such, it kinda works at its own level. Where it’s less satisfying is when some aspects of a parody are finely tuned to the smallest details but maybe slightly tarnished by another element being less so...

For example, the sailor’s song and dance number, headed up by Channing Tatum, is an incredible movie moment. It’s clear that the choreography and dialogue of those big MGM mid-fifties numbers have been studied here to the nth degree. And Tatum has obviously been looking at Gene Kelly and the way he moves, the way his face expresses (or doesn’t always) and the way he delivers his lines... it all works really well. As does the consistency of the simplicity of the colour scheme of the set being used. However, what doesn’t work about this scene is the veracity of those colours themselves. The MGM films used to be... well, over the top and almost over saturated beyond belief in those movies... the colours here, while simply wrought, have none of the luminosity of the hues used in the films the Coens are trying to emulate in this scene... which kind of spoiled the overall effect of it, for me.

Another example would be Carter Burwell's score throughout the movie. Now this must have been a dream job for a composer to work on as he has to cover a range of musical styles due to the nature of the content... but I noticed that he was more successful in some styles than others... although that might not have been his fault. For instance, the music he delivers for the Hail, Caesar! movie within a movie scenes are typical in structure and tone of the kinds of scores these films were getting by the likes of Dr. Miklos Rozsa but... well, they just don’t seem to have the same punch or over the top-ness, over scored quality of the originals. However, like I said, it might not be the composer’s fault, it might just be mixed too far back into the background compared to the way the music would have been mixed into a genuine Roman/Religious epic of the mid 1950s so... well I’ll find out once the CD arrives.

The composer does do some really great stuff here too though and, getting back to Hobie going after the kidnappers, the scenes where the Coen’s get almost metatextual and use the vernacular of the 1940s and 1950s film noirs to tell that part of Hobie’s story is faithfully backed up by Burwell with something which really does the trick in those sequences. So, yeah... looking forward to this score arriving in the post sometime soon.

And that’s what I thought of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! Once it starts coasting along the movie is a real breath of fresh, or maybe that should be reconditioned, air midst a cinematic climate where no other film is being made quite like this one at the moment. So as far as subject matter and approach are concerned, there’s nothing else like it out there currently... so if you want to see something different then check this one out. I, for one, had a great time with this movie and if you’re a fan of old school Hollywood movies then you’ll probably have a good evening with this one. Definitely a big thumbs up for this one... if I had a massive, giant thumb to do that with.

Things Ain’t What They Rooster Be

True Grit US 2010

Directed by

The Coen Brothers

Still just about playing

at UK cinemas if you

can find one...

Warning! OK, this article will probably contain spoilers in it... even for people who have seen the original 1969 version of True Grit. I’m not sure about people who have read the book because, frankly, I haven’t.

I should also warn potential readers that this will probably be, like my previous post, somewhat short, because I find myself at somewhat of a loss of interesting things to say about this movie... even though I liked it a great deal.

The Coen Brothers have always been a bit hit and miss for me. I remember going to see stuff like Blood Simple, Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing at the cinema at the time of their release and thinking... yeah, technically brilliant but there’s no real emotion in these movies is there? Then they hit a phase with me where they could do no wrong and brought three movies out in a row which were all pretty good... The Big Liebowski (basically one of the great pieces of cinema of our time), The Man Who Wasn’t There and Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Then I kinda lost my way with them and didn’t like a lot of their choices for material and, worse, when I did get to see their later output... didn’t find myself enthralled or entertained as I had been by earlier efforts (even as much as their initial stuff). As a result I didn’t bother with their movie No Country For Old Men and now I wish I had because everybody keeps telling me how brilliant it is.

Now I don’t like it when the Coen Brothers do remakes and stayed well clear of The Ladykillers when they turned their collective eye to that because... well come on? Remake The Ladykillers? Why not just remake Citizen Kane or Star Wars while you’re at it. I initially felt the same about True Grit but then somebody said that it’s more an adaptation of the original novel than a remake and so... well I let the film slip back onto my radar.

Now it’s been a long time since I saw the original version of True Grit... maybe a couple of decades... and so I really don’t remember it all that well. However, one thing that I did remember about the original was Kim Darby in the role of Mattie Ross being absolutely sensational and how the relationship between her and John Wayne’s portrayal of Rooster Cogburn kinda carried the film. I was therefore really annoyed when the Coens’ cast someone other than Ellen Page (from Juno) in the role of Mattie Ross... after all, Ellen Page is pretty much channelling Kim Darby in every film anyway isn’t she? She would have been perfect. If they ever want to do a remake of The Karate Killers then they need to get Page into the picture.

Anyway, I was kinda wounded when I learned Page wasn’t in it but I went along anyway and I have to say... I had a pretty good time with it.

It’s not a remake as such but considering I could hardly remember a thing about the original it was surprising how much of the original was coming back to me when I saw this movie. Seriously... either the original was really faithful to the novel other than the prologue and epilogue book ends or this was more a remake than people would have led me to believe. I hope it’s a case of the former because I don’t see the point of a remake to be honest... and even though I didn’t remember much of the original, this felt pretty much scene by scene to me.

Hailee Steinfeld is pretty darn good, actually, as Mattie Ross. Jeff Bridges is always good but there’s not a heck of a lot of difference (to these nostalgic eyes) between his performance and John Wayne’s original and Matt Damon as LaBoeuf is perhaps, if anything, a little less sympathetic than the way Glen Campbell played him in the original.

Actually, that’s an interesting point to note. The characters in this version are all a lot less sympathetic than in the original and the only ones I really felt sorry for, perhaps perversely, were some of the villains. I just don’t care about the main protagonists in this version enough to root for them all that much and the final death blow on my sympathies lies in the one-armed version of Mattie Ross at the end of the film and how hardened and unlikeable she turned out to be. I think the only one in this picture who I really felt sorry for was the horse, Little Blackie, who Rooster rides to his death to get Mattie to a doctor (securing that death with a bullet to the brain of the horse in question).

But for all this I found myself still quite gripped by the action on screen and caught up in it to a point I didn’t expect. I think it might be just because there are so few Westerns made these days... I even liked Jonah Hex whose titular character was played by Josh Brolin and who winds up here playing Tom Chaney, the man Mattie Ross has sworn revenge to bring to justice as the killer of her father.

A lot as been made of Carter Burwell’s score and he’s certainly a fine composer but I found this one lacking. Listen to Elmer Bernstein’s original and you know the kind of scoring you’ll get on the action sequences... the scoring on this one is quite laid back and more atmosphere based than blistering leitmotif. Nothing wrong with that, of course. That was the late, great Bernard Herrmanns approach to most of his scores too and that worked like gangbusters... I just felt like the music on this one was a little underwhelming at times. Not necessarily blaming Burwell for this though... might have just had his score dialled down too low in the final mix for all I know.

At the end of the day, True Grit is a solid piece of Western filmmaking but, you know what? It seems totally unnecessary to have remade it. It really doesn’t do a whole lot different from its predecessor and one wonders if the Coens’ didn’t just take the money and rune on this one... we all know how much Hollywood loves commissioning remakes these days.

If you like a good Western yarn told in a convincing manner then the new version of True Grit is definitely worth checking out... just don’t go expecting anything earth-shattering or groundbreaking on this one.

Fill your hands you sunnuva -!