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.

Frogs

Each Spawn I Die

Frogs
USA 1972 Directed by George McCowan
American International Pictures/
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: There are spoilers in here but the real thing I’m warning you about is ever attempting to watch this movie.

Wow. So I’d seen Frogs popping up quite a lot over the last few years on Twitter and when I saw the UK Blu Ray release at a ‘bargain basement’ price sporting a cover depicting a giant frog with a human hand in it’s mouth, hovering over a woman drowning in quicksand, I was pretty sure that this would be the kind of ‘so bad it’s good’ movie that I like to look at every now and again. Alas, having now seen it and finding it to be, so bad it’s nearly unwatchable in its dullness, I can’t help but think that the company putting this one out should be paying their customers to watch this one.

Okay, so first things first... it’s kind of a curio in that it features two legendary actors, one nearing the end of his big screen release career and another who had only been acting for around five years when this thing was made. So on the one hand we have Ray Milland playing Jason Crockett as the head of a rich family who gather for a couple of weeks every year for his birthday in his island mansion in Florida... and on the other hand we have a young Sam Elliot, playing a freelance eco photographer with the unlikely name of Pickett Smith. It’s Smith who we trail through an extended credits sequence as he rides his canoe around the swamps and waters of the island as he takes photographs depicting the evils of human pollution and its effects on the local ecology. Little does he know that the local ecosystem is about to bite back hard on human kind... oh wait... let me be straight about this in a way that the people who marketed this film aren’t... Little does he know that the local ecosystem is about to mostly mind its own business while people seem to just die around it in completely avoidable and preventable ways.

This is the truth you need to know before delving into the almost unwatchable dullness that is Frogs... there are absolutely no deadly frogs in this movie. Oh, sure, there are hundreds of frogs here, most of whom apparently fled their captivity for good and went off to do their own thing while making this movie, escaping their handler and returning to the wild. Yeah, gazillions of frogs... there’s just no frog death or, really, any kind of death remotely connected to our amphibious friends. And, bearing in mind how it’s been promoted, the film-makers must have felt pretty guilty about this I reckon because, right at the end of the closing credits, there’s a quick animation of a frog swallowing a human hand, just like on the poster. A kind of token afterthought to at least attempt to somehow tie it in to the sales pitch, I would guess

Instead, what we have are snakes, crocodiles (or possibly alligators, I can never tell), surprisingly deadly spiders, lizards, birds, a token scorpion, poisonous fumes and... in one notable case... a half decent sized turtle. There are no special effects with any of these creatures, they are just normal sized versions you can find in real life and with a lot of edits and placements to try and convince us that they are purposefully interacting with the various members of the Crocket family, who inexplicably wander off on their own to do something and then run afoul of the ‘pollution mad’ beasts. Plus a lot of frogs are just thrown into shot every scene so we don’t forget the movie is called Frogs, even though said frogs seem to have absolutely no input on the course of the story although, it has to be said, that in most cases they are better actors than a lot of the human performers in the film.

So, yeah, people will just run about the swamp, get scared by a snake, run off somewhere else and then fall, stumble around a bit and then get bitten. Or, as in the case of a greenhouse victim, some lizards will knock over various bottles labelled with words like ‘poison’ and then, when the somewhat naive guy goes to investigate what’s going on with all that toxic smoke, he coughs a bit and dies from... I dunno... slightly lizard related injury I guess. One of the ladies was supposed to fall in quick sand and die and you can actually see this death in the trailer (not to mention the poster) but it was then deemed too tame so, instead, she runs through the swamp, stumbles around a bit and then gets bitten and, because she has been bitten by something, her face turns somewhat green (in some of the shots).

Other deaths include a woman who succumbs to being in the water while... I think... we are supposed to surmise a turtle has somehow bit her to death but, perhaps the most ridiculous way a person ‘croaks it’ here (and it’s a film filled with ridiculous excuses for death scenes, as you can see) is when a guy stumbles and falls in the general vicinity of a few tarantulas (or other venomous breed of spider). Somehow, these tree dwelling creatures manage to cover said, quite unnecessarily squirming figure... just get up man!... with a web in less than 30 seconds. An apparently strong web which looks, really, just like somebody got some clumps of dried, non threatening grass and thrown them on the guy. Hang on... I think I might have just discovered the secret of the not so special effects in this movie. This looks so unconvincing and when the spiders are dropped onto the guy, he takes a long time yelling in an effort, I think, for the film makers to have something to pad the already dull running time out.

And in between every scene or transition, shots of watching frogs are inserted to continue to remind the audience of the title of the film, although I can’t imagine why they would call it that in the first place when there are no killer frogs anywhere in the picture.

Another completely pointless death is the protracted... “oh wait, we forgot to tie that bit up so lets go back to it after we’ve already had the concluding scene of the movie” moment where Ray Milland’s character, left alone in his mansion, is killed by... um... I dunno. I think he has a heart attack maybe just from being in the presence of a whole host of lizards and snakes. He’s wheelchair bound but you’d think this would just make him faster but, no, he somehow seems to die of complete startlement anyway. Well, I say he dies but apparently, Milland was so sick to death of the production by this point that he stormed off the set three days earlier than he was supposed to and a double had to be used for some of the shots in that final sequence. So there you go... not sure if it was a happy set or not but, I guess, for Ray Milland it certainly wasn’t.

And, there’s not much else to say about Frogs. Apart from a nicely over the top Les Baxter stinger when the first, harmless frog comes on the screen and a J&B sighting which just made me think I would have been better off watching something Italian, Sam Elliot as a young actor is about the only interesting thing in this movie and even his smile can’t stop this film from being a deathly dull watch. I wouldn’t, I have to say, wish the movie Frogs on anyone, even connoisseurs of B-movies... it’s that boring and energy sapping. Sure I’m glad I saw it because, with a stupid poster like that it would have been a lifelong regret if I hadn’t. That being said, I’m not sure if that outweighs the regret of having to shell out £6 for this thing in the first place. This was not the fun movie I was expecting it to be... avoid at all costs.

The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot

Foot Im Himmel

The Man Who Killed Hitler
And Then The Bigfoot
2018 USA Directed by Robert D. Krzykowski
UK cinema release print.

Wow... this movie is absolutely phenomenal. I love it when something you thought might be pretty good turns out to be something even greater than you were expecting. I mean, for a film with the title of The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot, you kind of expect it to be quirky and kind of fun but, well... lets just say that unless Avengers Endgame And Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker are absolute masterpieces, then I suspect this film will be the best one I see all year. Certainly it will probably be the most moving.

The film starts off with the back story mission of young Calvin Barr, played in the 1940s by Aidan Turner, as we see him infiltrate a building which houses Hitler, as he goes to kill him. We then cut to the ‘present day’, older version of Calvin, as played by the one and only Sam Elliot, as he remembers all of this. And when I say present day... it’s not really made completely clear in the text what decade this film is set in but I did notice that a grocery clerk in the movie is reading a copy of the Heavy metal Presents, square bound graphic novel adaptation of Ridley Scott’s Alien so, yeah, I guess that dates the movie to 1979 as to when the events depicted are supposed to be taking place (I still have my copy of that sitting in a box behind me as I write this review).

We then get a classic style ‘four thugs try to mug the lead character’ scene which is used to show that, while Calvin is fairly old now, he’s still more than enough of a match against knives and guns when push comes to shove. When Calvin parks his car up on the way back to the home he shares with his labrador, there is a perfect freeze frame with the title of the movie superimposed across the shot with a vertical strip down the middle to separate The Man Who Killed Hitler And from Then The Bigfoot... and the whole thing looks and feels like it’s straight out of a low budget, 1970s US made exploitation movie. It's absolutely spot on with that vibe but to dismiss this film as an homage to that would definitely not be 'on the mark' as this movie far exceeds the capacity of the majority of those old movies in terms of the drama and pathos which is injected through the character of Calvin Barr by both actors who play him here. As you would expect, Sam Elliot rules in this (doesn’t he always... such a contrast from  the last thing I saw him in, Frogs, which I’ll put up on here as a review at some point soon, after my Easter reviews go up) but, I have to say, so does Aidan Turner as the younger version of him, who you will also see a lot more of in flashback throughout the course of the movie.

The basic plot is that, Calvin has become an almost mythical (behind closed doors) person after he managed to perform the task mentioned in the first half of the film's title and, because of a certain very rare quality he possesses, which I’m not going to go into here, he is sent to kill the bigfoot because, for more reasons I won’t go into here for fear of spoiling your appreciation of this wonderful piece of art, he’s pretty much the only person who can do it. And he has to go in and do it on his own, for even more reasons which will become clear to you with one of the slow build reveals which this movie uses to keep the audience engaged, in suspense and very much rooting for Calvin.

Calvin’s tragedy, as depicted in the movie, is that he’s a man alone (apart form his trusty dog), through his own choice... haunted by the memories of what he has done and all the things that have happened throughout his life. And, just like a good Sergio Leone movie (which this film in no way harkens back to stylistically), the story is one of memories and the person shaped by those memories, as the narrative goes back and forth between the two time periods, allowing both actors to shine and build up a picture of the man who is Calvin Barr.

The director plays with time in another way too. Asides from the wonderful segues between periods, he also does some amazing things which lull the audience into the film before, often quite gently, pulling the rug from under us in terms of where things are heading. For instance, when Elliot takes a pair of shoes off, the camera takes a slow, deep dive into those shoes before cutting to a moment which isn’t, as you might be expecting by this point, just another jump back through the decades but is instead used as a hard edit to visually punctuate a cut to a scene a few minutes later and draw attention to the importance of the slow contemplation of a certain closed box at some point soon.

Or there’s the wonderful moment where we see Calvin alone and standing at the threshold of the terrain where the bigfoot is going to be located where we are suddenly, by way of the edit, thrust into action with the titular creature, who is out of the frame again before we even get a chance to properly register that it was even there. Our first glimpse of the Bigfoot of the movie is, therefore, such that we only have a vague impression of the creature before the hunt is back on. And it’s this whole way the director has of pulling the audience in with slow and beautiful cinematography before a quick, almost aggressive edit pulls you into something that you aren’t necessarily expecting, that seems to be an underlying modus operandi for the movie. And it works wonderfully well, it has to be said.

The film is beautiful and quite poignant regarding the main character but the ponderous nature of the main protagonist and his past relationship with a woman, played here by Caitlin FitzGerald, in no way dilutes the wonderful action sequences which also, along with some brilliant scoring, pep up the pace at various key points in the narrative. The Bigfoot featured in the, somewhat, slow build to a surprise of a showdown, the writing of which seems to exactly mirror the intent of the editing style in this film, is a wonderful creature when you finally get to focus on it for long enough and the confrontation, coming before a long and brilliant wind down of a false ending followed by... stuff I can’t tell you about without spoiling things... is appropriately violent and intense. There’s also a nice element in the movie which is basically a red herring in that we never get to find out what a specific artefact is but, I have to say, the dramatic melancholy invoked by what Hitchcock would have called a McGuffin works really well and is on the level here, somewhat, of the final whispered words of Bill Murray to Scarlett Johansson in the last moments of Sofia Coppolla’s Lost In Translation.
All this is supported by a brilliant score by composer Joe Kraemer, who does some really great and subtle writing here, along with some deliberately not so subtle, propulsive music which helps pep up the pace in those scenes where ‘stuff’ is about to go down. It all kind of fits in with that 1970s vibe too. In fact, there’s one sequence in the film, where Sam Elliot reaches the peak of a mountain he’s been climbing, where Kraemer’s score sounds like early to mid 1970s John Williams at his best. It’s that great a score and I’m so glad I managed to somehow snag one of the first 100 of the limited edition CD releases out of the gate from La La Land records because it’s been signed by the composer and, frankly, I can’t wait to hear this cue again (hope it’s on there). I’m going to spin this thing right after I’m done writing this thing... which is pretty much now.

I think by now you’ve probably figured out just how much I love The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot and, frankly, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in cinema, the technique of how you put together narrative without having to rely solely on dialogue and, frankly, anyone who’s interested in how you can construct a compelling story and not just a bunch of post-modernistic references strung together to look like one. An absolutely wonderful movie which you should all go and see. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.