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.

The Dead Don't Die

Fourth Wall Of The Dead

The Dead Don't Die
USA/Sweden 2019 Directed by Jim Jarmusch
UK cinema release print

Warning: Some very slight spoilerage.

I’ve always liked Jim Jarmusch as a writer/director, since first seeing his early masterpiece Down By Law in the late 1980s. I’ve not seen all of his movies... there are a few gaps... but I have seen and enjoyed most of them. Every now and again he will make a movie that seems to be a complete side step from his usual fayre. The first time I noticed this was in his truly excellent Ghost Dog - The Way Of The Samurai but he also took me by surprise by making a ‘vampire movie’ a few years back called Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed by me here). Both of those films were much more commercially minded, it seems to me (either by design or by fluke) but each still transcended their genre trappings and held the key elements that I tend to associate with Jarmusch’s work over the years...

Those being: They were funny, poignant and highlighted the alienation of people sharing different languages and cultures even as they drew together.

So when it was announced that Jarmusch had made a zombie movie, I was interested... not just because I happen to like that sub-genre of horror movie anyway but because I knew, coming from Jarmusch, that it would be like no other zombie movie that ever came before it. Well... I got that right.

The film stars Bill Murray and Adam Driver, both regular collaborators with the director (check out Driver’s role in the directors last non-documentary movie Paterson, which I reviewed here) as two cops who are the main police presence in their small town of Centerville, along with the only other cop in town played by Chloë Sevigny. And they are all supported by a star studded cast, many of whom have worked with the director before, including Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, RZA, Selena Gomez, Iggy Pop and Caleb Landry Jones (in a wonderful turn as a petrol and film/comic book merchandise dealer who wears a Nosferatu t-shirt). And, as you would expect from a cast like this (or pretty much any cast under this director, actually), they are all pretty amazing. Between them, Murray and Driver keep the mood sombre with their perpetually downbeat expressions and this helps maintain the minimalistic, gloomy atmosphere of a town, one of many, which has suddenly been overrun with a plague of zombies.

Now, I think this film is going to really divide people and there’s an element that even I, while laughing out loud at a lot of the wonderful humour on display here, found somewhat annoying. I’ll get to just what that is in a minute but let me first look at what this film both shares and, often, doesn’t share with the zombie genre in general.

Well, the common traits are a marked goriness when the humans are attacked although, conversely, when older zombies are out walking there is just dust instead of blood, which is possibly more accurate (I’m not sure, not being an expert on the undead myself). There’s also... and this is quite blatant here and almost being done just to check off boxes, it seems... the comparison of zombies who, like their nearest on-screen antecedents in the George A. Romero zombie flicks, are a satire of various aspects of our culture. Indeed, Jarmusch almost goes over the top to prove a point here by comparing some of the zombies to mobile phone/social media users and demonstrating this while it’s already been established earlier on in the text of the film what the ‘wifi’ so desired by the walking dead has already failed in the town.

However, it does do a lot which the modern, post-Romero zombie movie doesn’t often do. For example, it gives us a pseudo-scientific reason for the outbreak of the undead (which somehow comes in two stages in its ressurectional properties and thus renders the narrative nonsensical anyway... possibly what Jarmusch wants here) whereas most modern zombie films don’t try to find a rationale behind the undead shenanigans, they just deliberately side step it and cut to the chase. Here, Jarmusch has introduced the concept of polar fracking throwing the earth off its axis and this somehow raising the dead. Honestly, though... I think this is just another excuse to heavy hand the various metaphors used within the genre and, in some ways poke fun of it.

And that’s where I have my main problem with this film... the lack of respect for the genre. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a director like Jarmusch seeming to say that films made in these kinds of genres are dumb and I’m more than happy for him to have a pop at them. However, the way in which he does it, with a blatant disregard for his own story mechanics where its later shown that... quite literally... anything goes (and if you’ve seen the movie I’m talking about both the final exit scene of Tilda Swinton’s character and the awareness of its non-feasibility in the script by Adam Driver’s character). And this is a big problem for me because, as I’ll get to in a minute, this kinda feels like the director is insulting the intelligence of the kinds of people who would turn out for a film like this... or at least that’s the way it felt to me, anyway.

Also, there’s a lot of referential, postmodernistic jokes in the main body of the film and while the director has done this just a little in the past, usually with a lot more of a story impact than the ‘thrown off’, almost Tarantino-esque way he does it here, I think this dumbs down the movie somewhat too. Again, don’t get me wrong because I had a little chuckle when I saw the late, great director Sam Fuller’s name on a tombstone but this film seems to be loaded with this sort of stuff and, outside of the obvious and loving references to Pittsburgh (where Romero plied his zombie trade), there seemed to be to be way too much of this kind of thing and it felt like the high calibre director was kind of slumming it, to some extent. Jarmusch is better than this, is what I kept thinking... it just seemed a little out of character for him.

Okay, so there were a few walk outs in the audience when I saw this (I’m pleased to say because, if someone like Jarmusch doesn’t get some walk outs then he’s almost failed) and I think this may be due to the quite blatant self awareness of some of the characters, Adam Driver’s in particular... and their inability or disinterest in helping themselves out in terms of where the script is taking them. So, yes, Adam Driver and Bill Murray’s characters both show, from very early in the film, that they are characters in a film and this kinda grates in the way it’s done. We’re not being asked to share in any peril or the particularly humourous modes of speech that the various characters explore (including cycles of repeat phrases which got me smiling quite a lot, it has to be said) because we can’t invest with them in any way as characters. In fact, we are being asked to interact with them on a more metatextual level, it seems but... only when it doesn’t get in the way of the on-screen action... which is a bit like the director is trying to ‘eat all the pies’ and not helpful in creating a film which holds together tonally, despite the minimalistic air of cynicism and acceptance that Jarmusch pulls from the air almost effortlessly.

Despite all these criticisms though, I personally really enjoyed The Dead Don't Die. It’s not ever going to make the top of my list in terms of favourite Jarmusch movies but it’s an entertaining piece and I think long time fans of the director shouldn’t have as much of a problem with it as a more commercially minded audience expecting to see a ‘cool zombie movie’ might have. Recommended to cineastes who are not worried about seeing what I think is personally too many directorial experiments thrown together into the same film. It’s interesting, funny and entertaining so, honestly, what more could you want from a night out at your local cinema?