"FARGO" AND "NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN" may have all the awards, and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" may have the soundtrack, but "The Big Lebowski" is arguably the Coen brothers' biggest film of all.
It's certainly the only one with its own festival.
Ten years ago, however, it was a critical and commercial flop: another smart movie about dumb people, a genre the Coens may not have created but have certainly mastered.
Yet "The Big Lebowski" never condescends to its characters, as many of their films do. In fact, the Coens show uncharacteristic affection for the main character, a perpetually stoned and pathologically laid-back bowler named the Dude (played with stoned slyness by Jeff Bridges).
As he bumbles through a Chandleresque mystery involving a wealthy baron and a band of German nihilists ("Ve believe in nuzzink!"), the Dude comes across as a bizarre masculine ideal, his narcotized demeanor almost a zen state.
Continue Reading "A Strike for the Coens: 'The Big Lebowski'" »
IN A PERFECT WORLD, teenage Diane Lane, her hair in a two-tone skunk 'do and her eyes lidded with bright-red bands of makeup, would be a rock icon.
Finding an intuitive balance between righteously pissed off and achingly vulnerable, she sneers, screams and sobs her way through "Ladies and Gentlemen ... The Fabulous Stains" as Corinne "Third Degree" Byrnes, a teenage orphan who uses punk as a means of escape from her dead-end Pennsylvania town and becomes a sellout in the process.
Rhino's new DVD edition of the 1981 movie is a long time coming, but the commentary track from Lane (as well as from director Lou Adler and co-star Laura Dern) more than compensates for the wait. Listening to the actress describe doing a nude scene — at 15 years old! — is squirm-inducing, but she reminisces casually and hilariously, mostly surprised at her younger self.
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CULTS: NOT A GOOD THING. Cult films: One of the best guilty pleasures around.
Not every film can be a blockbuster like "Titanic" or "The Dark Knight," but that doesn't mean it's not adored by droves of ardent fans. See the '80s Brat Pack films, "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "A Clockwork Orange" — though not necessarily commercially successful, each has gained infamy as a cult classic.
And thanks to the Internet (props to Al Gore), films that might have flown under the radar when first released can gain new acclaim. Enter "The Big Lebowski," the Coen Brothers' film about the Dude and his adventure when trying to deliver a pretty sizable ransom for a certain millionaire.
It's been a decade since "The Big Lebowski" — hailed by The Independent last year as "the first cult film of the Internet era" — was released, and today marks the release of the 10th anniversary edition DVD of the movie.
But if "The Big Lebowski" was the first Internet cult film, what are some other films that have captured the hearts and minds of those with a high-speed habit? Here are five flicks that deserve to be part of that collection.
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AT SOME POINT in the 1970s, the BBC erased about half of the television series "Not Only .. But Also" from its archives, which was a devastating crime on two counts. First, it eradicated historic footage of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's early routines from the mid-1960s, which influenced generations of British comedy from "Monty Python" to "The Office." Second, those clips would have been roll-on-the-floor funny.
In 1990, at the urging of Cook, BBC delved into its archives, salvaged the remaining footage, and assembled six episodes of the best surviving material, which was rebroadcast as "The Best of ... What's Left of ... Not Only ... But Also." In lieu of the exhaustive box set that many fans dream about, BBC United is releasing those six episodes on a single DVD, with a short documentary from 1974.
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WHAT SCHOOL GRANTS this Master of Horror degree, and how recently was the institution accredited?
"Masters of Horror," the strangely popular Showtime series that ostensibly celebrates those filmmakers who have most profoundly impacted the genre, fails to live up to any part of its title with the possible exception of "of". Each self-contained episode showcases a different director, cast and crew telling a supposedly scary story, but judging from this second season DVD set, the show has only a tenuous grasp of horror and its purported masters are merely genre journeymen. Its cleverest idea seems to be packaging the eleven discs in a skull, which admittedly makes a great paperweight.
This type of serial concept has a long history in horror, dating back to the 1940s with EC Comics' controversial comic books and to the 1950s with "The Twilight Zone." More recently, HBO's long-running "Tales from the Crypt" and movies like "Creepshow" have revived the serial format, and NBC created its own horror franchise, "Fear Itself." The first season of "Masters of Horror" fit nicely within that sensibility; it was mostly pretty clunky, but there were enough inspired episodes (Lucky McKee's "Sick Girl," John Landis' "Homecoming") to prove that horror serials could still pack a few twisted scares in a "Hostel" world.
Continue Reading "DVD Review: 'Masters of Horror: Season 2'" »
"DELICATESSEN" BEGINS WITH one of the most ingenious credit sequences in recent memory. Following a short but bizarre prologue, the film cuts to a pile of junk, tracking around the objects to reveal each crew member's name in an apt setting: The composer, for instance, appears on the label of a broken record.
It's lovingly detailed, a prop-department triumph, yet what makes it all the more impressive is that it was done in one shot.
That sequence makes an appropriate introduction to the skewed and darkly whimsical world of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and designer Marc Caro. Prior to 1991, the duo had collaborated for more than a decade on animated and live-action shorts, but "Delicatessen" is their first sustained work. Enthusiastically received at the time, it launched their careers: Jeunet later directed "Alien 4" and "Amelie," and Caro's art direction inspired a legion of young directors like Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry.
IN THE TV VERSION of New York City's Upper East Side, coke addictions run rampant, school uniforms get replaced with couture, everyone is hiding something — and there's always someone watching: Gossip Girl.
Based on the trashy teenage novels of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar, The CW's "Gossip Girl" is probably the best show you're not watching. Despite tons of controversy from the Parents Television Council (or maybe because of it — OMFG!), "Gossip Girl" is getting more hype than ever, with the show's second season debuting Sept. 1.
And now is the perfect time to catch up on all the back-stabbing bitchery that Kristen Bell ("Veronica Mars," "Heroes") can narrate, as the first season of "Gossip Girl" hits DVD on Aug. 19.
With all the slickness of "The O.C." — "Gossip Girl" creator Josh Schwartz was also behind all things Ryan and Marissa back on Fox — the convoluted love triangles of "One Tree Hill" and the screwed-up parents of "Less Than Zero," "Gossip Girl" is here to take you for one "mind-blowingly inappropriate" ride — one of many "bad" reviews co-opted for the TV show's fall advertising campaign.
With all that mind-blowingness in mind, Express breaks down the five best things about this small-screen guilty pleasure.
Continue Reading "True Rumors: A Quicky Guide to 'Gossip Girl'" »
QUENTIN TARANTINO recently announced he was tackling the World War II movie genre by remaking the 1978 minor cult hit "The Inglorious Bastards," which will give him a chance to match explosive dialogue to equally explosive, well, explosions. On the heels of that production, which has already cast Brad Pitt as the lead, comes Severin Films' overdue three-disc reissue of the movie, complete with the requisite documentaries and the not-quite-so-requisite soundtrack CD.
In Tarantino lore, the film sounds a bit like "Fox Force Five," the fictional television show from "Pulp Fiction." Instead of five gorgeous assassins, "The Inglorious Bastards" features five antiheroes who conspire to hijack a German train. They certainly live up to their title billing — these men are thieves, cowards, murderers, deserters and traitors who meet each order with a shirk and each wartime peril with a smirk and a nonchalant quip. It's a war movie, sure, but has a sense of goofy fun as the characters roadtest their manhood.
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IN THE LATE 1920s and early 1930s, moviegoers had some choice in their vampires. They could watch Lon Chaney's toothy demon in "London After Midnight," Bela Lugosi's caped bloodsucker in Universal's "Dracula," or the ancient crone played by stone-faced Henriette GerĂ¡rd in Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr."
Chaney's creature was a blockbuster — the film, alas, has since been lost — and Lugosi's Count has proved massively influential. But "Vampyr" was booed off screens in Europe and hardly showed in America, so Dreyer's interpretation of the living dead remains fairly esoteric today.
Rather than feasting on the blood of the innocent, Dreyer's vampire commands a dark legion of the living and the dead, scheming against humanity while inspiring sinister goings-on.
GOOD GOD, Y'ALL!
The new three-DVD box set "I Got the Feelin': James Brown in the '60s" (Shout! Factory) almost lives up to all the funky promise that title suggests. He's not in a hot tub, but you'll still see him sweat plenty — and on disc one you'll see he's got lots of company.
But first, watch disc two. It features a crude videotape of Brown's April 1968 MLK-memorial Boston show, complete with mayoral introduction and a lecture by Brown on real black power. The music is compelling — notably on the marathon "This Is a Man's World," which he does in the style of "I Put a Spell on You" — though the show feels truncated. (Given the crowd rushing the stage, it's just as well he ended the show when he did.)
Disc three is a 1968 time capsule, a so-so Apollo show cut to 50 minutes for TV and, thankfully, in color so you can see the rotating psychedelic disks behind the stage. During a break, there's a few minutes of JB walking through Watts, Harlem and D.C. and commenting that "my fight is for Black America to become America."
Disc three extras include a performance from the 1964 concert film "The T.A.M.I. Show," though sadly not of "Please Please Please" which is the best James Brown footage you'll ever find. (Memo to Shout! Factory: please ask Dick Clark Productions owner Dan Snyder to finally give this film a legit DVD release.)
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