ChrisThilk Blog

It’s not the big moments that stand out for me upon re-watching The Big Lebowski but the smaller moments. The way Jeff Bridges reacts to his drink spilling in the car and things like that make this such a rewarding experience. It’s easy to forget, if you haven’t watched it in a while, to get caught up in the nostalgia and hype of how the movie is a “classic” or what not but checking it out again reminds me that it has earned its way into that status.

John Goodman certainly has the flashiest role (and that’s saying something when you consider John Turturro’s “Don’t f**k with the Jesus” speech and his purple uniform) but it’s almost always Steve Buscemi’s performance that I find amusing. Here’s one of the most emotive and passionate actors of our time and his role is the schmuck hanger-on of the two larger personalities who can never get a word in without being subjected to abuse. But Buscemi never plays him as a loser, just as someone who feels this is his position and hey, he just want’s to roll.

Again, though, it’s the reactions that get me more often than not. The character of The Dude and the story he’s involved in put so much emphasis on the ability of the actor to react to what’s going on around him that it eclipses everything else that actor might choose to do. Luckily Bridges is more than up to that task and manages to turn everyone of those reactionary moments into a little chunk of character-building work that, in the end, builds a fully-fledged persona.

I decided that I needed some good old-fashioned Vaudevillian humor and so dove into Universal’s collection of the first five Marx Brothers movies, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.

It’s funny every time I watch these, which I usually do as a mini-festival like this, that it’s Animal Crackers and Duck Soup that consistently work the best for me. Duck Soup has long been my favorite and there are great bits in the other films but Animal Crackers, it seems to me, is the best distilling of the Marx Brothers format that exists, especially when it comes to their interplay with Margaret Dumont and the entire notion of class divisions.

Horse Feathers, on the other hand, is the one in this batch that I can never quite get my head around. While some truly classic moments have come out of this (swordfish in particular) it never jells for me as a whole the way the others do. It’s a slight ebb in the inspired genius between the first three movies and then Duck Soup, but that still makes it better than 80 percent of what’s available.

It was interesting to follow-up the real Indiana Jones with these movies, which features one of the most prominent Indy-Lite characters to be developed in recent years.

Nicholas Cage and his cast of cronies run, jump and ponder amiably through Book of Secrets, which I actually watched first, as they try to stay one step ahead of the bad guys, who are after the same City of Gold that the good guys are. There’s nothing that they’re asked to do by the plot that’s all that engaging and the strength of the film is dependent largely by the action just never slowing down enough for the audience to actually think about what’s going on. If they were given that opportunity some bad things would begin to happen, including them starting to likely laugh at the action unfolding on-screen.

While enjoyable enough as some fluffy entertainment there’s nothing beyond the surface layer. It’s like reading an early Grisham novel in that all the characters are dependent on everyone else being as illogical as they are but hey, look at the car chase!

I had not, upon seeing this one, seen the first movie but that’s certainly alright in that the character development is so superficial you can still get to know everyone and who they are and why they’re in the situations they’re in pretty quickly and easily. Decent enough if you find yourself needing something on in the background while you’re catching up on some emails but certainly not meaty entertainment by any stretch.

It was after watching #2 that I finally caught up with the first National Treasure and found it to be almost the exact same movie as the second installment. There are the same familial issues that Cage’s character is working out, the same Mission: Impossible tech sequences that are pulled off by the nerdy sidekick and the same romantic arc that goes on between Cage and the female lead, although in the first one it’s them falling in love in the second it’s them coming back together after a falling out.

In thinking back on the movies it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the two. If I think about a scene it takes me a minute to remember whether it comes from the first or the second. I basically have to try and visualize either Ed Harris or Sean Bean in the bad guy role (though their motivations aren’t so much “bad” as “counter to those of Cage and his altruistic gang”) in order to decide which is which.