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jeff bridges clearly... posted by: publius 10:17 7.23.10 the author of this piece (max read) is a gentleman and a scholar: http://gawker.com/5594336/tron-legacy-jeff-bridges-as-starman-vs-jeff-bridges-as-bad-blake ______________________ Here's the new trailer for Tron: Legacy, the sequel to the 1980s sci-fi classic Tron. It's got Jeff Bridges, music by Daft Punk, and it's set inside a computer. What's there to dislike? The original Tron was about a stoner-hacker named Kevin Flynn who gets trapped inside a computer mainframe, where all the programs look and talk and act like people, which at the time was how computers worked (tiny slaves inside metal boxes). It's kind of complicated, but basically he has to play a bunch of hilarious computer games involving motorcycles and frisbees, and then he defeats the bad program, and then he goes home to the "real world" where he invents the iPod and becomes a controlling autocrat known for his hatred of pornography. Or does he? In Tron: Legacy, the title of which is written in a foreign language where the word "legacy" means "2," Flynn appears to have returned to the computer-world and become some kind of grizzled cyber-guru. There is also a program written by Flynn, who looks like Flynn, called Clu 2.0, and may or may not be "the bad guy." (I told you it was complicated! Computers are hard!) Clu is played by Jeff Bridges using some kind of witch-magick that makes him look about 35. It works pretty well, judging by the trailer. Anyway, Flynn's fratty son (Garrett Hedlund, who you don't remember from Troy and Four Brothers) goes into the computer country and has to ride his lightcycle (computer for motorcycle) and have literal cybersex with Olivia Wilde (of The O.C. and House) and probably reconnect with his dad in some kind of emotionally satisfying way. Or whatever. Will it be good? OK, well, it won't be as good as the original Tron, which as every cultured person knows is the best movie ever made about computers. And it's kind of a bummer that they seem to have just taken the (awesome) production design aesthetic from the original and made it shinier, instead of coming up with a new, equally awesome aesthetic—it's been 28 years since the first movie and a lot has changed with computers! But it has Jeff Bridges, which counts for like a million points in a rating system I just made up. And Daft Punk wrote the score (I don't know if that's a piece of theirs in the trailer), which is also worth a million points. So it's already at roughly two million points, which is definitely see-it-opening-night quality. If you're a cultured person. one small step for jeff.... posted by: publius 10:30 1.18.10 jeff bridges wins best actor at the golden globes for crazy heart...and apparently he's been reading this tentfort thread, as his comment was "Wow, you're really screwing up my under-appreciated status here". on to the oscars, and the "it's about time jeff bridges got his due" era... http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/17/golden.globes/index.html?hpt=T2 dude studies posted by: publius 18:46 12.30.09 i had heard that there were cult gatherings/theme events centered around the big lebowski, and i suppose that, as the article mentions, once you get that scholars (or at least people who work in universities and teach classes) will follow... and of course, proper credit is given to jeff bridges: "The glue that holds 'The Big Lebowski' together, as gloriously rickety as it is, is Mr. Bridges’s performance." this is not to slight the rest of the cast, or the gloriously wacky script and screenplay, but without jeff bridges playing the dude this film would have been orders of magnitudes less wonderful. i'm including the entire article from the time, because i have heard rumblings that as of the new year only folks with subscriptions will be able to access the content...so just in case.. ______________________________ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/books/30lebowski.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all December 30, 2009 Dissertations on His Dudeness By DWIGHT GARNER Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie, “The Big Lebowski,” which stars Jeff Bridges as a beatific, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed slacker known as the Dude, snuck up on the English-speaking world during the ’00s: it became, stealthily, the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings. “The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.” Where cult films go, academics will follow. New in bookstores, and already in its second printing, is “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” an essay collection edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe (Indiana University Press, $24.95). The book is, like the Dude himself, a little rough around the edges. But it’s worth an end-of-the-year holiday pop-in. Ideally you’d read it with a White Russian — the Dude’s cocktail of choice — in hand. More than a few of this book’s essay titles will make you groan and laugh out loud at the same time (“ ‘The Big Lebowski’ and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”). But just as often, the writing here is a bit like the film: amiable, laid-back and possessed of a wobbly Zen-acuity. In one essay Fred Ashe — he is an associate professor of English at Birmingham-Southern College — profitably compares the Dude to Rip van Winkle, for both his “friendly charisma” and what Washington Irving described as Rip’s “insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor.” Both men, Mr. Ashe notes, expose “the sickness of a straight society premised on the Puritan work ethic.” In another, “On the White Russian,” Craig N. Owens — he teaches literature and writing at Drake University in Des Moines — divides the world into two factions: those who float the cream on their White Russians (“the floaters”) and those who mix it in (“the homogenizers”). He praises the Dude’s “middle way,” avoiding the hassle of “shaking and straining.” At times Mr. Owens sounds as if he’s been hitting the minibar himself. He writes about how Leon Trotsky is “doubly implicated” in the White Russian, first because he helped defeat the anti-Communist White Russian army during the Russian civil war, and second because he later fled to Mexico, “Kahlúa’s country of origin.” Mr. Owens suggests that the Dude has a kind of “Trotskian positionality.” Most of the essays in “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies” began as papers presented at the 2006 Lebowski Fest in Louisville. Working at an unhurried, Dude-like crawl, it took the editors three years to wrap these papers up and usher them into print. “When we first put out a call for papers, we received about 200 proposals,” said Mr. Comentale, an associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, whose previous books include “Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde” and “T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.” When putting the book together, Mr. Comentale said, he and his co-editor “immediately cut out all the papers celebrating the Dude as a hippie hero in a postmodern landscape.” That’s a sober choice. Admirers of the Dude are already dangerously close to becoming Internet-age versions of Parrotheads, the weekend-warrior Jimmy Buffett fans who tip back margaritas — and embarrass their children — while wearing flip-flops, board shorts, Hawaiian shirts and coconut bras. “Trying to impress your academic colleagues and also make a dent in the popular market, that’s a fine line to walk,” Mr. Comentale added. “We wanted these essays to press the connection between the goofy and the profound.” Reading “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” it’s hard not to recall some of the profound and not-so-goofy things the novelist Umberto Eco had to say about cult movies in his 1984 essay “ ‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” “What are the requirements for transforming a book or movie into a cult object?” Mr. Eco asked. “The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognize through each other a shared expertise.” (If the phrases “Nice marmot,” or “You’re entering a world of pain,” or “I can get you a toe” mean anything to you, then “Lebowski” has entered your private sectarian world.) Mr. Eco certainly seemed to presage the existence of “The Big Lebowski” when he wrote in his essay about “Casablanca” that a cult movie must be “ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself.” He explained: “Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.” The glue that holds “The Big Lebowski” together, as gloriously rickety as it is, is Mr. Bridges’s performance. Pauline Kael once observed that Mr. Bridges, who is gathering Oscar buzz this month for his performance as a down-on-his-luck country singer in “Crazy Heart,” “may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived.” In an essay in “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” Thomas B. Byers — he is a professor of English at the University of Louisville — points out that more mainstream actors like Harrison Ford or Kevin Costner or Tom Hanks could not have pulled off the role of the Dude. “What makes Bridges less of a star is precisely what makes him perfect for ‘Lebowski,’ whose particular niche of success depends on its outsider, cult status,” Mr. Byers writes. As a new generation of “Lebowski” fans emerges, Dude Studies may linger for a while. In another of this book’s essays, “Professor Dude: An Inquiry Into the Appeal of His Dudeness for Contemporary College Students,” a bearded, longhaired and rather Dude-like associate professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., named Richard Gaughran asks this question about his students: “What is it that they see in the Dude that they find so desirable?” One of Mr. Gaughran’s students came up with this summary, and it’s somehow appropriate for an end-of-the-year reckoning: “He doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his values. He just does it. He lives in a very disjointed society, but he’s gonna take things as they come, he’s gonna care about his friends, he’s gonna go to somebody’s recital, and that’s it. That’s how you respond.” Happy New Year, Dude. crazy heart posted by: publius 11:32 12.17.09 crazy heart opened last night in new york in a few theaters (one of them being the angelika, a personal favorite) and i caught the 10:30 show. first off, kris kristofferson was very good...oh wait...i mean jeff bridges playing kris kristofferson playing townes van zandt with more than a little dude thrown in for seasoning was very good. do i think it's best-actor oscar worthy? not really, but others have certainly won that award on far weaker showings (die, forrest, die!). i rather doubt he will win (assuming he's nominated) and if he did i believe, as i mentioned below, that it would be less of a "best actor" oscar and more of a "de-facto and deserved lifetime achievement award on the back of a very solid performance" oscar (i heard they were going to make that an actual category but none of the presenters could ever say it without fucking it up so they decided against it - in any case, see jack nicholson for "as good as it gets" fro precedent) some other thoughts on the film aside from mr. bridges... i haven't heard anyone make the explicit connection between bad blake and townes van zandt (i haven't been looking very hard either though - my guess is those connections are out there in the blogosphere) but it was all i could think of for much of the film. bad blake as the songwriter's songwriter, respected by the young turks (colin farrell's turn as blake's protege/steve earle-esque character was surprisingly strong), drowning his talent with booze, etc. and just in case you were in any doubt, there's a townes van zandt song plopped right down in the middle of the movie. maggie gyllenhall was uneven. she had moment when she was quite good and moment when it very much felt like you were watching a park slope woman imagine what a bizarro world it would be if she were to be having an affair with an aging, burned out country music troubadour. to be fair, she got stuck with some pretty bad dialogue at certain points, but so did everyone in the film and they were all able to carry it off with more aplomb. my heart sank when robert duvall came on screen. it wasn't a disaster, but the tension of waiting for and hoping against a scene-chewing duvall train wreck was a definite distraction. bad casting - no reason he needed to be there. i kept thinking of this movie as well: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071115/ i haven't seen it in a long time, and definitely the kris kristofferson angle is the main reason i kept coming back to it, but i think there's probably more to it than that. more details as events warrant. final analysis? worth seeing, a generally fine (if somewhat hackneyed) story which thankfully didn't have a disney ending. nothing world-beating here, but certainly better than most of what you're going to find at your local theater. maybe his time has finally come... posted by: publius 15:40 11.19.09 i don't put much stock in the oscars, but assuming this film is good and mr. bridges is up to his normal level of work, i certainly wouldn't protest if the academy decided to award one of its periodic, thinly veiled "lifetime achievement" awards masquerading as a best actor nod... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/movies/19crazy.html (btw...10 best oscar nominations now? how cynical is that?) agreed that heat was a good mo posted by: publius 19:42 10.17.07 but it plays directly to my point. the departed was also a good movie, yet in that nicholson also mugs around the screen playing himself. the fact that the roles in heat called for them to play themselves doesn't change the fact that that's what they were doing, and all they have been doing, for a long time. i don't think anyone doubts that all three have (had?) great acting chops (an example apiece - pacino: godfather, deniro: taxi driver, nicholson: five easy pieces). the point is they don't every take interesting roles these days - they allow themselves to be type-cast. and any of these three guys could pick up almost any role they want. fat of the land... as for heat, coming soon (2009), perhaps with deniro and pacino playing themselves once-removed...heat, the video game... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803002/ I nominate HEAT posted by: horsebeater 18:48 10.17.07 I realize that they played themselves somewhat in Heat, but that's who they were supposed to be playing. Heat was good shit. here here! posted by: publius 17:53 10.17.07 francis ford coppola comes out and trashes the big three - deniro, pacino and nicholson - for coasting for the last god knows how long. about time someone saw fit to mention it. none of those guys has had a notably good role in the last 15 years...their last truly good roles? nicholson (with the exception of the films he makes for sean penn, in which i think he is quite good): a few good men (1992) pacino: glenngarry glen ross (1992) de niro: a bronx tale, 1993 and even those cases are a stretch. none of these guys has done any truly great work since the late 70s/early 80s. just to be clear - this doesn't mean those guys haven't been in some solid movies over since the movies listed above. it means that they have, as coppola says, been "living off the fat of the land" and essentially playing themselves over and over again, with pacino being the number one offender. http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2193230,00.html fuck you fucker! posted by: publius 21:46 7.20.07 all hail the person that made this condensed version (?) of the big lebowski.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqtgfjkB6Pg and they even managed to keep the townes van zandt cover of dead flowers at the end. great stuff. Objections posted by: mrbuckles 10:08 8.15.06 King Kong (1976) I could never get into The Big Lebowski and I (used to) really like the Coen brothers. The Hudsucker Proxy showed the cracks and they bounced back strong with Fargo. Since then, it's been a rapid drop. hb, I'll assume you're just as disappointed in your brother's haircut Dude trumps all posted by: prankmonkey 09:55 8.15.06 Nothing else matters - Dude puts him in the pantheon. that is pretty bad hair... posted by: publius 22:42 8.14.06 though you can't really blame him for that...it's not like he has much choice in for a role, one would think. and the fisher king was a good and (like the man himself) underrated movie. i haven't seen all of k-pax. i saw part of it on a plane. it certainly wasn't good (not to mention just a touch sanctimonious) but from what i have seen, it was spacey and not jeff bridges who made that so awful...and i would gladly watch it before either meet the fokkers or the blind guy pacino thing... and also if you ignored k-pax. posted by: horsebeater 19:26 8.14.06 this would be a completely uno posted by: horsebeater 19:25 8.14.06 if it were not for his haircut in the fisher king. totally dq's him, publius, sorry. http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0767811089.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg finally starting to get his du posted by: publius 22:15 8.6.06 though still one of most under-rated american actors out there. people will talk of de niro and pacino (who haven't played anybody except themselves for going on 15 years), and perhaps their best is better than bridges' best (but if so, not by anywhere near as much as common wisdom dictates)...but if i had to roll the dice and watch a random movie made by one of the three, i'd take bridges running away (meet the fokkers? that blind guy movie they gave pacino an oscar for? good lord...). nothing in this list scares me anywhere near that much... http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000313/ i've never quite been able to put my finger on what it is that makes him so solid, but i think that being "the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived" (while perhaps a touch hyperbolic) is along the right track...certainly that's not a comment anyone ever has or ever will make about pacino or de niro... http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1837991,00.html and come on...the guy was "the dude"...