The Big Lebowski (1998)

Film: The Big Lebowski
Release: 1998, theatrical
Starring: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore
Directed by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
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Description: Jobless slob Jeff Lebowski, otherwise known as The Dude is thrown into a kidnapping negotiation when he's confused for a local billionaire with the same name

Hans' thoughts:

Between bowling tournaments, drug fantasies, riled up war veterans and one of the most complicated to sum up movies of all time, The Big Lebowski sits as one of those big quotable cult classic comedies. Made by the impeccable Coen bros., The Big Lebowski stars Jeff Bridges as "The Dude" a laidback slob that signs checks for ridiculously small amounts and whose only social outing is that of the ongoing Bowling league where he hangs out with his peers. The paranoid and quick to arms Vietnam veteran Walter played by John Goodman and the socially awkward loser Donny played by Steve Buscemi. Everything takes a radical turn for the complicated when The Dude is mistaken for a multimillionaire of the same name, said multimillionaire being the titular "Big Lebowski" whose wife owes a considerable amount of money to a local loan shark and pornography magnate and then seemingly gets kidnapped. The Dude will now have to balance the drama of being hired to negotiate with the kidnappers while fighting his own personal battle of wanting to win the local bowling league where his greatest adversary is the colorful sex offender Jesus Quintana played by John Turturro. This may seem like I'm spoiling the plot of the movie, but trust me that this is actually just the setup for a plot that will go further and further down a very strange rabbit hole. 

Acting wise the movie is great, The Coen brothers have always been a star pull and this time is no exception. John Goodman and Jeff Bridges as the movies leads make for a very funny oddball pair and every character in the movie is just so darn colorful that you can tell the actors involved had fun on the set. There's not really much of a limit to the utter cool of The Dude, he's a laidback guy who's just found his special sweet spot in the world and he very much channels the spirit of a grown up hippie who's never really gotten to the point of a formal career but instead decided to do whatever he wants. He may not be a big player in the political leagues or a hero in the formal sense but The Dude is nevertheless a man steadfast on his principles and he really just wants to go on existing the way he's done so far which is what makes him so relatable everytime he tries to call it quits on the strange version of The Hero's Journey he's been put on. Bridges does a great job of portraying the character and you can kinda see elements from his performance as Flynn in the 1982 movie Tron as he prefers pleasure to duty and is bare bones honest about it. The Dude is very much a hero of the era he exists in and would go on to become an icon of 20-somethings everywhere. The film is also littered with strange but compelling and well choreographed dream sequences where we explore the psyche of our very laid back character. 

While the plot may seem very complicated, it never goes too far and leaves the casual audience behind. Reusing many of the same characters and expanding on them while the movie goes along even minor characters kinda get their own little moment in the movie and we can kinda tell who they are even if we're never given all that much time with them or information about their past. It's very reminiscent of the Iceberg-style created by late author Ernest hemingway, a style where you're only shown the tip of the iceberg directly but it's a tip that you can really read a lot into thus revealing the rest of the iceberg hidden underneath. It's a very show-don't-tell style and one I feel really fits the visual medium but unfortunately never get's used enough. This is an independent piece and that use of style is a sign of it, I very much doubt that a film like The Big Lebowski would've been greenlit by a major studio. However the Coen bros funds all their movies themselves and the revenue always goes into the next project, they only really use the big companies like Universal Studios as in this case for the sake of distribution to a mainstream audience. That's a pretty hard thing to pull off, yet the Coen bros. have done so with all of their movies and it really speaks for the amount of talent that's behind them. Especially interesting to me were the political commentary inherent in the story. There are next to no innocents in this movie and everyone is portrayed as a bit of a two-faced buffoon with the only possible exceptions being Steve Buscemi's Donny and Julianne Moore's character whom shall go unnamed for the sake of spoilers. The Bowling imagery is a running theme in the movie and what exactly it means is thankfully left to interpretation, something I once again don't think a mainstream studio would've let slide.

The Big Lebowski is one of those bizarre instances of good acting meeting good scriptwriting and magic just happening on screen. Between characters taking on a life of their own, really well-written dialogue and some fun imagery the film presents us with a strange journey taken by a strange man where he meets strange people. The film takes on nihilism, social status, the burden of keeping up appearances and the presidency of George Bush senior all seen through the eyes of a man who actually just wants to be left alone and live out his humble but comfortable existence. 

Casablanca (1942)

Film: Casablanca
Release: 1942, Theatrical
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
Directed by: Michael Curtiz
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Description: In the early 1940's, hundreds of Europeans fled to North Africa to catch the plane to Lisbon, where they could fly to America and escape the horrors of the second world war. The last stop on the route to Lisbon is unoccupied French Morocco. Our story takes place in Casablanca, where a man's café plays host to neutral ground.

Hans' thoughts:

One of the most quoted movies of all time, the story of Casablanca is one of love, loss, and self-sacrifice for the greater good. We meet our reluctant hero in the city of Casablanca, in this time a place where money talks - and not much else. As large as the scope of the movie is, illustrating major points about the second world war, most of it takes place in a café not much bigger than a tv-set of today. Most of the score of the film is therefore diegetic, being played beautifully by an onscreen band and pianist. Historically, the movie presents the viewpoints of people who lived with hearing news about the war every day, and curiously in that regard, Casablanca was invaded around the time the movie was made and released.

Part of the appeal of Casablanca is the cozy center of Rick's Café, the main turning point of the movie. Outside in the rest of the world, everything is hell breaking loose but the café is like the little place where the people of it's day could find safe haven, regardless of politics. Our reluctant hero Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the owner of the café. He has certain principles and he tries his best to be neutral in every regard - even women. As far as the hero's journey goes, Rick certainly seems to go through a couple of the steps. When he is given the opportunity to fix his crisis, it is with much reluctance and by the point of no return he has completely pulled up his roots from everything he once knew. It's not all dark though, as much as Rick is a struggling character he also has a certain charm about him, this is because of the writing style of the Epstein bros., who gave the movie a slight comedic angle making Rick and his peers masters of sarcasm.

The female lead of the story, played by the lovely Ingrid Bergman, is a woman who has had the naiveté of her youth stolen from her much too soon, and the complete mess that is the relationship between her and Rick is one of the major driving forces behind the tale. She's confused about every decision she takes, but loyalty is a major quality of hers to say the least. As for the way the movie is shot, it plays it safe. This was originally made as dime-a-dozen romance movie so it wasn't an ambitious project by anyone involved. However, somehow they have managed to make the back-drop shot method still work compared to modern movies. In case you're not aware, the back-drop method is the way of having actors in front of a projected video working as a backdrop. It's a simplistic method but it gets the job done and the lack of color certainly helps in terms of not making the change in quality too jarring.

Casablanca is a timeless tale, as much as it is based around the ongoing war few can not admit to relating to the drama in a good old fashioned triangle-romance. What makes it interesting is that it might as well have ended much differently, which would have made the story trivial and without much substance, however a mix between the nature of the age it was made, combined with changing the writers 4 times have made the movie more of a "best of all worlds" mixed bag. The movie has goofy recognizable characters, a simple plot, but at the same time it also allows itself to try and fully explore all the elements of the story. From the battle between two music numbers in the bar, to the ambitious flashback to the lovers' time in paris to the off-the-wall endning about sacrificing your own happiness for something much greater then yourself - this story tells a tale of a man who lost his way and found it again. Humphrey Bogart played the man Rick in such a way that he is today the prototype for the reluctant but good at it's core hero. Much like Han Solo or Indiana Jones would be in the 70's and 80's or Eddie Valiant would be in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

While the movie was not shot very ambitiously, the same can not be said for the lighting. Throughout the movie, Director Mark Curtiz has chosen to play a lot on Shadows, making the movie a study in Negative space, much like the Noir genre and the Sin City comic books would be inspired by later. Indeed, one could make the argument that the lighting of Casablanca, combined with Rick's charm would be a prototype of modern iterations of superheroes.