Jeff Bridges makes a great Rooster Cogburn – weird froggy voice, sloppy beard, aura of laziness, legitimately kind of disgusting as he’s introduced taking a shit and later casually pisses himself. If you don’t know the character from the novel by Charles Portis, or from John Wayne’s Academy Award winning portrayal in the 1969 version, or from the considerably less Academy Award winning sequel, or perhaps Warren Oates in the TV movie version, or obviously the episode of Scooby-Doo where Rooster has to figure out which Harlem Globetrotter has been replaced by an evil Moon-man, then let me fill you in: Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn is an eccentric, one-eyed civil war vet turned U.S. Marshall who “really knows how to pull a cork” and has a reputation for unnecessary but high quality shootings of suspects. So he’s the bounty hunter of choice for 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who wants to “finish [her] father’s affairs” by chasing down the drunken ranch hand who killed him and fled into Chocktaw territory with the Lucky Ned Pepper gang.
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Posts Tagged ‘Coen Brothers’
No Country for Old Men
Saturday, November 24th, 2007A guide for enthusiasts of Badass Cinema
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is one of those movies that’s so quiet it can be uncomfortable to watch with an audience. Alot of scenes all you hear is the wind blowing lightly over the wide open Texas plains, or the cars driving past outside a motel room, along with every squirm, every sigh, every shoulder crack in the theater. At the end when I saw the music credit for Carter Burwell I honestly couldn’t for the life of me remember any point in the movie where there was music.
So it’s clearly a little arty, it’s not like anybody’s gonna mistake this for THE MUMMY RETURNS. Or for THE FRENCH CONNECTION for that matter. It requires a little patience. But there’s so much about it that’s so fuckin good that it will win over all kinds of people from all walks of life. At first.
It’s a movie full of great performances and great characters. James Brolin’s boy Josh has a career-catapulting role as Llewelyn Moss, Vietnam vet who’s out hunting when he stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone real bad, and decides to take home a briefcase of money as a souvenir. Javier Bardem, with his worst haircut since PERDITA DURANGO, plays Anton Chigurh, an enforcer who’s gone crazy enough to kill pretty much anybody who sees him along the way while spouting philosophy to justify his actions. And Tommy Lee Jones, in another topnotch quiet old lovable sadsack performance like he’s been doing lately, is the disillusioned Sheriff Bell who follows the trail.
And it’s a movie with alot of great talking, a script that pays careful attention to the interesting ways different people put words together. But this time credit doesn’t go as much to Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers out of Minnesota who made the movie, as to Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the book that way already. Alot of the dialogue is lifted straight out of the book so it has alot of classic lines. I was glad they kept my favorite: Llewelyn’s wife asks him where he got that gun and he says “At the gettin’ place.”
This is a jawdroppingly awesome piece of filmatism, but is it a piece of Badass Cinema? This is a question not relevant to most reviewers but since everybody else has already written ten books worth about every other angle I might as well focus on this one. (more…)
Blood Simple
Saturday, January 1st, 2005Hey Harry and Father Geek, it’s me, Vern.
Well you know what guys I am going through some tough times in my life, sort of an introspective type deal, and what you do in this type of situations sometimes is you want to relax, go to an activity such as a barbecue, titty bar or film festival and get your mind off of things.
So that is what ol’ Vern did yesterday, I went and saw the BLOOD SIMPLE movie that every motherfucker has been recommending to me left and right. “Vern, see Fargo. Vern see Blood Simple. Vern, see Big Lebosky.” Well Blood Simple was playing at the Seattle’s International Film Festival, a film festival here in Seattle.
Now this was interesting because I always thought this would be a video type movie, but it was playing at the fancy Cinerama theater, the biggest screen in seattle besides Imax. Which is a large type of screen they have. And there it is in all it’s glory. The movie starts out with an older individual, a gentleman smoking a pipe sitting at a desk reading a book. Not sure who this dude is, maybe he is from AMC I’m not sure. He explains how the movie changed the face of Cinema, blah blah blah, restored, blah blah. A little bit too educational for my tastes. But then the picture starts.
Now Harry I don’t know if you have got a chance to see this picture yet. It has only been available for about 10-15 years. But it is a good one. You see, it is about a slow, quiet dude who works at a bar, and he is having an affair with his boss’s old lady, Abby. So his boss hires this fat old cowboy private eye to find out who Abby is having an affair with. And then to kill them. M. Emmett Walsh plays the fat dude and this guy is hilarious. He talks in a garbled drawl like most directors wouldn’t allow their actors to use. This is point #1 for the Coen brothers, the auteurs behind this particular picture. (Auteur means the author of the picture, which in my opinion is the director.) (more…)
Bad Santa
Saturday, January 1st, 2005Well I seen this picture a while back when it was in a theater. I remembered it was pretty good so I wanted to watch it again for Christmas. Because it’s about Christmas. It’s called Bad Santa. (I mentioned that above so you probaly know that already)
Well I watched it about a week too late so this review is not very timely. But since this review will still be here to read next christmas I feel this bad timing should not count against my 2005 New year’s Resolution, A Commitment To Excellence. If you disagree take it up with the magic new year baby.
Anyway what this BAD SANTA one is about is Billy Bob Thornton is a character called Willie, a self loathing alcoholic safecracker who every year gets a job as a department store Santa. His partner Marcus (Tony Cox from FRIDAY) is a dwarf who is his elf. Then after closing time on christmas eve Marcus will be disguised as a snowman decoration or something, he runs and turns the alarm off and they rob the place.
The robberies seem to go pretty easy but the tough part is in the lead up to the robbery, the actual Santa part. Having to get his picture taken with a bunch of kids on his lap. This is hard because he hates everybody (especially kids, himself, and his boss, John Ritter), he is always drunk, he has no social skills, he says fuck more than I do, he often pisses himself, etc.
Now I could imagine a movie with this premise but it pulls its punches, it tries to make the bad santa charmingly mischeivous, and then he learns his lesson at the end. This is not that movie. This is a movie with a heart, but it’s a dark, cruel, dried out heart with thorns on it. This is a character who swears at kids, goes to bars in his Santa costume, takes his beard off in front of kids, passes out while kids are waiting, etc. In one scene a kid sneezes chocolate ice cream cone onto his face and he spends the rest of the day looking like he was dragged face first through mud and doesn’t give a fuck. (more…)
