Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Though my original review was perhaps a little more even-tempered than I initially recalled, I look back on Kingsman: The Secret Service with great fondness, cringing at some of the bawdier moments but overall greatly sympathizing with director Matthew Vaughn’s appreciation for the 1960s era of spy films (particularly James Bond, though – as the characters are fond of reminding you – “dis ain’t dat kinda film, bruv”). While its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, is an enthusiastic action film with more than a few decent thrills, I was not transported in the way I was with the first film; that is, if the original were Skyfall, The Golden Circle is more Spectre, a sequel that doesn’t misstep but doesn’t transcend like its predecessor did.

After a coordinated attack on Kingsman, secret agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and gadget guy Merlin (Mark Strong) link up with their “American cousins” (Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, and Pedro Pascal) at Statesman to avenge their fallen comrades. As the trailers have revealed, however, a comrade also rises – Harry Hart (Colin Firth) returns to the service for the fight against the cartel leader Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore), who controls the worldwide drug trade from her 1950s-infused lair.

As I was watching The Golden Circle, I couldn’t help but think of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a sequel to a similarly inventive and strong first outing. Though the two sequels do have a similar “more of the same” quality to them, never triumphing as their predecessors might have led one to expect, I can safely say that Golden Circle is unlike A Dame in that it’s not boring. Where A Dame felt almost sleepily safe and content merely to reproduce what had gone before, Golden Circle shakes up the script and goes to places one wouldn’t expect. Though slickly devised, Harry’s return is anything but smooth, and it leads to an interesting new dynamic with Eggsy. It’s a real treat also to see a British stereotype of Americans; if The Secret Service satirized Britain’s vision of itself, Golden Circle is a dashing wink of a cliché of the United States, with its cowboy whiskey peddlers and honky-tonk bars.

The Golden Circle is not, as the trailers might have led you to believe, a film about the Statesman agents (though apparently Vaughn wants to make that spinoff). Aside from Pascal, who participates in the film’s rousingly thrilling Spy Who Loved Me by way of OHMSS action setpiece, the Statesman cast amounts to an extended cameo. The focus is squarely – rightly, as fun watching Statesman can be – on the Kingsman agents and the high-octane action that follows them. The film opens with an extensive (and, in IMAX, quite loud) taxi chase through London; you’ve also got the ski chase sequence, a snowy shootout, and the raid on Poppy’s HQ, all of which feel substantively different than what we saw in the first Kingsman film.

This Kingsman is about twenty minutes longer than the first one, and I have to say it does feel it. There’s a recurring gag about Elton John that overstays its welcome, and this film does feel a bit bogged down by laddish humor, perhaps more so than before (but mercifully not as bad as in Kick-Ass 2, which actively suffered from this). The first Kingsman famously ends (no spoilers) with an unconventional send-up of Bond’s get-the-girl closer, and while it’s tonally off-putting it wasn’t as cringingly gross as Eggsy’s encounter at the Glastonbury Music Festival, which does leave a bad taste on the film for a while. Perhaps overall the film needs more of what Colin Firth brought to the first film and to Eggsy’s training – a Pygmalion for the surveillance crowd, polishing up the rough bits and reminding us to stand a little straighter. (Put another way, “Manners maketh man.”)

Back in 2015, Kingsman: The Secret Service was better than most of us were expecting it to be, especially since it was pitted (you’ll recall) against the guaranteed box-office winner 50 Shades of Gray. The Golden Circle, however, is not as good as it should have been, though neither is it as bad as it could have been. It’s not as impressive as the first, which is a tragedy, but it’s a fine second entry and a cheering diversion at its best.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, drug content, language throughout, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Pedro Pascal, and Julianne Moore.

Hell or High Water (2016)

You wouldn’t believe what a difficult time I had seeing this movie. Aside from the fact that the limited release didn’t hit my area for a few weeks, my matinee showing had a problem with the audio, leading me to come back later in the evening. But despite the difficulty in actually getting to Hell or High Water, the experience was all worth it; it’s a first-rate flick, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it up for a few golden statues come early 2017.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers forced onto the wrong side of the law. In order to save their family’s ranch after the death of their mother, the two have resorted to bank robbery, meticulously planned and carefully precise. Their robbery spree attracts the attention of a retiring Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) and his partner (Gil Birmingham), who aim to stop the robberies – or at least understand why they’re happening.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of westerns, perhaps just because I haven’t seen the right ones, but I’m a big fan of this genre-in-progress, the neo-western, which takes the themes of the western and relocates them into more contemporary trappings in order to continue to ask questions about justice, frontier spaces, and the nation’s long, complicated, and often troubling history. At the same time, it’s also (I think, indirectly) a space where older performers can step back into the genre and reevaluate it and themselves, where audiences can read the frontier’s weariness on the crags of an actor’s face.

You might think that I could very well be describing No Country For Old Men, and you’d be onto something, because Hell or High Water is very much of a piece with No Country. Both neo-westerns take questions of frontier justice into pressing issues of the twenty-first century (there, the loss of the “good old days”; here, the question of economic injustice). Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones are characters who ought to join each other on rocking chairs on the porch of their retirement, wearied as they are by the cases that baffle them. And while there’s no figure of pure evil like Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in Hell or High Water, there is the same lingering attention to the prairie wastelands of Texas, highlighting the bleak despair of the soul and the relentless persistence of our protagonists, who have only their own codes to which they can cling.

It’s truly riveting stuff, a two-hour trip that flies by despite its fairly small scope and tight narrative focus. The key is the well-crafted screenplay, as precise as the bank heists and wisely funny in a way that the trailers didn’t let on. Pine is surprisingly subdued, given his recent turn as the swaggeringly confident Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Of course, a Jeff Bridges performance is always worth the price of admission, with Hell or High Water somewhere between True Grit and Crazy Heart on the Dude-ometer. His turn as the retiring ranger practically prickles, and it’s the knowing gleam in Bridges’s eye that humanizes the character as we and his partner question why he’s pursing the case so doggedly.

Who knew it would take me through hell and high water just to see Hell or High Water? It’s worth the watch if you can find it, and it’s worth a double feature with No Country For Old Men to really think about where the neo-western is going.

Hell or High Water is rated R. Directed by David Mackenzie. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Gil Birmingham.

Monday at the Movies - June 18, 2012

Welcome to Week Twenty-Three of “Monday at the Movies,” a grab bag of movies I hadn’t reviewed yet. 

The Mummy (1999) – As with last week’s entries, The Mummy was a movie very dear to me as a child, and I think I’m sensing a pattern here.  Like the Indiana Jones movies, The Mummy is a period adventure piece mixing action, humor, the supernatural, and 1930s clothing.  In fact, the film could very easily be read as an Indy flick starring Brendan Fraser as a mercenary hired to lead Rachel Weisz to a hidden Egyptian city where an ancient evil mummy (Arnold Vosloo) is about to be resurrected.  The film is fast-paced, very exciting, and entertaining at every turn.  As with The Rocketeer, there’s something to enjoy in each scene, with director Stephen Sommers effectively never wasting a scene; when the plot isn’t advancing, the characters are interacting in fun ways.  While the chemistry between Fraser and Weisz isn’t entirely tangible – a kind of throwback, perhaps, to the early horror trope of the protagonists falling in love – John Hannah’s role as Weisz’s besotted treasure-seeking brother remains one of my favorite supporting roles in recent movies.  The screenplay, though, is surprisingly strong, flirting with the monster movie trope while giving it a modern sense of humor and weaving in a compelling take on the plagues of Egypt (making this film the unlikely love-child of Indiana Jones and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments).  The procedural format of a chain of victims and the accompanying plagues helps the film continue to advance and gather a sense of purpose while our characters band together to fight the mummy.  More than a decade later, The Mummy is still terrifically fun.

Sin City (2005, Extended Cut) – With recent news indicating that the sequel is finally on, Sin City has been on my rewatch list for a while.  The story and the content aren’t for everyone, to be sure; the film is violent and extremely dark, its depiction of women problematic at best, and the dialogue corny in places due to Miller’s hardboiled sensibility.  But what holds the attention more is the unique visual look, which has spawned a bevy of impersonators (I contend that Zack Snyder wouldn’t have a career without Rodriguez’s inspiration, particularly on Watchmen).  The version under review today is the “Recut, Extended, Unrated” version where director Robert Rodriguez added in ten minutes of direct “translation” of Frank Miller’s comics source material but divides the interweaving narratives into their own short films (about forty minutes each).  The only story that suffers from being divided is “The Customer is Always Right,” which stars Josh Hartnett as a hitman-for-hire; the clip’s link to the end of another segment makes its ending stand not-quite-alone.  Mickey Rourke leads “The Hard Goodbye,” in which he plays the hulk Marv on a quest for revenge.  In “The Big Fat Kill,” Clive Owen aims to protect the women of Old Town from the mob.  And, in what would be my favorite segment were Jessica Alba a stronger actress, Bruce Willis seeks out Alba after learning that her former attacker “That Yellow Bastard” is eager for a second attempt.  All three leads are fantastic, delivering the noirish narration with appropriate gravel and world-weariness (it says something that the voiceover isn’t distracting), while the supporting cast (too many A-listers to name) rounds out the film into an enjoyable experience which benefits from directorial expansion.

TRON: Legacy (2010) – TRON: Legacy is one of several rare breeds:  a sequel better than the original, a film that gets better each time I watch it, a film where the soundtrack is a character in its own right... you get the idea.  I have mixed feelings about the original – it hasn’t aged well, the story is a little thin, and not very much happens in between plot points – but I recognize its innovative nature and applaud the sequel for pushing the industry in the same ways as the original.  The look of the film is striking, resulting in another rare film where it looks just as good with the sound turned off; do that at your own peril, however, because you’ll be missing out on Daft Punk’s soundtrack, which was one of the best of 2010.  But the story is intriguing as well, kind of a Matrix done right what with its use of a “digital frontier” and what separates user from program; here, Jeff Bridges (in full Dude mode) reprises his role as Kevin Flynn, discoverer of “The Grid,” as well as portraying the evil program CLU (via CGI rejuvenation).  Garrett Hedlund is Bridges’s son Sam who enters The Grid looking for his father, while Olivia Wilde is charming as a naïve program hungry to learn about the real world.  The characters are more compelling than reviewers gave them credit, especially the elder Bridges, whose paternal compassion is a perfect companion for Father’s Day yesterday (always reminds me of my father, at least).  I’m admittedly a Disney shill, but the more I watch TRON: Legacy (or listen to the soundtrack), I always find something new to like.

Be sure to tune in Wednesday for The Cinema King’s review of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.  For now, though, that does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Iron Man (2008)

There are two kinds of comic books movies - the good and the bad. Within the division of "good" exist two subdivisions - the light-hearted and the heavy. Where The Dark Knight represents the pinnacle of what the heavy can accomplish in terms of cinematic excellence, Iron Man (released in the same year) is the finest example of a comic book movie high on thrills and - perhaps more importantly - unabashed fun.

Robert Downey, Jr. stars as weapons innovator Tony Stark, who's just debuted his new missile-within-a-missile project, the Jericho. After demo'ing the Jericho for armed forces contact James Rhodes (Terrence Howard), Stark is kidnapped by terrorists who demand that he build them a Jericho. Stark manages to turn the tables on his captors, creating a suit of forged iron in which he effects his escape. After returning to the States and much to the chagrin of business partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), Tony Stark begins to rebuild his legacy by stripping his company of its weapons manufacturing arm and by suiting up to fight the bad guys as Iron Man.

Iron Man is an important entry in the comic book movie genre because it reminds us that comic book movies can be fun without being campy. Bye-bye, market pandering of Batman and Robin; au revoir, angst of Ang Lee's Hulk. Here's a movie whose director - and consequently its protagonist - is chiefly interested in high-flying fun and in turning out a high-quality superhero flick grounded in good spirits and verisimilitude. It's difficult not to feel a swell of breathtaking ecstasy while watching Iron Man swoop through the skies, and it's downright impossible to remain coolheaded while watching the scene in which Iron Man destroys a tank while simultaneously validating the "cool guys don't look at explosions" trope; it's a scene whose very purpose seems to be to elicit a "Wow, that's awesome" reaction - which it does.

And if anyone can watch this movie and remain stoic and humorless while watching RDJ's performance as Tony Stark - a role he was, essentially, born to play - is a soulless, lifeless zombie. RDJ wears the character like a second skin, completely comfortable as the character and yet entirely believable as a real person. We're introduced to the character first as a fun-loving wisecracker whose life turns topsy-turvy before the AC/DC guitar solo can end, but quickly we get a sense of the facets beneath the witty exterior - the son in his father's shadow, the inventor with the guilty conscience, the objectivist profiteer with a heart of gold. All of these suits RDJ wears with coolly composed sangfroid, a convincing performance that's among the most compelling in any comic book movie - or, indeed, in any film of 2008, right up there with Heath Ledger's Joker and Brad Pitt's Chad Feldheimer. The other performers are good, too; Bridges is pitch-perfect as Stane, the ostensible villain of the piece, and Howard is such a fantastic foil to RDJ that one very nearly regrets the sequel's decision to replace him with Don Cheadle. But this is unquestionably RDJ's show, and he more than rises to the occasion.

A few disconnected thoughts: The special effects are dazzling, fun in a way that might be surprising for viewers expecting run-of-the-mill men-in-metal-suits-whaling-on-each-other action scenes. The glossy sheen on Stark's Iron Man suit is dazzling, lending a preternatural twinkle to his action scenes, and the combat is punctuated with bits of physical humor that prevents a disconnect from forming between man and mask. Also present are the Randian echoes that critics have noted; a particularly salient moment comes when Stark is told, "You really think that just because you have an idea, it belongs to you?" And while I haven't heretofore read any Iron Man comics (I know, shame; I have an unread Masterworks on my bedroom floor, though), I can't imagine the film being any bit inaccurate as far as the hero's spirit is concerned.

If I could give Iron Man a more glowing review, I would. Suffice it to say that this is a phenomenal picture, at once an acccomplishment on celluloid and an exhilarating breeze of a picture - in total, the perfect summer blockbuster.
Iron Man is rated PG-13 "for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and brief suggestive content." A few quick shots of bloody violence occur, but most of the violence is directed at a metal battlesuit, which scuffs and chips but never totally breaks. Mild flirting occurs between RDJ and pretty much every female character in the film, a few of whom wake up in his bed the next morning without showing more than bare shoulders.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008)

I'd hate to think that Simon Pegg is a one-hit (with a few near-hits) wonder, but How to Lose Friends & Alienate People just didn't score a home run for me.

Based on Toby Young's memoir about his time on staff at Vanity Fair, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is a cynical look at "making it" with Pegg starring as Sidney Young, an up-and-coming journalist climbing the periodical ladder after being hired by top editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges). Coarse and unrefined, Sidney meets the ire of his immediate editors Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst) and Lawrence Maddox (Danny Huston) while trying to court the gorgeous but empty-headed starlet Sophie Maes (Megan Fox).

I haven't yet seen a Simon Pegg vehicle as laugh-out-loud funny as Shaun of the Dead (though Hot Fuzz came close), and after this one I'm still looking. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is funny, but not consistently so and not usually for more than a snicker every five minutes. (Only one scene, in which Sidney's left leg suffers pretty serious injury repeatedly, elicited three consecutive gut-busters.) The script, consequently, is a little weak - especially for a comedy. It's formulaic in its worst places and only mildly charming in its best. Comedic shortcomings aside, the film suffers from what I call "Observe and Report syndrome" - that is, none of its characters are truly compelling, nor do we have good reason to root for any of them. Sidney's lovable, true, but it's a thin sheen covering a crass and predominantly unappealing core. Alison and Clayton are drawn in very broad strokes, with little characterization beyond "girl" and "boss," respectively; only Maddox has any real personality to him, thanks to a solid performance by the always reliable Huston.

Then there's Megan Fox, to whom I devote an entire paragraph because I've seen pretty much every one of her major features. Yet I don't seem to have learned my lesson with it all - Transformers, Jennifer's Body (that's about it, folks) - because she's as talented here as she has been in the other films in her canon. Translation: she looks pretty, but her acting ability is as glassy-eyed as her own striking face. She floats through the movie (well, except for that gratuitous scene where she walks through a swimming pool) without committing to an emotion, an inflection, or a facial expression beyond "vapid." Her delivery is unenthusiastic, her body language is entirely silent, and her emotional range goes from zero to one over the duration of the movie. She's gorgeous, but she's got about as much substance as that transparent dress she wears in her early scenes.

What's disappointing is that all of those involved (Fox excluded) can and have done much better work. Pegg was priceless in his collaborations with Edgar Wright, and I liked Dunst in the Spider-Man franchise. While Huston's good here, he's much better elsewhere (like in 30 Days of Night), and Bridges is criminally underused here; despite numerous allusions to The Big Lebowski (including White Russians, Port Huron, and a reference to Clayton being "the dude"), the film employs none of Bridges's trademark talewnt, though he manages to pull off a good deal of deadpan humor. Even director Robert B. Weide isn't doing his best, having cut his teeth on the uber-funny Curb Your Enthusiasm series.

Despite being mildly fun at moments, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People does not represent the best work of anyone here. Even Megan Fox has looked better.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People carries an R rating "for language, some graphic nudity and brief drug material." Translation: F-bombs galore, a transsexual fully naked from the front (prosthetics doubtless involved), and cocaine presented twice.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

It’s refreshing to see an Army movie that isn’t politically charged. There’s no hidden agenda at work in The Men Who Stare at Goats” - just hippies, psychic powers and goats. Lots of goats.

Grant Heslov (co-writer of the Murrow biopic Good Night, and Good Luck) directs Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, profiling reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) as he begins to investigate and uncover a top-secret military research program on psychic abilities.

If it sounds like an intrigue-laden espionage thriller, it’s not. Bob’s top contact is Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a dishonorably discharged serviceman who still insists that he’s a Jedi warrior but who can’t seem to drive a car for more than two scenes without horribly wrecking it. Lyn’s mentor, Bill Django, is even more ridiculous; Jeff Bridges is perfectly cast as the innovator of the Army’s new program, more Jeffrey Lebowski than Sgt. Hartman.

That Clooney and Bridges cut their comedy teeth in films directed by Joel and Ethan Coen is a fascinating coincidence, because if there’s one word I’d use to describe The Men Who Stare at Goats, it’s Coen-esque. Heslov is borrowing more than a page from the Coen book here, playing up the absurdity and playing down conventional techniques of cinema (like character development or chronology). It doesn’t matter that the characters don’t really grow or that the storyline oscillates back and forth in time like an episode of Lost on LSD.

What matters is the ridiculous nature of the story unfolding before our eyes. This is a movie driven more by personality than by plot, more by narration than by narrative. The personalities in the film - McGregor as the piece’s Doubting Thomas, Clooney playing dead-on deadpan and Bridges as a doped-up hippie holdout, with Kevin Spacey as a smarmy mentalist - successfully carry the picture from its low-key opener to its unabashedly hokey high-note ending.

What’s even more fun than the Star Wars metafictional subtext (McGregor, lest we forget, played Obi-Wan Kenobi from 1999 to 2005) is that the film keeps pretending to take itself seriously. Even though the narrative throughline is grounded in Bob’s quest for an identity, let’s not forget that isn’t the opening scene of the film. The first scene finds Gen. Hopgood (Stephen Lang) running headfirst into a wall he thinks he can pass through.

Similarly, The Men Who Stare at Goats never really tells us if the Army has developed psychic weaponry. For every bent spoon, there’s something like the death touch - the dim mok - that doesn’t kill you right away but could take effect at any time years later. For every cloud that Lyn Cassady disperses with his mind, there’s a giant rock he rear-ends with the car he’s driving.

But none of that matters. The film’s much more of a throwback to the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby buddies-on-the-road pictures of the mid-20th century. As such, then, the film doesn’t break a lot of new ground; the laughs are more than amusing, but they aren’t anything we haven’t seen before. There’s nothing new, for example, about Major General Holtz’s (Glenn Morshower, TV’s Aaron Pierce on 24) exclamation of “Holy (you-know-what)” upon seeing Lyn kill a goat with his mind, but the Southern drawl delivery, not the uniqueness of the moment, is what elicits the biggest laugh in the scene.

But what The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks in ingenuity, it makes up in execution. The cast have spent years climbing to the top of the Hollywood ladder, but it’s pictures like these that prove they’re not too good to make us chuckle.

With Oscar season right around the bend, The Men Who Stare at Goats isn’t cerebral drama or even brainy comedy, but it’s just right for (to paraphrase a line from Cyndi Lauper) girls - and boys - who just want to have fun.

These goats are rated "R for language, some drug content, and brief nudity." Language is run of the mill F-bombs, but the drug content is heavy although played for laughs. As for nudity, there's a fleeting glimpse of two rear ends from a distance.

Arlington Road (1999)

One thing's for sure about director Mark Pellington's Arlington Road - you won't look at your neighbors the same way again.

Jeff Bridges plays Michael Faraday, a history professor specializing in American terrorism. After his wife dies in an abortive FBI mission gone awry, Faraday starts to suspect that something may be amiss with all-American neighbors Oliver (a spooky Tim Robbins) and Cheryl (Joan Cusack, in a role that didn't make me want to scream, as most of her other roles do) Lang. The movie oscillates between painting Faraday as a paranoid delusional and hinting that there may be something darker at work in the Lang house.

Bridges proves himself one of the better actors of our day, in a very un-Dudelike performance here. And Robbins steps deftly out of the Andy Dufresne pigeonhole (oh, the myriad Shawshank puns I could have made!) and keeps the audience guessing about his intentions. I even can't say much negative about Cusack, who usually induces a run-for-the-hills mentality any time I see her in a movie; I'm only just getting over similar sensibilities when it comes to her brother. So the acting is fairly strong; Hope Davis does a fantastic job as Faraday's girlfriend who initially rejects his theories but eventually comes to see things his way, and it's fun to see The Closer's Robert Gossett as Faraday's FBI buddy.

Major kudos go to both screenwriter Ehren Kruger and director Mark Pellington for balancing suspense without compromising story. Though the movie at times feels like it's dillydallying without delivering and approaches being formulaic, an explosive final reel more than atones for the movie's sins.

The disadvantage with a film like Arlington Road is that most of the fun (if we can call such an experience fun, laden as it is with a heavy scoop of gravitas) of the movie is discovering along with Faraday what's true and what's imagined. Once we know how the movie ends, there's little fun in rewatching it; it doesn't harbor as many delightful nuggets that make a second viewing as worthwhile as, oh, Nolan did in The Dark Knight.

So ultimately this cerebral thriller comes with a solid recommendation from The Cinema King, with a caution that - ending aside - it might be a little forgettable. Decent acting all around, though.

Boom.


The MPAA rated Arlington Road "R for violence and some language." Violence consists of some gory footage of terrorism as well as a few bloody flashbacks. Language is sporadic but objectionable. Most of the violence is all in your head, though, since there's more tense moments than in-your-face guts.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

To say that I'm a fan of the Coen Brothers is something of an understatement: they're among my favorite filmmakers, abundantly entertaining and deftly profuse. So to say that The Big Lebowski is my favorite Coen flick is probably also an understatement (though Barton Fink kind of muddles that statement).

There are two Jeffrey Lebowskis - The Dude (Jeff Bridges), amiable stoner hero extraordinaire prone to swilling White Russians, and The Big Lebowski (David Huddleston), a prime mover in the L.A. region. When the two are confused by a pair of nitwit goons - and one micturates on The Dude's rug - looking for The Big Lebowski's wife Bunny (Tara Reid) and the money she owes to one Jackie Treehorn, that's where the trouble begins. It only gets worse when The Dude tells bowling buddies Walter Sobchak (a perfectly over-the-top John Goodman), a Vietnam vet obsessed with his service and his religion ("Shomer Shabbos!"), and Donny (Steve Buscemi), who can't seem to get a word in edgewise, Walter convinces The Dude to petition The Big Lebowski for rug compensation. After all, "that rug really tied the room together."

That's all in the first ten or so minutes. The rest is a tangled web of mystery, blackmail, kidnapping, Creedence Clearwater Revival, pornography, deceit, and bowling. Eat your heart out, Raymond Chandler. Speaking of Chandler, this is the best adaptation of The Big Sleep since Bogart and Bacall bantered back in the Forties. It's also the most comprehensible, although I'll admit it took me a second viewing to fully understand just what had happened. This is a top-notch screenplay from the Coens, poetically profane and tantalizingly tangled.

Much as Sweeney Todd was for Tim Burton, this is the movie that the Coens have been aiming to make throughout their whole career. It's got all the Coen staples - both plot points and cast members - and it's their pinnacle film. Nothing before or since - not even No Country for Old Men, Oscar-winner though it may be - has matched The Big Lebowski.

The film takes place in a world populated by classic Coen characters, The Dude and Walter not least among them. There's John Turturro as pederast bowler Jesus Quintana, who talks a big game; Philip Seymour Hoffman as bootlicking sycophant butler Brandt; Julianne Moore as feminist artist Maude, who wants The Dude in more ways than one; Ben Gazzara as mysterious smut peddler Jackie Treehorn; Arthur Digby Sellers, a classic TV writer now confined to an iron lung; his son, a sloppy juvenile delinquent; and Sam Elliott as The Stranger, a narrator soothing enough to give Morgan Freeman a run for his money.

It's difficult to say much more about The Big Lebowski beyond "It must be seen." This is a wholly original movie that really escapes description. Relaxed and entertaining, The Big Lebowski is certainly my favorite Coen Bros. picture - and may even land a spot on my irregular-around-the-margins Best Movies of All Time list.