"The Big Lebowski" (15) Nationwide
Kidnapping, extortion, adultery and double-crossing are central themes in Joel and Ethan Coen's screenplay for The Big Lebowski - and all of them are played for laughs. This convoluted and mischievously deceptive scenario opens as the camera follows a tumbleweed's progress over a mountain and down a cliff-top into Los Angeles and along the streets to Venice Beach, where Jeff Lebowski lives.
Known as The Dude, Lebowski is, the narrator advises us, "quite possibly the laziest man in Los Angeles County". Played by a scruffily-dressed, scraggy-haired and goateed Jeff Bridges, The Dude is an unemployed, dope-smoking, ageing hippy whose laid-back life revolves around the bowling alley where he plays with his friends, the dim-witted Donny (Steve Buscemi) and the loudmouth security-store owner, Walter (John Goodman) who's obsessed with his experiences in the Vietnam war.
However, the eponymous Lebowski is not The Dude but a Korean war veteran and wheelchair-bound millionaire (David Huddlestone) who happens to share Jeff's surname and little else - as they discover when they meet after an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. A couple of thugs attack The Dude and warn him that he's responsible for his wife's debts to a dubious character named Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara).
Why do the thugs think the millionaire Lebowski would be living in a shabby, cluttered place like the Dude's home? Why does the older Lebowski hire The Dude, of all people, to deliver the ransom when his precocious young wife (Tara Reid) is kidnapped? Why is the movie set in 1991 with the progress of the Gulf War reported regularly in the background?
Anyone expecting answers to these and other questions raised by the narrative can forget about it in the case of this deviously plotted comedy which Joel and Ethan Coen consciously assembled in the style of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery, specifically The Big Sleep, in all its labyrinthine fascination. Ethan Coen sees it as "a case that might have challenged a professional private eye like Philip Marlowe - if he had lived in the Los Angeles area of the Nineties and been an avid bowler and pot-head".
In this characteristically idiosyncratic entertainment from the Coens, the multiple digressions include a very funny skit on porn movies, a performance artist who works in mid-air, a marmot let loose in The Dude's bath (while the unfortunate Dude is in it), and, most elaborately, a Busby Berkeley homage in which the dancing girls are led by Julianne Moore dressed as a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Those sequences, like the many bowling scenes and references, are shot from every conceivable angle by the Coens' gifted lighting cameraman, Roger Deakins.
The redoubtable Jeff Bridges is admirably deadpan as the amiable Dude, and John Goodman rarely has been so effectively employed on screen. The fine cast also includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as the older Lebowski's fawning assistant; Peter Stormare as a menacing German nihilist; and, in a hilarious cameo, John Turturro, dressed in skintight purple as a bowling rival whose playing is accompanied by the Gypsy Kings performing Hotel California on the soundtrack.
"U-Turn" (18) Nationwide
A director never particularly noted for his sense of humour, Oliver Stone eschews making grand pronouncements on politics, business or war to fashion a wild, crazy, and overblown black comedy in U-Turn, a lurid, noirish modern western played out in blinding sunlight to the accompaniment of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack interspersed with rock'n'roll and country music.
Sean Penn plays a gambler who has already unwillingly surrendered two of his fingers to Russian gangsters and is en route to Las Vegas to pay them the balance of a gambling debt. But his car has radiator problems which detain him in the dead-end Arizona desert town of Superior for one truly disorientating day which turns into a waking nightmare.
He becomes caught up with a striking young Apache (Jennifer Lopez) and her much older husband (a grizzled Nick Nolte), each of whom wants the other killed for the insurance money. He happens to be in a grocery store just when there is a shoot-out. He attracts the attention of a young woman (Claire Danes) and the jealousy of her possessive and aggressive boyfriend (Joaquin Phoenix) - and the attention of a nosy and predictably corrupt sheriff (Powers Boothe). At one point Penn's character quite understandably asks, "Is everyone in this town on drugs?"
The screenplay for U-Turn, adapted by John Ridley from his own novel, Stray Dogs, consistently invokes other movies - chiefly After Hours, Double Indemnity, Body Heat and Touch of Evil - while the in-store shoot-out is Peckinpah-esque and there is a Leone-style protracted finale. Even Ennio Morricone's syncopated score uncannily recalls his own music for Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion; and Penn gets beaten up even more often than Marlon Brando's most masochistic screen personae.
A comical and raucous romp which runs out of steam well before the closing credits roll, U- Turn is shot in the deliriously surrealistic visual style Stone and his regular lighting cameraman, Robert Richardson, employed on Natural Born Killers. The more outsized the performances the more fun the film, and while Penn is refreshingly less mannered than usual, it's the scenery-chewers who carry the picture - Nolte, Phoenix, and Billy Bob Thornton, who is a hoot as an edgy, scary garage owner caked in grease and grime.
"John Grisham's The Rainmaker" (15) Nationwide
The proprietorial title of the new Francis Ford Coppola movie is intended less to distinguish it from the 1956 movie, The Rain- maker, which featured Burt Reynolds and Katharine Hepburn, than to highlight the new movie's source in a novel by the prolific best-selling author. This is Grisham at his most formulaic, with Matt Damon playing the latest in his long line of idealistic young lawyers catapulted into a maelstrom of danger and corruption.
Damon's character, Rudy Baylor, was brought up in a poor Memphis family by a violent father and physically abused mother, and he gets his first job working on a percentage basis for a shady lawyer (Mickey Rourke) and his ambulance-chasing assistant (Danny DeVito).
The inexperienced, too-good-to-be-true Baylor takes a case against the powerful Great Benefit insurance firm which has refused to pay for the bone marrow transplant of a young man (Johnny Whitworth) dying of leukemia. This involves taking on the powerful law firm led by a slick, smugly patronising and well-connected lawyer played by Jon Voight. Baylor is also drawn to a battered young woman (Claire Danes) whom he encourages to divorce her brutal husband (Andrew Shue). And he protects his elderly landlady (veteran actress Teresa Wright) from offspring preying on her will.
The Rainmaker never dips over into the sheer awfulness of Coppola's previous outing with the wretched Jack, and there is the initial diversion of so many familiar faces popping up; others involved include Virginia Madsen, Danny Glover, Dean Stockwell, Roy Scheider and country singer Randy Travis.
However, this effort shows no sign of a halt to the decline of Coppola, a film-maker who, in the 1970s, was producing towering achievements such as the first two Godfather movies and The Conversation. Even in the wake of Jack, The Rainmaker registers as merely rudimentary work from Coppola, scripted and directed by him as if it were bug-budget television with its attractive but underused cast mostly wheeled off screen as soon as their characters are simplistically established in the TV "guest star" tradition.
"US Marshals" (15) Nationwide
About half-an-hour into US Marshals, Tommy Lee Jones's character Sam Gerard declares, "We've got a fugitive" - a line which sounds suspiciously like it was planted for use in the movie's trailer to signal that this is a follow-up to The Fugitive, in which Jones first played the dogged Gerard. With Richard Kimble's name cleared at the end of the earlier film, the producers of The Fugitive had to come up with a new prey for Gerard, and screenwriter John Pogue devised Mark Sheridan, a former CIA operative suspected of murdering two Secret Service agents.
Gerard is escorting Sheridan and other prisoners on a Con Airstyle flight from Chicago to New York when the plane plunges on to a narrow road and into the Ohio river. Conveniently for the narrative, Sheridan is the only one who escapes, and Gerard proves even more exceptionally intuitive as he goes after him; inconveniently for Gerard, the State Department attaches a brash special agent (Robert Downey Jr) to Gerard's pursuit team.
Unlike in The Fugitive, where it would have been inconceivable for a Harrison Ford character to be guilty of murdering his wife, there is a lingering ambiguity about the guilt or innocence of Mark Sheridan, played by Wesley Snipes, an actor at ease with playing people on either side of the law.
The slender narrative of US Marshals, is over-stretched and involves relentless set-hopping across the US, but the movie's raison d'etre is to pile one energetic action set-piece atop another. Director Stuart Baird, a long-time film editor who turned director two years ago with the gripping and under-rated Executive Decision, delivers these setpieces with aplomb in a car chase through Manhattan, a foot chase through Tennessee bayous, and most elaborately, the spectacular plane crash which is expertly staged and edited.
"Happy Together" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
The imaginative Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar-Wai received the best director proze at Cannes last year for his gay road movie, Happy Together, which takes its title from the exuberant old Turtles song played over the closing credits. It features two handsome Hong Kong movie icons - Tony Leung (from Cyclo and Chungking Express) and Leslie Cheung (from Farewell My Concubine) - as gay lovers who are happy together when they arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong, but their relationship suffers when they take to the road.
To describe Happy Together as unpredictable is an understatement, as Wong's free-style film-making steers the narrative in any number of directions. The visual style is as flamboyant as ever with Wong working for the fifth time in six films with the brilliant Australian lighting cameraman, Christopher Doyle - and it employs hand-held work, speeded-up film, gritty black-and-white and striking colour to achieve a sensual movie of a tempestuous relationship.
Hugh Linehan adds:
"Up'n'Under" (15) Savoy, Santry Omniplex, UCI Coolock
In bleak, post-industrial Northern England, a frustrated dreamer tries to rouse his peers in a spirit of rebellion and self-pride. If you've seen The Full Monty or Brassed Off, you'll already have got the gist, although there's no question of plagiarism with Up'n'Under - writer/director John Godber's first film is an adaptation of his own 1984 stage play. But this broad comedy, in which rugby league takes the place of male strippers or brass bands, is a sadly unimaginative addition to the Grim Up North genre.
Gary Olsen is impressive as the former professional player, disillusioned with his life and his marriage, who bets his house that he can train a local team of no-hopers into shape in time to win a sevens tournament. But, Olsen apart, Godber packs his cast with over-familiar faces from the world of sitcom, including Griff Rhys Jones, Tony Slattery and Neil Morrissey, none of whom seems to be making much of an effort. Perhaps that's not surprising, as the one-dimensional screenplay offers little opportunity for character development. The predictable plot winds slowly down to the inevitable final triumph over adversity, unencumbered by any evidence of cinematic imagination on the part of its director (this must be the most shoddily-shot film of the year so far). And rugby fans should be warned - the game itself barely figures on screen.
