Bringing Out the Dead

 Year:  1999

Director:  Martin Scorsese

Screenplay:  Paul Schrader, based on the novel Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly

Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore

Running Time:  121 minutes

Genre:  Drama

New York City, the early 1990s:  Burned-out paramedic Frank Pierce (Cage) works the night shift.  Depressed, unable to sleep, and wracked with guilt for those he has not been able to save, Frank begins to hallucinate the patients he has lost.  After responding to a call about a man suffering cardiac arrest, Frank forms a tentative friendship with the man's daughter Mary (Arquette).

On it's release in 1999, this bleak urban drama was seen as a follow-up to Taxi Driver (1976), another collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader.  Both films tell the stories of nocturnal workers in a hellish urban environment, and have strong themes of guilt and redemption.  However, while Robert De Niro, as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, finds his salvation in violence, Frank Pierce is essentially a compassionate man, trying to do the right thing in a broken, fallen world.  The film take place over the course of a weekends Frank and his fellow paramedics make the rounds tending to the sick and wounded of night-time New York, and delivering them to the overcrowded, understaffed and under equipped hospital.  Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances as the haunted Frank Pierce, deathly pale, with sunken red-rimmed eyes, he looks like someone who hasn't slept in weeks, his slow drawl fitting Frank's laconic narration, and even the scenes where Cage delivers some of his more trademark over the top moments, it fits with Frank's mania at that point in the film.  Patricia Arquette delivers a quietly powerful performance as compassionate drug addict Mary, who becomes Frank's angel of mercy.  Sharing Frank's season in hell are Larry (John Goodman), Frank's friend,  Marcus (Ving Rhames), an eccentric devoutly religious paramedic who enjoys flirting with the dispatcher and organises a prayer circle among clubbers while he and Frank try and save an overdose victim; and Tom (Tom Sizemore), a wild paramedic who enjoys beating people up when he's bored.  This is a violent, and dark film, which is sometimes hard to watch and often disturbing, but it is visually impressive, with the fast cutting between flashing ambulance lights, and the camera tearing down the streets of New York, it's also very funny, albeit with humour of the darkest variety, such as Frank begging his boss to fire him at the start ion every shift, and some surprisingly surreal imagery.  It is a tough watch, and failed at the box office when it was released, but it is one of Scorsese's most powerful and underrated works.

Nicolas Cage in Bringing Out the Dead
  

Matinee

Year of Release:  1993
Director:  Joe Dante
Screenplay:  Charles S. Haas, from a story by Charles S. Haas and Jericho Stone 
Starring:  John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton. Omri Katz, Kellie Martin, Lisa Jakub
Running Time:  99 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Key West, Florida, October 1962:  Flamboyant B-movie producer Lawrence Woolsey (Goodman) comes to town to preview his latest epic, a science-fiction/horror film called Mant!.  However the Cuban Missile Crisis has started and the town is in a state of red alert.  Young horror fan, Gene Loomis (Fenton) is one of the Naval kids whose father is on a blockade ship around Cuba.  On Saturday night at the movies, teenage romance, on-screen horror, and real-life fear collide.

This is a fun period comedy film.  It works as a celebration of cinema itself and horror in particular, the film-within-the-film, Mant!, is a very funny recreation of those terrible atomic age B-movies from the 1950s and '60s.  John Goodman is pitch perfect as the twinkly, enthusiastic Lawrence Woolsey who, with his gimmick-laden shows, seems to be based on real-life producer/director William Castle.  The film also features Cathy Moriarty, as Woolsey's long-suffering wife and lead actress.  The main focus of the film are the kids, Gene (Simon Fenton), his little brother (Jesse Lee), his best friend Stan (Omri Katz), rebellious Sandra (Lisa Jakub) and Stan's love interest Sherry (Kellie Martin), whose ex-boyfriend is a violent thug and aspiring poet.  The usual teen movie hijinks are present here, but it's all set against the backdrop of this looming threat of imminent nuclear annihilation, which during the Cuban Missile Crisis was seen as not so much if as when.  The appeal of horror films is partly because the onscreen horrors can act as a release and a respite from the real horrors of life, which can seem lessened, and this film deals with that.  The film has  a great soundtrack of period songs, and also pokes fun at various other aspects of 1962 such as beatniks, and weird fantasy family films with another film-within-a-film, The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, which features an early appearance form Naomi Watts.  There are also appearances form B-movie stalwart and Dante regular Dick Miller and actor/writer and director John Sayles.
This is a hugely enjoyable film, which manages to balance laughs, nostalgia, and drama.

it's showtime in Matinee       

The Big Lebowski

Year of Release:  1998
Director:  Joel Coen
Screenplay:  Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Starring:  Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, John Turturro, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Running Time:  117 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Los Angeles, 1991:  Jeff Lebowski (Bridges), who prefers to be known as "The Dude", is a good natured slacker, an ex-hippie who spends his time bowling and smoking weed.  One night two strangers break into his small apartment, mistaking him for a millionaire who is also named Jeff Lewbowki (Huddleston).  They leave after realising their mistake, but not before one of them ruins the Dude's rug.  Believing that the "Big Lebowski" owes him for his rug, the Dude finds himself unwitting drawn into a complex kidnapping plot involving an experimental artist, German nihilists, wealthy pornographers, a million dollars and a hungry marmot. 

This is a very funny shaggy-dog story from the Coen Brothers.  Influenced by the detective fiction of author Raymond Chandler, the story doesn't really make a lot of sense, but then, it's not supposed to.  the episodic narrative is packed with jokes and memorable characters:  Aggressive Vietnam veteran Walter (John Goodman), avant-garde artist Maude (Julianne Moore) who works naked flying on a swing, and flamboyant bowler Jesus (John Turturro).  The Coen Brothers have a real gift for idiosyncratic dialogue, and a strong ear for individual speech patterns.  It's sylishly directed, and visually striking, particularly the surreal dream sequences, and a great soundtrack of late sixties and seventies psychedelic rock.  Most importantly it is very funny, and full of quotable lines.  The film wasn't a big success on it's first release, but it has since become a major cult hit, to the point where some people pattern their lives on the film, there is even a semi-religion known as "Dudeism".  It's set against the backdrop of the first Gulf War, which is seen on TV sets and occasionally mentioned (in one scene the Dude hallucinates Saddam Hussein as a bowling alley employee) but doesn't really impact the characters lives at all, even the militaristic Walter is pretty much fixated on Vietnam, and these characters are living in the past, and are still stuck in the early seventies.  Their nostalgic worldview isn't criticised by the film, seeming to exist apart from the rest of the world, in a mythic Shangri-La for white middle-aged men, of bowling and weed.  The Dude's problems occur when he is forces himself out of his own world, but despite everything that happens, all he really wants is a rug.  Everything the Dude does in the film is because he has been pushed to do it, or talked into it by others, to the extent that he frequently parrots what people say to him to others, word for word, as if they are his own ideas, and he seems to think they are.  The Dude elevates laziness into an artform.  Everyone in the talented cast gives a good performance, and it seems like it was a lot of fun for all concerned.  While the Coes Brothers have definitively stated that there will not be a sequel, John Tuturro has written, directed and stars in a spin-off film called The Jesus Rolls which is due for release in 2020.

            Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman prepare to roll in The Big Lebowski

Inside Llewyn Davis

Year of Release:  2013
Director:  Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Starring:  Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garret Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham, Justin Timberlake
Running Time:  105 minutes
Genre:  Drama, dark comedy, period, music

Greenwich Village, New York City, the winter of 1961:  The film charts a week in the life of struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis (Isaac), sleeping wherever anyone will give him a couch for the night, constantly hustling for low-paying gigs or session work and always hoping for an elusive big break.

This is a beautifully dark comedy, following one very bad week for Llewyn Davis, virtually plotless, the film moves from incident to incident as Davis' troubles mount up, although many of them are self-inflicted.  Filmed in muted colours it captures a particular moment in American music, of the folk scene just prior to the emergence of Bob Dylan.  It features a fantastic performance from Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis who could easily just be a complete prick.  While Davis is not a particularly likable character, his obnoxious personality alienating friends and strangers alike, he is never unsympathetic, with Isaac being able to convey so much despair and frustration with just a look.  Also the fact that Davis is a good singer, and he could possible make it big if he could get the breaks, but he knows that his break probably will never come, and the fact that often it doesn't matter if someone has talent if they can't catch a break.  Isaac is well supported by other great performances, mot notably from Carey Mulligan (as a fellow folk singer who looks like an angel and sings very sweetly but has a lot of anger which she is not shy about expressing) and John Goodman (as an obnoxious drug addicted jazz musician).  There are a lot of Coen Brothers hallmarks here, with characters being defined by repeated phrases and motifs, and recurring plot elements (such as Llewyn's search for a missing cat, which runs through the film), and it feels almost like a companion piece to A Serious Man  (2009), which has a similar theme of life being like a cosmic joke.  The film also has one of the best soundtracks of recent years.      

Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis

The Artist

Year:  2011
Director:  Michel Hazanavicius
Screenplay: Michel Hazanavicius
Starring:  Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, James Cromwell, John Goodman, Missi Pyle, Penelope Ann Miller, Malcolm McDowell
Genre:  Silent, drama, comedy, romance
Running Time:  100 minutes

The middle of January is obviously way too early to be talking about the greatest film of the year, but if it manages to produce anything to top The Artist than 2012 will go down as one of the greatest years in movie history.  I'm not even joking.  A black and white, French, silent film with no stars, might sound like box-office poison, at least outside of the art-house circuit and Film Festivals.  However this film has been met with rapturous critical reception and large audiences.  It is immediately obvious why when you see it because it is absolutely fantastic.

The film opens in Hollywood in 1927.  The biggest star of the day is matinee idol George Valentin (Dujardin) who has been hugely successful in a string of comic adventure films with his adorable little performing dog, Jack (Uggie the dog).  One night after a premiere he literally bumps into a young aspiring actress, Peppy Miller (Bejo), whom he helps to get her first big break.  However, Valentin's position at the top of the tree is threatened by the latest technological innovation:  sound cinema (aka "the talkies").  Initially dismissing sound as a passing fad, Valentin finds himself unable to adapt to this new style, and soon finds himself on a relentless downward spiral, while Peppy goes from strength to strength fast becoming the biggest star in Hollywood.

This charming and endlessly stylish film perfectly recreates the world of silent film, featuring such out-dated techniques as irises, wipes and intertitles.  The two lead actors give superb performances, with Jean Dujardin expertly playing the charismatic leading man, and also allowing the audience to see his darker side in the later parts of the film.  Berneice Bejo is effortlessly engaging as Peppy, and the two handle the physical sielnt comedy perfectly.  The score is brilliant, although it's inclusion of Bernard Herrmann's love theme from the movie Vertigo (1958) has proven controversial due to the hostile reaction it provoked from the actress Kim Novak, who starred in Vertigo.    

Despite being very much a tribute to the cinema of the past, this is still accessible for modern audiences.  Those who worship at the shrines of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin will doubtless love it but it will also entertain those who seem to think that cinema started with Star Wars (1977).   If nothing else it will introduce the magical world of silent cinema to a whole new audience and that is enough in itself  to make it an unqualified success. 

Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are all smiles in The Artist  

Raising Arizona

Year: 1987
Director: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (uncredited)
Screenplay: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter, Trey Wilson, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, Frances McDormand, Randall "Tex" Cobb
Running Time: 94 minutes
Genre: Comedy, action,

Summary: H. I. "Hi" McDunnough (Cage) is a career criminal, with a penchant for robbing convenience stores, however he is so bad at it that he constantly gets caught. As time goes on he falls for the officer who processes him each time, Edwina "Ed" (Hunter), and they get married. Vowing to go straight, Hi embraces married life. However Ed is desperate to have a baby, but she is infertile and they are unable to adopt due to Hi's criminal past.
When they learn that local businessman Nathan Arizona (Wilson) has just become a father to quintuplets, Hi and Ed decide to steal one of the five babies to raise as their own.
They successfully kidnap one of the babies, but their new found family life is thrown into jeopardy when two of Hi's old friends from prison (Goodman and Forsythe) break out of jail and arrive at the McDunnough's home, as well as a deranged biker bounty hunter (Cobb) who is determined to find the missing baby.

Opinions: Child abduction is not exactly the most obvious theme for a light hearted knockabout comedy, especially one in which the abductors are actually the heroes, but the Coen brothers make it work.
The film is hyper-stylised and almost cartoonish, featuring sweeping camera movements, surreal moments and plenty of the Coens' trademark dialogue.
Nicolas Cage does some great work in the film. He is an actor who can be really good when he is in the right film and has a character that fits his over-the-top, manic style. He fits right in to the frenetic, bizarre world of this movie. However the film belongs to Holly Hunter who provides the film with it's heart. Genuinely well-meaning, if misguided, her character, which was written specifically for Hunter, anchors the whole movie.
The film is visually impressive, consistently entertaining, and very funny. The darker aspects of the premise are hinted at, but not really explored. Despite not being particularly successful when it was first released it has become something of a cult movie now.
The film gets a lot of comedy mileage out of the character's dialect (which was written as a blending of the local dialect and the character's assumed reading material - namely the Bible and magazines). As happens a lot with Coen brothers films, it's difficult to tell if they are celebrating or mocking the South, or maybe both at the same time.
The movie runs the risk at times of being too quirky for it's own good, but it gets by on sheer energy and the fact that it is always enjoyable and frequently genuinely charming. This was the Coens' second film and was written deliberately to be the polar opposite of their debut, the hard-edged, stripped down noir thriller Blood Simple (1984), and fans will be able to spot many of their tradmarks.
Over the top, exuberant fun, but with genuine heart, this is worth checking out.



Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona