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Bplus July/August 2012

your favorite movies and then some July/ August 2012 • $6.95

Walk Like a Man

e d u D e h T e k i L k l Ta 1

From the Editor

Bplus

We love making every issue of Bplus; after all, it’s our job to be nostalgic and entertained. But making this issue was special. Making this issue made us laugh. In uproarious pitch meetings, we reminisced about our favorite parts of our favorite funny films. We distracted ourselves with impromptu screenings (in the interest of research, of course). And we guffawed, belly-laughed, chuckled, giggled, or snorted on a daily basis.

Editor in Chief Dustin Q. Diaz

i Managing Editor Haley Durbin

i Art Director Emily Eisenhauer

Much beloved by Bplus are Christopher Guest’s fauxdocumentaries. The transcripts from Tasha Robinson’s interview with Guest and his creative partner Eugene Levy had us all in stitches.

Mike D’Angelo’s nostalgic essay about the Large Marge scene from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure inspired a costume contest. Mike won by sporting a mask replicating Marge at her worst.

And, naturally, all of our most enterataining of movie quote one-upsmanship devolved in a veritable reenactment of The Big Lebowski, inspired in no small part by Steve Tobias’ canonization of the film.

Our offices were a brighter, cheerier place while we worked on this issue. We hope you agree, readers: Laughter truly is great medicine.

Dustin Q. Diaz 2

i Associate Editors Kyle Wheeler Dan Stephens

i Contributing Editors Mary Willems-Akers Beth Lusch Christopher M. Smith Maki K. Thomas Valerie Cline i Bplus is printed on recycled paper with biodegradable ink. When you finish reading this issue, help us take care of the planet. Instead of throwing this copy in the trash, add it to your compost bin. Bplus fortified compost helps veggies grow strong.

Bplus July/August 2012

UP FRONT

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Join the Club

FEATURES 10 Team Effort

Bplus interviews Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy

THE END

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MST3K made easy

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Five Things... ...from Michael Cera’s glove box

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On Set Find out what’s so special about Austin, TX

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Marge Looms Large Mike D’Angelo remembers Pee Wee’s Big Adventure

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The Dude Abides Why The Big Lebowski is a national treasure

Fun’N’Games We can’t find the differences.

Can you?

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Reviews

Rushmore

1998 Criterion Collection

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While Bottle Rocket had effective moments of brilliance that signaled the cinema to come, Wes Anderson made his first enduring stylistic stamp with Rushmore. His later films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic would expand upon and cement that aesthetic (and I would argue that The Darjeeling Limited begins to caricature it, Wes Anderson pandering with a “Wes Anderson” film), but for me the cream of the crop has always been the tale of Max Fischer, Herman Blume and Rosemary Cross. Maybe it’s

because, at the time of first viewing, the film was such a unique and fresh experience. Or maybe I just dig whimsical and quirky. Maybe it’s the music, the art direction, the performances… so many options! My point is that there are a number of reasons I adore this film, and while I have expected in subsequent viewings over the years to find some weakness in the film that will lessen its impact or value to me, I have yet to find any.

Sure, I’ve heard the occasional disparaging comment from those that saw the original trailer and thought they were in for an entire zany film of Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray playing increasingly horrible, though

humorous, pranks on each other, only to be presented with the cinematic masterpiece they got in that expectation’s place. I get that, but I’ve never felt that criticism had anything to do with the film, only to do with audience confusion (watching the trailer now, which is included in the special features of this release, it’s actually a truncated version of the entire film, not just the love triangle bits). And if you feel the film is lesser for not living up to that interpretation of the trailer, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you, even though I think you’re insane.

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Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 1993 MGM

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is about the most fun you can have with three guys who like to dress up as women.

There are movies like Mrs. Doubtfire, which treat crossdressing as a joke, then there’s Just Like a Woman, which has its maudlin moments. Somewhere in between is Priscilla, which takes the matter seriously, but delivers a lot of laughs while doing so.

The dance numbers are lavish and fun to watch. They’re performed in the middle of the desert, atop a bar in some out-of-the-way town, or on a professional stage in Sydney.

The often-ribald comedy varies from amusing to hilarious. You’ll find yourself remembering great lines, most of which are too “colorful” to repeat.

While each of the three leads is good, the standout performance belongs to normally-serious veteran actor Terrence Stamp, who has previously appeared in such diverse outings as Billy Budd and Superman (I and II).

Here, he brings a quiet dignity to the role of Bernadette, an aging transexual. That’s not easy to do considering

some of the outrageous costumes he’s required to wear.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a great deal more appealing than many might suppose it to be.

It’s a road movie that’s anything but typical or traditional. So, whether or not you share the proclivities of Bernadette, Mitzi, and Felicia, the trio’s cinematic cabaret is nevertheless something to smile and laugh your way through.

The Goonies 1985 Warner Bros.

The Goonies has convinced me that sterility might not be such a bad thing.

The Goonies features a ratty group of kids who live in the boondocks. When wealthy developers threaten to move in, they discover an old treasure map, and set off in search of ‘the rich stuff’ to save their admittedly pathetic way of life.

The Goonies is more than just some goofy Fox Kids treasure hunt story.

Over time, it has become a true cult classic, heralded by film geeks and movie nerds the world over. Yes, at its heart it is just a simple kiddie tale, no different than the hundreds of other

kiddie tales which go straight to video every year. But, The Goonies has a certain scruffy, goofball roughness that makes it endearing and lovable, allowing it a special place in the hearts of its followers that has endured the test of time.

The Goonies suffers from an overabundance of shouting and at times devolves into nothing more than a furball of grungy kids running around screaming and talking over one another. Indeed, at times I was left wondering why director Richard Donner didn’t hire a nanny or a drill instructor to get the kids to shut up and talk in coherent sentences. But real kids are not quiet, and real kids do not deliver Oscar-worthy lines with great drama and flair. Real kids do run around shouting and jumping and generally making a nuisance of themselves. So, perhaps in spite of the fact that the film frequently becomes extremely annoying, the rampant kiddie-rampaging isn’t so bad after all.

In the end, The Goonies is a flick to watch with your children. This is a film that the whole family can love.

Replete with lavish and quirky set design, goofily harmless antics, and smart scoring, Donner manages to delight and surprise at every turn in a coming of age tale the likes of which is rarely seen.

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Join the Club

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Why it’s daunting: A true cult classic, Mystery Science Theater 3000 maintained a fervent following (a.k.a.

“MSTies”) beyond the run of its 10 seasons and 198 episodes, which were originally broadcast between 1988 and 1999. The premise is simple enough to be encapsulated by the series’ jaunty theme song: Every episode involves a two-hour “experiment” wherein mad scientists subject the series’ human host and his robot friends to one of the worst movies ever made. The subjects fight back with the only weapon they have: a rapid-fire barrage of jokes. But several stumbling blocks toward devotion remain.

First, there’s that run time, which still amounts to 90 minutes without commercials. Second, there’s the fact that the show was subject to constant cast changes: By the time MST3K was canceled for the second time none of the onscreen roles were occupied by their original performers. Add in the fact that negotiations over movie rights prevent the home-video release of full-season sets—they’re released instead in non-chronological batches of four episodes—and you have what seems to outsiders a tangled,

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confusing creation as foreboding as any cinematic turkey screened on the Satellite Of Love.

Possible gateway: Episode 820, Space Mutiny. Despite the cast switch-ups, Mystery Science Theater 3000 maintained a great sense of continuity in its writers’ room, where the creative core of the aptly named Best Brains, Inc. broke down the films featured on the series to the subatomic level. Under the guidance of head writer Michael J. Nelson (who also assumed hosting duties from creator Joel Hodgson after Hodgson’s 1993 departure), the Brains watched and re-watched each film, singling out key moments of ineptitude and flinging innumerable jokes, cultural references, and observations at the onscreen action. With the more accessible and enjoyable episodes of MST3K, there’s a sense that this painstaking process was actually fun; this certainly applies season eight’s decimation of the South African sci-fi cheapie Space Mutiny.

The series highlighted some outand-out stinkers in its time, but in terms of production value and pacing, the relatively slick and zippy Space

Mutiny is the Star Wars of the MST3K canon. (Or the Battlestar Galactica) It still gives Nelson, Crow T. Robot (Bill Corbett), and Tom Servo (Kevin Murphy) plenty with which to work, though. John Phillip Law turns in a deliciously hammy performance as the leader of the titular insurrection.

Cisse Cameron appears to be two decades too old to be the romantic interest of hard-bodied hero Reb Brown.

A character killed by Law in one scene briefly reappears, silent but alive, a few scenes later. (Quotes Crow: “I think it’s very nice of you to give that dead woman another chance.”) Plenty of jokes are made at the expense of Brown’s weightlifter-like physique, including an increasingly ludicrous series of nicknames punctuating his character’s most heroic actions.

Next steps: MST3K’s B-movie well ran much deeper than inept space operas and crummy monster movies—it just so happens that those types of films are featured in some of the series’ most memorable episodes. When it comes to poorly dubbed imports in which Japan is menaced by rubbery creatures, few worked as well as the

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five Gamera movies featured in season three. The last of those films, Gamera Vs. Guiron, provided the series with one of its most inspired musical moments. The Spanish E.T. wannabe Pod People, also seen in season three, is another highlight of the Hodgson era.

In line with Hodgson’s sleepier approach to hosting, the episode takes a while to get going, but its second half is imbued with some fun metatextual gags—after one character takes a break from being terrorized by fuzzy aliens to enjoy a cocktail, Joel and the ’bots reimagine him as a grumpy drunk with an encyclopedic knowledge of hooch—and a completely off-the-wall segment where the friendlier of the movie’s intergalactic visitors gives a crash course in stopmotion animation.

Hodgson’s departure was the source of much “Kirk Vs. Picard”-style debate among MSTies, but Nelson

brought his own energy and a new spin on the host-and-bots relationship upon donning his green jumpsuit in the middle of season five. More of a friend to the ’bots than Hodgson’s paternalistic Joel Robinson, the character of Mike Nelson brought more of a hang-out vibe to MST3K—even if he was still technically a captive of the “Mads.” As such, there’s a puckish spirit running through many of the better Nelson episodes, like Show 907—featuring the flimsy Gremlins facsimile Hobgoblins—or Show 910, where The Final Sacrifice introduces mulleted fan favorite/beer-swilling folk hero Zap Rowsdower.

could do little more than express their exasperation through Joel and the ’bots. The same goes for another season-four feature, Monster A-Go Go, which despite being surrounded by some top-notch host segments—including the introduction of Johnny Longtorso, a piecemeal action figure invented by “classic” Mads Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) and TV’s Frank (Frank Conniff)—is a maddeningly muddled, fans-only endeavor.

Beaulieu’s elaborate, explanatory introduction to 1996’s Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie makes the series’ big-screen adaptation a worthy candidate for an entry point.

Erik Adams

Where not to start: Though Show 424 helped cement the infamy of Manos: The Hands Of Fate, it hardly sets a good precedent for the rest of the series: The filmmaking on display is so egregiously inept that the Brains

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On Set

Austin

We’re gonna need you to go ahead and visit the Office Space building Mike Judge didn’t have to shoot Office Space in Austin.

The office park that housed Initech could have been anywhere in America (and it is).

Chances are, your city has one that looks awfully similar, but you’ve never really noticed it, because why would you?

These kinds of buildings are designed not to be noticed.

They are blandness made real.

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And that’s precisely why Mike Judge shot here. Obviously it was more convenient for the Austinite to shoot in his hometown, but he didn’t have to go far to find an inconspicuous office park that captured the soul-crushing atmosphere of a dead-end cubicle job.

Local film critic and film professor Alison Macor spoke to just about everyone involved in Office Space for a chapter on the film in her book Chainsaws, Slackers, And Spy Kids: Thirty Years Of Filmmaking In Austin, Texas. She was a film critic at the Austin American Statesman when Judge

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was shooting Office Space, which was a popular time for Austin in film: Robert Rodriguez was doing The Faculty in town, Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys had just come out.

Turns out it was a bad time to be making Office Space. Not only was it an oppressively hot shoot, even by Austin standards, but Hollywood had been shocked by the success of There’s Something About Mary that summer. Fox, the studio, was looking for something similarly outrageous from Judge—described by Macor as “big, fat faces with a wide-angle lens”— and thus began what would be a continual battle with the studio over the film’s execution.

But Judge didn’t have to fight to shoot in Austin. The Initech building, at 4120 Freidrich Lane on the city’s south side, was used for exteriors.

(There’s some debate whether the nearby ditch is the ditch from the film, or if that was shot elsewhere.)

The exterior of Chotchkies is about 15 miles north. Also up on the north side were Ron Livingston’s apartment and the site of the traffic jam at the start of the film. (Check out our Austin site for a complete list of Office Space locations.)

According to some of the office park’s other tenants, the Initech space has been empty for some time, though when The A.V. Club was there, it looked like it was being prepared for some new people, which sparked a debate among us: Would people be happy to know their office was the setting of Office Space, or bummed because the movie portrays the work environment as hell on earth? The exceedingly friendly guys we spoke

to from the nearby Toshiba office seemed to think it was pretty cool.

One even mentioned how he and he co-workers would try to sneak on set to raid craft service during filming.

“I think a lot of people who work in offices feel that that movie speaks to them,” Macor says. “It doesn’t belittle them. I think they think, ‘Yeah, the underdog coming through,’ and Mike Judge himself slaved away in cubicle life for a long time and based a lot of the characters in the short— based Lumbergh on somebody that he had known, and based Milton on a coworker. I think there’s a lot of affection for these characters—I don’t think the movie is against them.”

Ferris Bueller

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Team effort An interview with Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy

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hristopher Guest and Eugene Levy have both worn a great many hats in their careers, as actors, writers, comedians, and musicians. In the three hilarious documentary-style films they’ve collaborated on over the past decade—Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, and A Mighty Wind—they tend to wear all those hats at once. They collaborate on the storylines, then Guest directs a talented cast of regulars through the process of improvising a script; Guest and Levy both appeared in all three films as well. This year’s For Your Consideration, a freewheeling comedy about what happens when rumors of Oscar nods reach the cast of a small, tacky film called Home For Purim, was made in a similar style, with the same core cast, and appearances from Guest and Levy themselves. But Guest is quick to point out that it’s a different kind of film. Bplus recently spoke with Guest and Levy about the craft of their collaborations, and why For Your Consideration is different.

Bplus: Has your collaboration process changed in any significant way over the years?

Eugene Levy: I would say that they haven’t changed all that much since the first film we worked on together, Waiting For Guffman. I think the writing process is pretty much the same—we kind of flesh out the idea first, and along with that, the characters. We kind of figure out who we want to play which character, and then we start putting it down in a scene-by-scene breakdown for the script. And that’s been the process, I think, for all these movies. It really hasn’t changed all that much.

Bplus: And then the actual dialogue is improvised by all of the actors within that scene-by-scene structure you provide?

Christopher Guest: There’s a very strict blueprint for what happens. There’s just no dialogue written—except

in this case, for Home For Purim, the movie being filmed within the movie.

Bplus: How flexible is that blueprint? Do you allow the scene-by-scene improv to change the course of the movie if something interesting develops that you hadn’t foreseen?

CG: They’re not flexible at all. What is flexible is the dialogue that’s used to convey the actual exposition that we need. Every scene has a point; it’s not just people rambling.

There’s exposition in every scene that has to be accomplished before we can move on. And so that can’t change, otherwise you have this free-for-all.

Bplus: How many takes do you do of a given scene, and how do you decide when you’re done with the improv process, and ready to move on?

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CG: I would say it’s far less than a conventional movie.

In a typical movie, you have anywhere between 10 and 20 takes. For our films, we do maybe three at most. Four would be a lot. It becomes quite clear, from the standpoint of something that’s funny, and in terms of what has to be conveyed, when to move on.

Bplus: At what point is Eugene’s part in the process finished? Is there a sharply delineated line between the writing process and the filmmaking, or is it more organic than that?

CG: We finish the outline, which could be 25 pages or so.

That’s distributed to the actors, and at that point, it turns into my job of being the director, essentially. From then on, we make the movie, obviously. After I’ve done an edit of the movie, Eugene will come in, and we’ll talk about that.

The process of editing is also for me to do with the editor.

Bplus: What’s the most surprising thing that comes out of the improv process?

EL: Just how brilliant and adept these people are at coming up with things that are funny. Getting the point across in the scene, and also being able to get amazing laughs. It’s the dialogue aspect of this process where you realize how great, how talented this troupe really is, because they’re able to improvise some amazingly, brilliantly funny lines.

And they kind of know when to be funny and when not to be funny, so it’s a kind of weird balancing act. You sometimes hear a line in a scene and you know how funny it is, but you don’t really want to laugh while the cameras are rolling.

Bplus: Since these films started coming out on DVD, fans have been speculating that you must generate a ton of unused footage, with different ways of improvising individual scenes. Yet there’s very little of that on the DVDs.

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CG: What I show in the film is basically what I think is the best take of a scene. Scenes that work, but only in themselves, not within the context of the final movie, those show up on the DVDs. Bplus: How does your process compare to how Rob Reiner made Spinal Tap? Did appearing in that film teach you anything about the faux-doc process that carried over to your own films?

CG: First of all, For Your Consideration isn’t documentarystyle. When I did Waiting For Guffman and the next two, those were done like documentaries. This current movie is a narrative style—we dropped that whole documentary template. Waiting For Guffman was different right away from Spinal Tap, because we didn’t show the interviewer.

That person became invisible immediately. That created a different way of tuning it and ultimately editing it. There was no person to cut to, to react to the person doing interviews, merely the people being interviewed. So there’s an evolution through all of these movies, and now the biggest evolution by moving to narrative.

Bplus: Why did you move away from that style?

CG: Well, we had done three, and we thought it was time to do something different. To take on a different kind of challenge. It is quite a dramatic difference in the way you construct a movie. With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes. And in For Your Consideration, you go from scene to scene the way you would in a typical movie.

Bplus: It does resemble the last three films in that it’s about an insular group of people who’ve lost perspective on the outside world. But it’s a much more expansive and less insular movie. Was that just a natural outgrowth of moving away from the documentary format?

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Bplus: Did changing the format change the way the actors approached the film?

CG: I don’t think it did. It changes, my standpoint as director, because at the end of the scene, I have to be conscious of the script, of where that ends up and goes to. I can’t bridge it with some fairly arbitrary joke. So from my standpoint, I had to watch what they were doing—look at it and say, “Is this going to be a good ending for this scene? Do we have that somewhere in the scene?” I think I can say, from the standpoint of the actors, it wasn’t really different from the way they’ve worked before.

Bplus: Eugene, as an actor, did you approach For Your Consideration in the same way?

EL: I think the process is exactly the same. I don’t think there’s honestly any difference in how the actors approach this film than doing a documentary.

The Regulars: Actor Catherine O’Hara has played parts in all of Guest’s and Levy’s films. Most recently she played Marilyn Hack in For Your Consideration

CG: I think it is an outgrowth of that, sure. Yet I think there is a similarity in terms of the mythology of the people. You can pick any area where people have these huge blind spots and are not really aware of what’s going on around them.

There are some similarities.

Bplus: Christopher, you’ve said that A Mighty Wind was kind of a personal film for you, because it’s about the folk-singing world, and you have a history there.

Obviously, both of you come out of the film industry—did that make this film similarly personal for either of you?

CG: I think Gene and I have both seen these things happen over the years—I’ve been in this business for almost 40 years, and I’ve certainly seen people who, going back 20, 25 years, have been told that they were gonna win awards.

And not just Oscars, all kinds of awards: Grammys and Emmys and Tonys. And without exception, it seems, in my experience, people I’ve known—it always ends up being kind of tragic, because it’s the same scenario every time.

Someone will say to someone in a musical, “You know, you better be prepared, you’re gonna win.” They skip over the actual nomination, I don’t know why that is, but they say, “You’re gonna win.” And the person then believes they’re gonna win. And then they don’t even get nominated—that

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Screen Cred Waiting for Guffman 1996 “People say, you must have been the class clown. And I say, No, I wasn’t. But I sat next to the class clown, and I studied him.”

Best in Show 2000 “Of course I’ve looked under the bed, of course I’ve looked under the bed.

That’s where you look when you lose things. ”

A Mighty Wind 2003 “Thank God for the model trains, you know? If they didn’t have the model trains they wouldn’t have gotten the idea for the big trains.”

For Your Consideration 2006 “You can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater because then all you have is a wet, critically injured baby.”

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always happens. I’ve seen this happen dozens of times, literally. So I think what interested me in this—and it’s not personal, because I have been nominated and I’ve won and I’ve lost awards—but I think what interested us was this concept that once this happens, the person cannot process this information. There’s no healthy way to really deal with this. It becomes a virus, basically, and I think that was a big core to what this movie was.

Bplus: Eugene, are there specific aspects of this film that come out of your experience?

EL: Well, we’ve both been in the business for 35 years, and I think there are aspects to this thing that have come out of personal experience. You know, my character is an amalgam of different kind of people, agents and other people that I’ve encountered over the years, and I think just about every aspect of this story, you’ve come into contact with in your life. So it’s very familiar to me, as was A Mighty Wind, because I was heavily involved with folk music as well. So there is a familiarity with the subject matter with this one and with A Mighty Wind. As opposed to Best In Show, where we had to go out and actually do some research, because it’s a world with which I wasn’t all that familiar.

Bplus: Christopher, this is your second film about Hollywood. Has your perspective on the industry changed significantly since you made The Big Picture?

CG: I don’t know if it’s changed all that much. I find that I’m somewhat removed from the business, even though I work in the business. I don’t read anything about the business, I don’t watch television shows that are about the business, so in many ways I guess it hasn’t changed. But I just kind of do the work that I do.

Tasha Robinson

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ack in the summer of 1985, I was working the first of what would be many McJobs over the course of my extended adolescence, manning the concessions counter at a mall multiplex in San Jose, California. At the time, Oakridge Mall “boasted” a rinky-dink six-screen shoebox (since replaced by a modern behemoth), which meant there was plenty of downtime between show cycles. Some of my fellow wage slaves brought in books to kill the dead hour after we’d finished cleaning and restocking; others developed meaningful relationships with the employees

of the churro stand a few yards away. I, however, had a schedule to keep. Precisely 45 minutes after Pee-wee’s Big Adventure began, allowing time for trailers, I would go stand at the back of the theater to watch the Large Marge scene—not so much for its own sake (though it holds up remarkably well after several dozen viewings), but for the joy of experiencing it again and again with an audience that had no idea what was coming. The collective shriek of laughter inspired by the scene’s climax, identical every time, is forever burned into my brain.

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At the time, of course, I had no idea who Tim Burton was. Nobody did, apart from the handful of folks who’d seen his superb animated short “Vincent.” And perhaps they were mentally prepared for a sudden stop-motion explosion in the middle of an otherwise live-action cartoon. For the rest of us, however, Large Marge confirmed our growing suspicion that this movie wasn’t a disposable cash-in (Pee-wee Herman having already made a splash via a stage show, an HBO special, and various talk-show appearances)—and that its wonderfully warped sensibility transcended the character and heralded an exciting new talent. (The arrival of both Beetlejuice and the tepid, Randal Kleiser-directed Big Top Pee-wee three years later sealed that deal.) In the unlikely event that you’ve never seen this before, watching it alone on your computer won’t pack remotely the same punch as seeing it in a crowded theater, but do your best to imagine a hundred people emitting a delighted yelp at just the right moment. If I could somehow download and then upload my vivid memory of the sound for you, I would.

One of the things that makes this bit work so well, I think, is the absence of any preamble whatsoever. Burton shoots the approach of Marge’s rig with a totally straight

face: The headlights slowly cresting the far horizon, followed by the gradual reveal of Pee-wee from darkness, isn’t too far removed visually from, say, the opening of Kiss Me Deadly. And once Pee-wee climbs into the cab, Marge immediately launches into her death monologue, without so much as a sidelong glance at the passenger seat. I actually think it might have been even funnier had her opening sentence not seemed to be a direct response to Pee-wee’s casual observation (“What a night, huh?”), acting instead as a complete non sequitur.

But that’s a quibble: Marge’s sepulchral delivery, coupled with Danny Elfman’s four-note Refrain O’ Doom (which I’ve always been annoyed isn’t included on the Varèse Sarabande soundtrack album), instantly lets us know that poor Pee-wee has once again flagged down the wrong vehicle.

In essence, this is a sketch-comedy bit—the film was co-written by Phil Hartman, who had done time with the Groundlings and would join the cast of Saturday Night Live the following year. But it’s unusual, from today’s perspective, in that the focus of the scene is neither the film’s star nor some other random celebrity making a cutesy cameo. Put this scene in a contemporary Will Ferrell comedy and Large Marge would be played by Amy Poehler in a fat suit, or perhaps even

by Paul Rudd in drag. (I wouldn’t put

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it past him.) Alice Nunn, on the other hand, was a complete unknown whose most notable previous credits were Mahala May Gruenecker on a show called Camp Runamuck and “Third Nurse” in the 1971 film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun. Which means that we’re not entirely sure what to expect from her—we know this is a comedy, so we’re not afraid, exactly, but there’s still a sense of uncertainty that would be absent in the presence of a familiar face. And of course, the face turns out to be crucial.

Now, there’s another observation I’m keen to make, but I need to tread carefully, since my lengthy diatribe on a related topic in the last Scenic Routes set a new world record for most instances of the word “douchebag” and its derivations in a single comments thread. (Maybe y’all will be more sympathetic to the general argument when it’s positive rather than negative.) Obviously, Burton chose to use stop-motion here because that was his background. In truth, though, I don’t think the scene’s big moment would be half as effective if it were done via today’s very best CGI. We’re accustomed by now to seeing apparently real objects undergo a convincing metamorphosis—it’s easily shrugged off, no matter how impressive. Stop-motion’s jerky frame-by-frame process remains oddly unsettling. And while

modern F/X could easily achieve such an effect in a single unbroken shot, I must say I like the cut from Pee-wee’s scream to Marge quickly swinging her face back from profile, even though it resembles those moments when the stunt double gets replaced by the star.

Without the cut, we’re marveling at the technique; with the cut, we can concentrate fully on the gag.

Either way, it surprises me a bit that this classic scene has inspired so little imitation over the last quartercentury. Apart from the venerable Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, I can’t think of anyone offhand who’s employed blatant stop-motion in an otherwise live-action context, using

its weirdly tactile quality in service of a goofy, unexpected punchline. (Perhaps the closest thing in spirit would be The Mask, though obviously that’s much more indebted to Tex Avery.)

Is Large Marge so sui generis that nobody dares attempt a vignette in a similar vein, for fear of looking too baldly derivative? Or are there homages and tributes out there that I just haven’t seen? If it’s the latter, please let me know, so I can keep an eye peeled for revival screenings of the film in question. I’ve been waiting a long time to experience that happy shriek again.

Mike D’Angelo

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Greasy Hair Sunglasses Stained T-Shirt

White Russian Dirty Bathrobe Short Pants Sandals 18

With Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski, among the most quotable movie this side of Double Indemnity or Sweet Smel l Of Success, perhaps the best place to start is a quote.

This one comes from the sasparil a swigging Cowboy: “Sometimes there’s a man..

I won’t say a hero, ’cause what’s a hero? Sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about The Dude here, The Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there’s a man.. wel l. . he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that’s The Dude. The Dude from Los Angeles.”

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s the narration rolls out, we see The Dude in all his majesty, skulking around the dairy aisle at a grocery store, sniffing through the cartons to find half & half to stir into his beloved White Russians. Streaked with the blond highlights of a California surfer gone to seed, his shaggy hair spills over into an ensemble that includes an open gray robe, a dingy white Vneck that barely contains his billowing paunch, blue plaid shorts, and a pair of open-toed jellies that seem custom-designed for ambling. Upon reaching the checkout line, he pays with a check for $.69. From this brief snapshot, the Coens very nearly reveal the whole picture.

But here’s the thing about The Dude (“or Duder or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing”): He isn’t the man for his time and place, as The Stranger claims. He’s a man from an era that passed more than 20 years ago, someone who may have gotten his hackles up over Vietnam—he claims to have been part of the Seattle Seven, him and “six other guys”—but he’s since slouched his way into potaddled oblivion. When the other, more materially successful Lebowski tells him later, “Your revolution is over. Condolences. The bums lost,” he doesn’t have the will or the lever-

That rug real ly tied the room together age to disagree. What does he have to show for his activism? A crappy apartment, no job, a bowling buddy who lives to exasperate him, and a world so thoroughly neutralized by the non-bums that President George H.W. Bush is about to declare war on Iraq, and nobody bats an eyelash.

It all starts with the carpet-pissers.

And that’s another brilliant thing about the shaggy-dog plotting of The Big Lebowski: By and large, the incidents that drive the story along are, in The Stranger’s words, “stupefying” in their absurd triviality. Had the carpet-pissing goons not mis-

taken The Dude for the other Jeffrey Lebowski—the wealthy, wheelchairbound businessman whose trophy wife (in the parlance of our times) owes money all over town—there’s no movie here. That rug “really tied the room together,” and The Dude’s quest to replace it leads him to get mixed up with a phony kidnapping scheme, a band of nihilists, tittering avantgarde artists, a pornographer, the fascist Malibu police chief, Saddam Hussein (as a bowling-alley clerk), and one Larry Sellers, a hollow-eyed young Dstudent who may have run off with $1 million in ransom money.

The Dude’s sidekick throughout his adventures is John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak, a short-tempered, well-armed Vietnam vet (and practicing Jewish convert) who tends to view everything through the prism of his war experience, no matter how slight or tangentially related. After watching his buddies “die face-down in the muck,” Walter feels entitled to a world that’s just and orderly, even if his idea of what that world might look like is completely absurd, distorted, and overblown. When a competitor steps over the line, out comes the handgun. (“This is not ’Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”) When a waitress asks him to pipe down a little at a diner, he lectures her on

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the concept of “prior restraint.” And though he claims to have “dabbled in pacifism,” his hair-trigger aggression thoroughly violates The Dude’s peacenik philosophy, feeding into a hilarious dynamic of mutual exasperation. Still, they aren’t the opposites they appear to be. Both are outsiders, both are men out of time, and both are deeply suspicious of The Man. The Dude acts embarrassed when, late in the film, Walter drags Lebowski out of his wheelchair to prove he’s faking his disability, but there’s probably a side of him that suspects his friend may be on to something.

Sam Elliott’s muddled yet loveably folksy narration is so well integrated into The Big Lebowski that it’s easy to forget that the Coen brothers’ incomparable stoner screwball comedy even has a voiceover. That’s because the narrator (a cowboy known simply as The Stranger) provides little of the on-the-nose commentary that normally comes from invisible, omniscient guides. “Sometimes there’s a man,” begins one of The Stranger’s characteristically shaggy-dog asides.

“Sometimes, there’s a man. Ah, I lost my train of thought here.” While voiceovers typically strip away the mystery and complexity of movies, The Stranger adds another layer of cloudy-headed confoundedness to

Smokey, this is not Nam. This is bowling. There are rules. perhaps the most willfully confusing (and entertaining) detective story since The Big Sleep.

In fact, The Dude is actually a pretty wily sleuth. For one, he knows how to leverage his dumb hippie persona for a little rope-a-dope, like when he absorbs Lebowski’s verbal abuse, then informs Brandt that the big man said he could have any rug in the house.

Yes, The Dude gets hung up on Larry Sellers’ culpability for too long, and his lone attempt at active detecting—shading over the pressings on Treehorn’s notepad with a pencil—

backfires on him. But he has the right idea about the kidnapping scheme all along, and he thinks through the case as new shit comes to light. (Jon Polito, appearing as a fellow gumshoe working on a “wandering daughter job,” is duly impressed by The Dude’s mastery at playing both sides against each other.)

The Coens wrote The Big Lebowski with Jeff Bridges specifically in mind as The Dude, and it’s one of those roles so instantly iconic that it would be hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off. Bridges is, in my view, the greatest

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actor alive, and what’s striking about his work as The Dude is his utter lack of vanity and self-consciousness. Playing a long-in-the-tooth stoner burnout would seem to invite a cartoonish goofiness—and many of the supporting characters in the film exhibit just that—but Bridges slips Zen-like into his skin and doesn’t go mugging for effect. The miracle of Bridges’ career is that he’s a brilliant character actor who just happens to have the features of a marquee superstar (see also: Paul Newman), so he gets the plum lead roles, yet you rarely catch him “acting.” His line-readings and gestures are chief among many things that give The Big Lebowski infinite rewatch value: His mid-toke inflection on “That’s a bummer, man”; his all-too-relaxed spread-eagle posture while cruising in the backseat of a limo; and the slow-burning exasperation that curls across his face when Walter thoroughly botches their friend’s eulogy and ash-scattering.

Arriving on the heels of the Coens’ austere thriller Fargo, at the time their most widely embraced film, The Big Lebowski opened to mixed reviews and anemic box-office, with many casting it off as a frivolous lark following their great leap forward.

(This is also roughly what happened to Burn After Reading in the wake of No Country For Old Men, and though a reappraisal of the former is definitely due, I’m not entirely convinced it’s on a level with Lebowski.) The film’s subsequent success on DVD—and the regular midnight screenings and Lebowski-fests that have popped up in the meantime—is a classic example of an impassioned cult resurrecting a film’s tarnished reputation. Quotes from The Big Lebowski have become a form of cultural currency second only to The Simpsons; for modern cultmovie fans looking for fellow travelers, they’re the closest thing to a Vulcan hand-sign we have.

Who are the Coen Brothers?

Arguably, they’re the most controlled and technically proficient filmmakers of their time—peerless writers of stylized dialogue, efficient in pacing, ingenious in plotting, and brilliant in harmonizing every aspect of the craft to best service the whole. The Coens’ obsessively pursue of perfection;all 12 of their features to date bristle with intelligence, and snapof great entertainers.

Many filmmakers could be called chroniclers of the human condition, but the Coens are even further removed from the rest of us—they’re anthropologists and historians, looking at humanity from the other end of the microscope.

Scott Tobias

It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ ‘er easy for al l us sinners.

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Five Things... ...From Michael Cera’s Glove Box The Arrested Development movie is finally happening. No, seriously. After years of rumors, series co-creator and executive producer Mitchell Hurwitz confirmed over the weekend that the Bluth clan is headed to the multiplex. Hurwitz also cleared up a long-running misconception about why the movie has not come to pass: that actor Michael Cera allegedly refused to play ball.

“I kind of was perpetuating a little thing, like, wouldn’t it be funny if Michael Cera was the holdout,” Hurwitz said. “Actually,” Cera quipped, “I do have a thing.”

one mitten toy robot map to a party kim candy cigarettes

That’s funny.

We found five.

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Fun’n’games There are five differences between these The Princess Bride reunion photos.

Prepare to find them.

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