GIANCARLO ZAPPOLI

MYmovies.it

Figlio d'arte e fratello di Beau, attore di minore successo, Jeff debutta nel cinema di qualità. Il fisico aitante e il volto spigoloso non ostacolano ma anzi favoriscono lasua partecipazione a film 'di qualità' come L'ultimo spettacolo di Peter Bogdanovich. La sua carriera è tutta un'alternanza tra cinema di qualità e cinema commerciale di buon (e a volte medio) livello. E' un attore disponibile per le imprese e i ruoli più diversi: dal romantico extraterrestre di Starman di Carpenter al dinamico e intraprendente Tucker di Coppola il passo è lungo ma Jeff riesce a conservare la misura necessaria. Così come trova lo spleen necessario per il ruolo del musicista (in coppia con Beau) ne I favolosi Baker o per quello del tormentato disc jockey de La leggenda del Re Pescatore. Chi però sembra essere riuscito ad amalgamare tutta la sua versatilità in un'interpretazione davvero degna di nota sono i fratelli Coen. Il ritratto che riesce a dare di Big Jeff Lebowski è di quelli che restano anche dopo che la memoria del film si è dissolta.

DWIGHT GARNER

The New York Times

Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie, “The Big Lebowski,” which stars Jeff Bridges as a beatific, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed slacker known as the Dude, snuck up on the English-speaking world during the ’00s: it became, stealthily, the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings.
“The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.”
Where cult films go, academics will follow. New in bookstores, and already in its second printing, is “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” an essay collection edited by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe (Indiana University Press, $24.95). The book is, like the Dude himself, a little rough around the edges. But it’s worth an end-of-the-year holiday pop-in. Ideally you’d read it with a White Russian — the Dude’s cocktail of choice — in hand.

More than a few of this book’s essay titles will make you groan and laugh out loud at the same time (“ ‘The Big Lebowski’ and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism”). But just as often, the writing here is a bit like the film: amiable, laid-back and possessed of a wobbly Zen-acuity.
In one essay Fred Ashe — he is an associate professor of English at Birmingham-Southern College — profitably compares the Dude to Rip van Winkle, for both his “friendly charisma” and what Washington Irving described as Rip’s “insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor.” Both men, Mr. Ashe notes, expose “the sickness of a straight society premised on the Puritan work ethic.”
In another, “On the White Russian,” Craig N. Owens — he teaches literature and writing at Drake University in Des Moines — divides the world into two factions: those who float the cream on their White Russians (“the floaters”) and those who mix it in (“the homogenizers”). He praises the Dude’s “middle way,” avoiding the hassle of “shaking and straining.”
At times Mr. Owens sounds as if he’s been hitting the minibar himself. He writes about how Leon Trotsky is “doubly implicated” in the White Russian, first because he helped defeat the anti-Communist White Russian army during the Russian civil war, and second because he later fled to Mexico, “Kahlúa’s country of origin.” Mr. Owens suggests that the Dude has a kind of “Trotskian positionality.”
Most of the essays in “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies” began as papers presented at the 2006 Lebowski Fest in Louisville. Working at an unhurried, Dude-like crawl, it took the editors three years to wrap these papers up and usher them into print.
“When we first put out a call for papers, we received about 200 proposals,” said Mr. Comentale, an associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, whose previous books include “Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde” and “T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.”
When putting the book together, Mr. Comentale said, he and his co-editor “immediately cut out all the papers celebrating the Dude as a hippie hero in a postmodern landscape.” That’s a sober choice. Admirers of the Dude are already dangerously close to becoming Internet-age versions of Parrotheads, the weekend-warrior Jimmy Buffett fans who tip back margaritas — and embarrass their children — while wearing flip-flops, board shorts, Hawaiian shirts and coconut bras.
“Trying to impress your academic colleagues and also make a dent in the popular market, that’s a fine line to walk,” Mr. Comentale added. “We wanted these essays to press the connection between the goofy and the profound.”
Reading “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” it’s hard not to recall some of the profound and not-so-goofy things the novelist Umberto Eco had to say about cult movies in his 1984 essay “ ‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.”
“What are the requirements for transforming a book or movie into a cult object?” Mr. Eco asked. “The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes and play trivia games so that the adepts of the sect recognize through each other a shared expertise.”
(If the phrases “Nice marmot,” or “You’re entering a world of pain,” or “I can get you a toe” mean anything to you, then “Lebowski” has entered your private sectarian world.)
Mr. Eco certainly seemed to presage the existence of “The Big Lebowski” when he wrote in his essay about “Casablanca” that a cult movie must be “ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself.” He explained: “Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.”
The glue that holds “The Big Lebowski” together, as gloriously rickety as it is, is Mr. Bridges’s performance. Pauline Kael once observed that Mr. Bridges, who is gathering Oscar buzz this month for his performance as a down-on-his-luck country singer in “Crazy Heart,” “may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived.”
In an essay in “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies,” Thomas B. Byers — he is a professor of English at the University of Louisville — points out that more mainstream actors like Harrison Ford or Kevin Costner or Tom Hanks could not have pulled off the role of the Dude. “What makes Bridges less of a star is precisely what makes him perfect for ‘Lebowski,’ whose particular niche of success depends on its outsider, cult status,” Mr. Byers writes.
As a new generation of “Lebowski” fans emerges, Dude Studies may linger for a while. In another of this book’s essays, “Professor Dude: An Inquiry Into the Appeal of His Dudeness for Contemporary College Students,” a bearded, longhaired and rather Dude-like associate professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., named Richard Gaughran asks this question about his students: “What is it that they see in the Dude that they find so desirable?”
One of Mr. Gaughran’s students came up with this summary, and it’s somehow appropriate for an end-of-the-year reckoning: “He doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his values. He just does it. He lives in a very disjointed society, but he’s gonna take things as they come, he’s gonna care about his friends, he’s gonna go to somebody’s recital, and that’s it. That’s how you respond.”
Happy New Year, Dude.
Da The New York Times, 30 dicembre 2009

PRESSBOOK

Ha finito di girare How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Ultimamente è stato il protagonista di Stick It – Sfida e conquista della Touchstone Pictures, nel quale ha interpretato il ruolo dell’allenatore di una squadra di ginnasti. E’ uno degli attori di maggiore successo di Hollywood ed è stato quattro volte candidato agli Oscar. Ha ricevuto la sua prima nomination alla prestigiosa statuetta per Miglior Attore non Protagonista nel 1971 con il film di Peter Bogdanovich L’ultimo spettacolo con Cybill Shepherd. Tre anni più tardi ha ricevuto la seconda nomination per il suo ruolo nel film di Michael Cimino Una calibro 20 per lo specialista. Nel 1984, la candidatura è stata come Miglior AtTore Protagonista con Starman. La sua interpretazione gli è valsa anche una nomination ai Golden Globe.
Nel 2001, ha ricevuto un’altra nomination ai Golden Globe e la sua quarta agli Oscar per il suo ruolo in The Contender, il thriller politico di Rod Lurie con Gary Oldman e Joan Allen, in cui Bridges ha interpretato il Presidente degli Stati Uniti.
La scorsa estate, Bridges ha prestato la sua voce a Surf’s Up – I re delle onde della Sony Pictures Animation, un film che è andato dietro le quinte del mondo adrenalinico del surf competitivo pro-pinguini. Bridges ha dato la sua voce al personaggio principale, Geek (un Pinguino Re) un surfista finito, litigioso, che vive una vita da recluso fino a quando un bambino di nome Cody (Shia LaBeouf) entra nel suo mondo e stravolge la sua vita. Nel 2005 Bridges è apparso in The Moguls, una commedia scritta e diretta da Michael Traeger, e in Tideland – Il mondo capovolto diretto da Terry Gilliam.

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Il grande Lebowski, il trailer ufficiale del film [HD]

Regia di Joel Coen. Un film con Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston. Dal 6...

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