A Serious Man (2009)

UK / France / USA, 106 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Photography: Roger Deakins

Music: Carter Burwell, Jefferson Airplane, Band of Gypsys

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, George Wyner, Amy Landecker, Adam Arkin, Peter Breitmayer

I wanted to make a point about A Serious Man being underrated, but every time I go looking for ranked lists of Coen brothers movies it’s chaos. I keep running into opinions I can’t believe anyone really has. A Rotten Tomatoes list that is aware of Ethan Coen’s solo Drive-Away Dolls from last year, for example, has True Grit #1 and Blood Simple #2 before getting to Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and Miller’s Crossing. The Big Lebowski is down at #14 in that list of 20 while A Serious Man sits comfortably in the middle at #11. That’s not exactly underrated but this list and many of the others strike me as weirdly perverse in any number of significant ways each.

Maybe Coen brothers movies appeal on a range of inscrutable, deeply personal points that may be difficult to discern. I know that’s at least partly the case for me with A Serious Man, which features, though not by name, the western Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, the growing up home of the Coen brothers. St. Louis Park was the next school district over from mine (Hopkins) and it was where my Dad taught 9th-grade physics and reported he’d had one of the Coens in a class one year. Many of the exteriors in A Serious Man were actually shot in Bloomington, a southern suburb. But I know St. Louis Park in the ‘60s when I see it. They are dead-on, these flat treeless squared-off suburban developments. The trees are all grown up now but this is what it looked like there 60 years ago.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022)

Ethan Coen’s documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis does not add a lot to what we already know about the iconic rock ‘n’ roller, but it has the advantage of being posthumous. It was released shortly after Lewis’s death in October 2022, offering the most panoramic view yet of his entire career (much like the essential I Am Everything did for Little Richard). As the picture notes toward the end, Lewis outlived a good many of his peers, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. This documentary overall leans more toward hagiography, never really addressing the many scandals that swirled around and dogged Lewis. The good news here is that means more time for the music. Who cares whether he murdered anyone or if there really was a hound dog no one ever saw before or since howling outside the window the night he was born? The music ranges across his rock ‘n’ roll hits, then his country music chapter, and chases all the way down to his pentecostal gospel music roots in Ferriday, Louisiana. His cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart get their time here too, as does his sister, briefly, Linda Gail. They all agree Jerry Lee was the most talented of them all, and Lewis of course modestly allows they’re right. When the music and performances are all stacked up in such proximity his whole deal does have a certain sameness—but what sameness! He gets the rumbling boogie-woogie undertow going and layers practically anything he likes on top, his own stuff and covers of songs, rock ‘n’ roll, country, gospel, anything. There’s some great footage of Lewis with Tom Jones on an exuberant cover of “Tutti Frutti.” Lewis goes out of his way to bearhug Chuck Berry in an extended sequence and pays his respects to Little Richard too. But on the matter of Elvis Presley, he remained dubious to the end. He never exalts Elvis for anything and credits Colonel Tom Parker for all the success, which made him basically consistent to the end. Little Richard had a similar problem and I have to say I’m inclined to agree with them more than not. Jerry Lee Lewis was as original and dynamic a rock ‘n’ roll performer as anyone else and there’s approximately 70 minutes of proof in this tidy documentary, worth seeing for the musical performances alone.

Ball the Wall (1989)

This collection of pieces and excerpts by Nik Cohn seems just slightly ahead of its time from its subtitle, Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock, as few were prepared to see "the Age of Rock" as finite in 1989, or anyway I wasn't, more fool me. Cohn always did seem to be living a few years ahead of the rest of us—in some ways so far ahead of his time his parents haven't even met yet, as the old joke goes. Cohn is also an outrageous fabricator and this collection includes perhaps his greatest in "Another Saturday Night," published originally in New York magazine in 1976 as "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and going on to serve as the basis for the movie Saturday Night Fever. Cohn made the whole thing up. He was living in the US by then (probably New York) but the story was based on his experience clubbing in London in the '60s. I struggled with most of the fiction here (explicitly fiction, that is) but I think that is more about the general inadequacy of novel excerpts, which are rarely satisfying as they are neither stories nor novels. The longest excerpt as such is from the formally nonfiction Rock From the Beginning (under the original Little Richard shout title, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom). There's some shrewd editing here to sharpen the pieces from that book and they are worth looking at even if you already know it. Elsewise, he has a great term for early '70s pop in "Pepsi," along with a great example in the B.J. Thomas "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" interlude in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "Pepsi" is perfect for the early '70s. Cohn's British origins and age give him a particularly interesting view on "pop" specifically, a somewhat more old-fashioned view of it that transcended music and included fashion and arty movies and sports figures too. And I think no one else could go to New York in the '70s and decide to write about the street drag-racing and stock-car circuit there. There's an interesting long piece here about fashion too, "Today There Are No Gentlemen," which sorts out the clothing styles and how it all worked with the Mods and Rockers, basically Cohn's home turf (fictional or otherwise). Pretty good collection!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Rock From the Beginning (1969)

I'm not going to attempt the convoluted publishing history of Nik Cohn's story of rock 'n' roll and, implicitly—shot from the hip as it is—early and influential essay at the rock critic enterprise. It has been sold under the titles Pop From the Beginning, Rock From the Beginning, and, most evocatively, AWOPBOPALOOBOP ALOPBAMBOOM (for Little Richard, of course). Editorial revisions appear to have gone on with every edition. The little mass market paperback with the illustration of Jimi Hendrix on the cover, called Rock From the Beginning, is the one I read in 1970. Written (mostly) in 1968 when Cohn was a jaded seen-it-all 22-year-old, its assessments are more often wildly wrong, or at least out of step with later rock critical canon (not least because so impossibly early). Nevertheless, it lit me up in the summer when I was 15 and instilled a certain set of long-lived prejudices, a tendency toward instinctive contrarianism that lives on yet, for better or worse (I'm honestly not sure which it is). Certainly Cohn's language no longer seems the freewheeling specimen of New Journalism it once did. But the orientation of swiftly moving fickle taste and self-contradiction set in deep, and I still find a likely source for fundamental preferences here. He singles out Eddie Cochran and Little Richard in the early bunch, for example, makes a lot out of the Coasters, and characterizes the Brill Building approach as "highschool." On the other hand, P.J. Proby gets his own chapter along with the Beatles and Rolling Stones (each), and the chapter on Bob Dylan is spent mostly sniffing at him with a superior air. In the end (remember, 1968) Cohn sees Pete Townshend as the single most important figure going. (There's a great anecdote about Townshend writing "Pinball Wizard" under Cohn's influence—Cohn hadn't liked much of what he heard of Tommy, still in production, and did happen to be a pinball maniac.)

Jeering Amazon reviewers are all over Cohn and this book for being so wrong about so many things. But I recognize and appreciate his skepticism about the evolving conventional wisdom, which was then deifying Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and other now-usual suspects, while artists like Larry Williams and Del Shannon were slipping down the memory hole. I read this book a few times when I was 15 and 16 and absorbed much of it at cellular level. Coming back to it decades later in my 40s it more annoyed me and I was embarrassed not only for it but for myself for ever liking it. Now I've reached a kind of Baby Bear middle. There's no sense to make of Cohn's taste. It is all pure response, contradictions bursting out like time-lapse flowers popping into bloom. One minute the Beatles are brilliant and historical, the next they're not all that, and then back again. He dismisses Rubber Soul and Revolver. He judges Sgt. Pepper's their best. The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be came out later—they were freaking still together when he was writing! Cohn struggles for consistency even as he rails against it, grappling with these strange mysteries—why do some things sound good once and then never again, why do the opinions of others matter so much, why does everybody like something I can't stand, why can't I like it if everybody else does, and other conundrums about life and pop music. Really Cohn might have had it right with the title Pop From the Beginning. The book is not just about pop (from the beginning of the rock era anyway) but it is also '60s-style pop itself in its approach and attitude, caught in the flickering intense ecstasies of right now. And notwithstanding the later marketing ploys of Jimi Hendrix on the cover and appropriation of the word "rock," which by 1969 had achieved ascendancy over rock 'n' roll itself, not to mention pop. As if to prove the point, here is Cohn getting Hendrix wrong but also right in a way, simply by focusing so intently, elliptically, and self-consciously: "[Hendrix] was a conman, a black cliché, but it finally didn't matter much; he freaked out regardless, and he was real excitement." I'm going to start using "real excitement" as praise as soon as I possibly can, because he packs everything into that.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

USA / UK / France, 104 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Photography: Bruno Delbonnel

Music: Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, Max Casella, Jerry Grayson, Jeanine Serralles, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, Alex Karpovsky, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham

Just to get some sense of where I stand here, I did a quick and dirty internet search for lists of "best Coen brothers movies" and then, a little appalled by what I was finding, made my own list (off the cuff, without benefit of systematic review). See below. I know I have been in the minority in not thinking much of this early-'60s Greenwich Village period piece, at least the first time I saw it when it was new, but it turns out there's a fairly wide range of opinion on Coens movies—one list has True Grit last, for example, while another has it at the very top, as the best movie they ever made. Inside Llewyn Davis reliably makes it into the top 10 of these lists, sometimes the top 5, and it was #2 on one list.

After a second look more recently, I agree top 10 of their 18 or so pictures total seems fair enough. My first reaction was a matter of my own biases, which start with a lifelong indifference to midcentury American folk music, particularly the fruit of early-'60s Greenwich Village. Then the way Llewyn Davis uses Bob Dylan was too much for me, and it is still annoying. He shows up off-camera at the very end as approximately the Inevitable Future of Folk Music (iconic voice of a generation not far behind), which struck me more as cheap pandering than ... well, I'm still not sure what the idea of sticking him in there that way is supposed to be. Mostly it feels like playing cynically to Greenwich Village folkie sentimentalists like Pete Seeger.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)

As a fan of the original Borat, I had high hopes for Sacha Baron Cohen's sequel. Back in 2006 his treatment of a US hollowed out by six years of Bush/Cheney assaults on social and political norms was inspired, the perfect response to what I thought was the worst thing that had ever happened to this country, certainly in my lifetime. But Trump and his accomplices, among other things, have made them all look like church deacons. The essential problem of lampooning the malevolent clown Donald Trump and his henchmen seems to have taken the edge off Cohen as well as most comics in this era. Is it any surprise that lip-synching Trump has become practically the most effective approach? Cohen's pranks are still good—often amazing both by how shockingly coarse they can be and simply by seeing him have the courage to say and do the things he does to the specific people he manages to rope in. The premise for the picture is that the Kazakh media journalist Borat has been in prison since 2006 for crimes against the state but is now released to carry out a special mission: deliver a gift to US VP Michael Pence to win favorable treatment for Kazakhstan by the US. The gift is Johnny the Monkey, a Kazakh porn star (and monkey). But the monkey dies in transit. Plan B then is to present Borat's 15-year-old daughter (Maria Bakalova, who is in her 20s and not Cohen's daughter), who stowed away on the journey. Father and daughter make appearances in Texas, Oklahoma, Washington state (Olympia!), New York City, and elsewhere, zeroing in on Pence and others. They gull low-grade celebrity types such as Instagram influencers and various Christianist grifters, who deserve the humiliation—and also innocent bystanders, such as a clerk at a faxing service place, who don't, but nonetheless serve as interesting barometers of social attitudes—as they work their way up to big stunts like storming the annual CPAC gathering of conservatives and, the one we've heard the most about, conducting an interview with Rudy Giuliani, whose behavior here is actually worse than the previews made it look. He plainly thinks he's about to get lucky with a 15-year-old girl—Bakalova has a convincing teen appearance and manner. The pranks are usually good, and there are some comedy bits that are not bad either (notably one featuring the Stealers Wheel chestnut, "Stuck in the Middle With You"). But too often the film drags with scenes between father and daughter playing on their pose of primitive sexist norms and/or showing innocent affection for one another. They don't work because Borat movies don't get their juice from their storylines, let alone feel-good moments designed to assure us of their good intentions and wholesomeness and that this is all a joke. Borat movies work best when Cohen sets up the pranks so that victims incriminate and embarrass themselves with a minimal amount of help from him. It just does not happen often enough in this one, but maybe in one-third of it scattered across its compact running time the pranks are working and make it worthwhile enough for me, once I got over the general disappointment of not enough and not that good. Cohen's targets always deserve everything they get and kudos to him for getting this out in October, not long before the US election.

Fargo (1996)

USA / UK, 98 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Photography: Roger Deakins

Music: Carter Burwell

Cast: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, Harve Presnell, Kristin Rudrud, John Carroll Lynch, Steve Park, Jose Feliciano, Bruce Campbell, Petra Boden

Pretty much everyone I know likes Fargo, and I do too, but over the years you can't help noting a grumbling undercurrent or even animus from some quarters toward the Coen brothers, the directors, writers, and editors of the picture. At least into the 21st century, naysayers seemed to see everything by them only in terms of adolescent disrespect. It probably doesn't help that the Coens are obvious aesthetes of grotesque violence but the main point seems to be that they are making fun of ordinary normal people all the time in their movies—that, in fact, that's what their movies are about. At least with Fargo, I feel like I'm in a reasonably good position to judge, as I was born and raised in Minnesota and knew both Lundegaards and Gundersons. The point I feel may get lost too often is how good the Coens are at what they do. Before it is anything else, Fargo is superior neo-noir, with a headlong narrative of despair that constantly ratchets tension as greed and human foolishness conspire to ruin multiple lives all at once.

For the most part, I think the Coens get the Scandinavian kitsch of Minnesota pretty much right. Although the movie claims to be based on a true story and isn't, what the Coens are doing is closer to reporting, not mocking. Yes, there is some exaggeration. But not that much. The accents are not always this broad, and the people generally not as stupid as some of those here, such as a policeman who can't figure out basic facts about a crime scene. Or, an even smaller throwaway, a 'cake-and-steak cashier with a certain classic vacuous affect. You can feel the Coens leaning a little extra hard into the white-bread, horrifying evil of Jerry Lundegaard, who works as executive sales manager at an auto dealership owned by his father-in-law and needs a lot of money fast, thinking he can score a big business deal. But leaning into his evil is also a natural element of this story.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Anthology pictures like this exercise from the Coen brothers are famous for being hit and miss, not to mention stop-and-start as they lurch from climax to fresh start over and over. They seem to come more often as horror (V/H/S, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Kwaidan, Dead of Night) but Buster Scruggs suggests it may be a matter of genre. At least, these stories often feel like genuine 20th-century pulp, dime novel, or comic book fiction in the ways they are put together. For example, in "Near Algodones," a man protects himself from gunfire by draping himself in pots and pans (and tauntingly calling out "Pan-shot!" every time one is hit). The experience of anthology pictures is also a bit like approaching a short story collection—somehow it's often more attractive to fall into a headlong extended tale than to chew off bites of beginning-middle-end. In fact, Buster Scruggs is explicitly built on the conceit of a story collection, with color plates and six tales distributed across a little more than two hours. I've seen ranking lists around the internet, which is another thing you do with anthologies, and of course I have my own ideas about weakest ("All Gold Canyon") and strongest ("The Gal Who Got Rattled"). Interestingly, for what it's worth, those two are the only stories not original with the Coens. "The Mortal Remains," the finisher, has some problems too. But even those two weakest have high points and are done well and completely entertaining. They're all pretty good. The Coens bring their own vivid flourishes of extravagant violence, as they will. It's very funny in the title piece, gleefully turning to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead style of slapstick for one memorable saloon confrontation. It's a bit more tiresome in "Near Algodones." The best of these stories, "The Gal" and "Meal Ticket," have tremendous bolts of pathos and achieve a natural grace and quiet, even in all the tumult. The ghost story of "The Mortal Remains," which moves like Stagecoach and/or the stagecoach section of The Hateful 8, may be trying too hard to leave the picture on a profound note, with a kind of inexplicable cross-up between Amelia Edwards's 19th-century story "The Phantom Coach" and an Emily Dickinson poem. But it has its points. They all do.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

USA, 122 minutes
Directors/editors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Writers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Cormac McCarthy
Photography: Roger Deakins
Music: Carter Burwell
Cast: Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Kelly MacDonald, Tess Harper, Stephen Root, Garret Dillahunt, Beth Grant, Kathy Lamkiri

It's hard to know what to do with the Coen brothers' 14th or so film, except to look at it and peel back layers. Based on a literary property of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, who of course is on the short list of most highly regarded living authors, it seems to throw a wall of unceasing violence in your face practically from start to finish. You may be too shocked from a first viewing ever to look again, but if you do you're likely to see something else entirely. On one of the DVD featurettes, people try to name the genre. Everyone lands on horror but no one thinks the label fits exactly. Other types mentioned include noir, period piece, road movie, crime, chase, western, even comedy. The latter was from Tommy Lee Jones, who didn't look like he believed it himself—maybe it's something about the Coens' popular association with irreverent mockery? Kelly Macdonald probably gets it right when she calls it a Coen brothers film: "They're their own genre."

I'm tempted to throw in superhero, because its remarkable villain Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem with a haircut no one ever forgets) is so vastly bigger than life. But it never gives off the recognizable superhero vibe currently infecting so much entertainment these days—Get Out, for example, or Breaking Bad. It's everywhere right now. Even Chigurh's coin-flipping thing, which I believe is something a Batman villain did in the '30s, is not overplayed here. In fact, No Country for Old Men strikes me as the most Hitchcockian film that codirectors and cowriters Ethan Coen and Joel Coen have made, a story based essentially and almost purely on schlepping the McGuffin around. Once inured to the violence you can see that for what it is, short bursts of set pieces that are actually quite artfully done, and mercifully short. Most of the shock of the violence has to do with the assorted weird ways that Chigurh kills people, along with his chilling efficiency. The arcs and shape of the narrative are almost purely physical, with people on the move and busy doing things. Dialogue is minimal, and there are long periods without it. In terms of Alfred Hitchcock, it reminds me perhaps most of Vertigo, but the trailing action is literally doubled.

The Future (1992)

Leonard Cohen was back once and for all (more or less) with The Future, which followed 1988's I'm Your Man and a revival of interest in him. Now he was a fixture of popular culture, the crusty croaker and natty dresser in the suit and fedora hat. The poet from Canada. The '60s survivor. The man of Montreal, New York, and Los Angeles. It was a living. The movies were continuing to absorb and disseminate him, which is when you can start to feel like you've made it. Three songs here (the title song, "Waiting for the Miracle," and "Anthem") can be heard in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (a movie, full disclosure, I have never had much affection for). "Waiting for the Miracle" got a return engagement in Wonder Boys (a better movie, packed full of Cohen, Neil Young, Tim Hardin, and other usual suspects, with more Bob Dylan than anything). It's evident on The Future that Cohen has grown wise to the utility of surrounding himself with first-rate studio hands—the song lengths alone speak to the easy-rolling groove-making going on here, with four of the nine songs running over seven minutes and, for the first time, an instrumental (the sweet and stately album closer, "Tacoma Trailer"). Yes, the grooves lean toward adult contemporary, but they are grooves. And the best are full of irresistible little hooks too, often in the arrangements. The album has a number of undifferentiated producer credits—six names, including Rebecca de Mornay, Cohen's girlfriend at the time—so it's hard to know who to credit for the lovely clean and inviting sound, which can get busy with orchestral and choral accompaniments but never seems cluttered. Maybe Cohen himself—he's the first producer named. It's hard to believe he knew his way around a soundboard, but certainly he would get final approval, so OK. Sharon Robinson is here again, but only collaborating on "Waiting for the Miracle." As the title implies, The Future is probably most famous for contemplating the future in that particular present. Cohen was publicly absorbing the history going down around him, notably, in 1989, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Democracy" ("is coming to the USA") jeers at the US's ability to cope with these world changes—that's been an easy position to take all my life, and has the benefit of making you look prescient later (at least in these particular terrible times). "Anthem" looks in another direction entirely, much beloved for its lines "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." If that seems trite or saccharine, at least there's something weirdly satisfying about seeing Cohen as the pollyanna for once. I don't like the Irving Berlin cover, "Always," and it's the longest song here, so it's not like The Future can't be a bit of a bumpy road, especially if, like me, you are slightly skeptical about the Cohen project. But it never sounds bad either.

Various Positions (1984)

It occurred to me that Leonard Cohen's seventh album came out within a couple of months of VU, the Velvet Underground's surprise release of its remarkable collection of previously unreleased material. I thought I might be able to make something of that, 1960s New York City icons at the crossroads or some such, but I don't remember anyone thinking of both albums together at the time, and really they're very different from one another. VU is pure blast from the past. That's why it's so great. Whereas the Cohen—coming after a five-year hiatus, his longest to that point—is more tentative about entering the future, or at least keeping up with the present. So we get synthesizer keyboards, for example, in the opener, "Dance Me to the End of Love." For all that, it's still Cohen's same plodding tempo and doleful air, occasionally pierced by unexpected words. It's comfortable like an old armchair but I'm not necessarily trying to convert anyone to his cause. As always, he is something of a prickly pear—the poet bona fides often feel more like a kind of con, or joke, though his words can ring, as I say (the aforementioned "dance me to the end of love"). But I didn't go for Various Positions much in its time, or Leonard Cohen either for quite some time. So I was actually a little surprised coming back to find it's the home of "Hallelujah." That song has long struck me as a kind of miracle, not to push too hard on the religious note. I came to it, probably like a lot of people, by way of Jeff Buckley's remarkable cover many years after this album. I know there's a label for it—"secular hymn"—but I say it belongs with real hymns, e.g., "In the Garden" or, especially, "Amazing Grace," which is close to being my single favorite song of all time full stop. Some may consider it trite, maybe as a matter of overexposure, although I can't fathom that myself because I have never been tired of or unmoved by the song and I love to sing it too. It feels right. "Hallelujah" is in that ballpark. Unspeakably beautiful—Cohen's version, Buckley's version, Kate McKinnon's version of Hillary Clinton's version, my version, croaking along. Transcendent. The rest of the album is thus unfortunately left in an embarrassing position, sounding aimless and too casual by comparison. Some songs, like "The Captain," "Hunter's Lullaby," and "Heart With No Companion," are weaker when you notice the words, even wince-worthy. Some, like "If It Be Your Will" and "Hallelujah," make me straight off want to have a conversation with whoever coined the term "secular hymn." (Well, no, never mind, I actually hate those conversations.) I understand Cohen is attempting to have it both ways through the use of ironic distance, but no. No. You can't have it both ways. All you need is "Hallelujah."

Leonard Cohen: Live in London (2009)

USA, 157 minutes, documentary
Director: Edward Sanders

Concert films are a breed of documentary unto themselves and the fact is I just don't look at that many. Maybe I've seen enough live shows that I know a movie of one is always a completely different experience. Or maybe I've seen enough bad shows that I forget (again) the magic of the good ones, which concert films can sometimes capture (rationally you would already assume it's a good show if it's getting the film treatment). The concert movies I like—Stop Making Sense, say—are often structured and filmic and not very much like seeing a concert. If they're rambling like a concert can be—The Last Waltz, say (understanding I'm likely in a minority in my indifference to that movie)—they're often even duller than concerts can be. At least in the movies we're spared the tedium of teardowns and setups. But paradoxically teardowns and setups count among the most common elements of the concert experience. Which only underlines how something essential about the actual physical presence is always missing from movie versions.

In any event, Leonard Cohen: Live in London is not cinematic, at all—the director is no one particularly in the movie business, and while the credits emphasize Roscoe Beck's role as musical director there is not a cinematographer credit on IMDb.com. Repeat: No cinematographer credit. Instead, "camera" is folded in with "electrical department." This product is also, while I'm on the caveats, associated with a CD release. It had no theatrical release of its own. So technically it's not a movie, it's a video, which only makes sense on ridiculous marketing levels. I would love to see it on a big screen. What's most remarkable about this Leonard Cohen performance from the summer of 2008 in London is how generous and satisfying it is. Cohen is the logical place to put the credit.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

USA/UK, 117 minutes
Directors/writers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Photography: Roger Deakins
Editors: Tricia Cooke, Roderick Jaynes, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Elliot, Tara Reid, Flea, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, John Turturro, David Thewlis, Ben Gazzara, Aimee Mann

I remember enjoying this star-studded fantasy barrel of laughs quite a bit when it came out, the insanely complicated story of the Dude (played by Jeff Bridges) and his inadvertent falling in with various packs of no-goodniks in and around Los Angeles who intend him evil in any number of ways. But I missed the shift to cult status, which I see started in the early 2000s on the usual midnight movie circuit, a few years after the release, and has now expanded to include a church, the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, or "Dudeism," a factor clearly signifying that something has arrived as a cult. In terms of both production and entertainment value, I don't think there are many such movies that can compare. The cast is stellar, in small parts and large. John Turturro, for example, probably gets something on the order of 10 minutes of screen time as a registered sex offender and deranged competitive bowler, but he's hilarious and unforgettable, pulling on his crotch as he makes threats and tonguing his bowling ball preparatory to hurling it down the lane. John Goodman has a much larger role as an aggrieved Vietnam veteran and it's arguably his best performance ever. Bridges, the star, is pitch-perfect as the slatternly hipster doofus—a bowler, a pot smoker, a white Russian swilling appreciator of indoor decorative arts, who roams the world perpetually clad in disgusting bathrobe and flip-flops. And Jimmie Dale Gilmore Sam Elliot almost steals the show as the cowboy narrator who gets all meta and shows up in bowling alley bars to discuss points of narrative with the Dude. Just another inexplicable cowboy from Hollywood. A screwball comedy minus the romance, this is the kind of movie where everybody knows the meaning of the word "nihilist" and casually bandies it about all the time, in regard to themselves and others. Not all the jokes work—the "Branded" scriptwriter found encased in an iron lung, for example—but they keep coming. It's pure comedy too. There are no changes to tones more appropriate to horror or noir or whatever, though they could have done it. They (meaning the Coen brothers, who wrote and directed) could have even made it kind of stressful, on the order of an "I Love Lucy" episode ("d'oh no, don't do THAT, Dude!") but they didn't. They stuck with comedy, underlined by the bizarrely effective fantasy sequences, such as the film within the film, "Gutterballs," which are funny and crazy weird on the order of Busby Berkeley dance routines, but with Creedence and bowling motifs and the hairy Dude in his bathrobe. If it starts to seem like a matter of diminishing returns to keep track of all the narrative threads, don't worry. It probably hangs together. Check on that with a Dudeist.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

USA, 84 minutes
Director: Larry Charles
Writers: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, Todd Phillips
Photography: Luke Geissbuhler, Anthony Hardwick
Cast/appearances: Sacha Baron Cohen, Ken Davitian, Luenell, Pamela Anderson, Bob Barr, Alan Keyes

Inspired, unnerving, and hilarious, so much so that I have wanted almost desperately to overlook its many flaws and exalt it to the status of documentary—and, at that, an important one. Sacha Baron Cohen as the overbearing yet disarming Kazakh stereotype is sharp as hell, locating the fatuousness of his various interlocutors, impassively abetting them in the self-exposure of their deep-seated stupidities and hypocrisy. But no, it's not a documentary, as the tissue-thin connecting narrative scenes make more than apparent, featuring only Cohen or Cohen and sidekick Ken Davitian (as his producer) on camera. But the throbbing heart of this thing remains the numerous daring and outrageous pranks that it documents. With the exception of the overdone kidnapping of Pamela Anderson as its lame climax, the pranks are as real as the stink on your ass. They are often so ingeniously engineered and played out as to be almost distracting (this Salon article has helpful information). Somehow, for example, he finagles his way into singing the national anthem at a rodeo in Salem, Virginia, where his introductory remarks draw an enthusiastic response: "May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child of Iraq! May you destroy their country so that of the next 1,000 years not even a single lizard will survive in their deserts!" (The crowd is noticeably less appreciative, however, when he begins singing and mangles the national anthem.) Then there is Cohen eagerly taking pointers in etiquette from privileged genteel Southerners in Birmingham, Alabama, pretending at a dinner party that he does not understand how to excuse himself to use the bathroom, and then returning to the table from said trip with a plastic bag of feces, which he presents in his confusion to the hostess. Then there is conservative/"libertarian" stalwart Bob Barr taking a sit-down with Cohen, who offers Barr cheese as a customary way to open a meeting. Once Barr has taken a bite of it Cohen tells him his wife made it "from the milk from her tit." All of which brings me, haphazardly or otherwise, to why I likely saw more importance in this wild romp than may actually be here: it is a neat encapsulation, reflection, and expression of the rage and impotence I experienced regarding the national zeitgeist in the U.S. over this past decade. I like this so much, in other words, because I got so mad. And if many of the people targeted here are hardly the most appropriate for the treatment (and a number are plain victims, in the wrong place at the wrong time), most of them will do fine until the right ones come along. What's more, none of that means this isn't funny. It's devastatingly, wickedly funny.