I CAN'T RESIST TO THAT TRIP

This is what it takes to catch up on nearly one week of work. Neglect the essential and sooner or later a rat will come back and give you the lie, the shame and the repentance.

THE COEN BROTHERS – THE BIG LEBOWSKI

This is nothing but a remake, or maybe the original (I would know if I had checked the dates: but you know, laziness, and it is funny to remain fuzzy, like the Coen Brothers themselves) of what we know under the title of “Pulp Fiction”. The Coen Brothers get rid of the shuffling time line and have episodes and chapters in order, but it is just as intricate as the other, except that it is harmless, more or less, and funny in the punk beatnik post 1968 style if you like that and the unemployed who play the Greek philosophers.. It means that the mistake in “Pulp Fiction” becomes the rule here and everything is over-reacting and mis-targeting the true victim of the explosion, of temper of course, never of any fire-arms, though quite a few are moving and travelling around, just like bowling pins and bowling balls. That’s a way of looking at  suburban social sprawl that deserves some attention and time. The best debunking of pulp fiction is in the bar-diner scene. A lot of noise and ruckus for very little. I like the breaking in, out and through of all sorts of cars. The Coen Brothers don’t seem to like cars probably because they are the best representation of American wastefulness and extreme vain arrogance. But “Pulp Fiction” seems to debunk cars too though in a different way.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

IMDb and Amazon.com Comment submitted a long time ago, August 23, 2007, not so long ago after all.

Summary: White Russian laced with hash and horse
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
A simple film of total disorganization that is supposed to be funny. It is another "Pulp Fiction", but this time in chronological cutting order. The disorganized impression comes from the totally airy and eerie behavior of the characters. One more or less fake Jew who respects Sabbath when it is practical. An unemployed idler who lives on thin air, fresh water and all kinds of little gains and benefits he can find. A third rather detached younger one who will end up with a massive heart attack on a parking lot. They all play with theirs balls, I mean their bowling balls, because that is the only profession we know they have. Then they get entangled into some kind of embezzling by some rich man who is not rich but wants to pilfer some good amount of cash from the foundation he is a trustee of and at the same time get rid of his youngish latest wife who is hardly grown out of teenage puberty, without going through a divorce. Simple when you are as naive as dumb can be and you don't know the alpha from the beta, not to mention the omega of crime in LA where you can end up playing the angel in no time. And they manage rather well since two will survive and one will die of too much emotion. Entertaining though slightly slow at times.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University ..Paris.. ..Dauphine.. & University ....Paris.... 1 Pantheon Sorbonne 

THECOEN BROTHERS – BLOOD SIMPLE

Jealousy, affairs and counter affairs, private eyes and sleuth, fishing and phishing in the private life of other people, the Coen Brothers are at it again. It was obvious the cuckold was not supposed to hire the private eye to eliminate his spouse and her lover. It was obvious too the lover was not supposed to get back to the bar of the cuckold, find the dead body – but was he dead really – and then get rid of it in some field, a live burial mind you. It was obvious the private eye should not have forgotten his lighter in the office of the cuckold bar owner because that could only cause the death of an innocent, well, an innocent, way of speaking for a cuckold maker – isn’t it what they call coveting the wife of your neighbor in some sacred books? – in the most spectacular way possible. In the same way that the lighter will put the sleuth on the tracks of the lady of the tale and there the Coen Brothers are going to be best of them all and it is the most un-innocent and guilty man who will finally pay – the hard way – the bill of that adulteress. And what’s more she will be the boss of the bar where there is another  bar tender that may interest her, especially since he is slightly black, a change from all her Caucasian affairs. Perfect conclusion for a Machiavellian machination.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

THE COEN BROTHERS – THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

The Coen Brothers had to go to the Wall of lamentations of ....Hollywood.... and remake Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane”. How can you inherit the greatest fortune in the world and know about it when you are going to hit the sidewalk falling from the fifty-fifth or fifty-fourth floor, according to you counting or not the mezzanine. At this moment your life is suspended in mid air by one blonde hair of your ideal love affair, or love targeted prey, ,and that hair is the broom stick of a black janitor, which is niggardly indeed, and the denture of an old spook who refuses innovation in stock exchange managing. The whole film is a hoopla about nothing, a hula hoop or a budsucker straw. The whole film revolve around a conception of the press that is quite Kanesque, scandal, hidden secrets, false accusations and true insinuations, in one word pulp pulp and pulp again. And the newly made rich man is living his accident – becoming rich out of no logic – as if it were natural and did not require any thinking, pondering and brain exploration if not surgery, like in some cuckoo’s nest of fame. And it even ends up with a marriage. Isn’t it funny? Are the Coen Brothers growing romantic? Probably not, but sentimentally sarcastic for sure.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

THE FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS

To take the battle of ..Iwo Jima.. and show how that war, that turning point, maybe not, that dramatic apocalypse, for sure, of the Second World War, American side, is a pure illustration of what an apocalypse is: a revelation. Clint Eastwood with his Steven Spielberg accomplice demonstrate that revelation and its secret content. The kids who are sent to a war, any war, all wars, are no heroes whatsoever and in any way but they are the flesh and dough of the cannons of the enemy, or rather the other side. And they even have to lie and play heroes to get the dough the government needs to continue and finish that war. Those heroes are associated to flags and the raising of flags on a pile of ruins to show and inspire victory, be it in ..Iwo Jima.., ..Berlin.. or ....Hiroshima..... Heroes are fabricated for the sole reason that they are needed to go on with the lucrative and politically essential war, on any side of the conflict. For one flag, and in this conflict hardly more than half a dozen flags for fifty five million dead. That makes each star on  the flags, when these flags have stars, quite expensive. There is no clean war, there is no un-staged war, there is no just war. There is only war, war horror and staging the horror to make it palatable to those who do not live it, have not lived it, do not remember it. And some invent a duty to remember, an obligation to keep in mind, even when we are two or three or more generations after the conflict and we do not have direct witnesses to speak of it any more, and their word is only their word modified by time, propaganda, celebrations and simply the desire to forget. There is no obligation to remember, even if there is an obligation to make, not only permit them to, historians go on with their work and try to reconstruct what has disappeared forever anyway. In fact a poet could be more effective in that direction than a historian who is paid for his work and tends to follow the trend of whoever pays him, be they publishers or politicians, or committed associations on one side or the other of the many rivers that run through historical time. Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg do a marvelous work along that line.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID