Who is The Walrus?

Rating: 6/10 (9 January 2010)

After watching this once, I watched it again, hoping it would get better. It did, up to a point, in that it was less confusing, since I now knew who the characters were and what they were about. Preparatory hints in the narrative were spotted, which explained what had seemed confusing first time round. Like how come Brad got shot so expertly and suddenly. When it happened the first time I couldn't make out how it had happened. I laughed a few times, but no more than the first time. Unlike The Big Lebowski, which just got funnier and funnier each time I watched it, probably about 50 times, BAR didn't seem to improve much. There were a lot of re-cycled dialogue echoes from TBL, not just the over-repeated cuss-word. This seemed funny in TBL, but not here.
I want to like the Coen films. A lot of them are definitely very good. But this one tends to support what some critics have complained of, that they are cold and cynical, and have little but contempt for the rest of humanity. What was the moral of this story? That the world is run by tired moronic bureaucrats and administrative apparatchiks, incompetently controlling other morons? Life's nothing but a poor joke? That anyone half-way innocent and naive, or half-way decent, like Pitt and Jenkins, gets rubbed out for stupidly trying to help another stupid, self-absorbed, silly person? Who ends up getting what she wanted? Well, maybe that's the way things are. Depressing really. Alive ridiculous, and dead forgot, like Pope said.
Nestling among the end credits, between "Camera Scenic" and "Assistant to Mr Clooney" there was a functionary called "The Walrus". I'm not familiar with everyone involved in making a motion picture, but don't think I've ever come across anyone whose job title might be The Walrus. For the record, this person's job was said to have been performed by someone called Drew Houpt. Tell us what you do, Drew.