Phoning it in

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

There are all sorts of ways to make a bad movie. Excrescences as diverse as Home Fries, Showgirls, Nothing but Trouble & Dune come to mind. After hinting at true originality with their first effort (Blood Simple), the Coens chose instead to coast and make a certain type of bad movie over and over.
It's clear that they make more effort than most of Hollywood. But success can lead to a standard & safe approach to the work. The Coens return to the studio after each release and exert the exact same effort, making a similar movie, shifting locales, emulating the known favorites of a genre, changing a detail here or there, including the required amount of eccentricity that their fans expect. All signs are painstakingly arranged for the perception that it's a fine film. Your reaction has been engineered into the equation.
But the Coens efforts are identical and the movies suffer from a debilitating sameness. It's as if they are most concerned that the production levels match from movie to movie. Rather than trusting themselves to actually see and evaluate each addition to the Coen canon, a devoted group of film nerds eagerly wait to observe what genre has been been fed though the Coen Bros movie-pooping-machine so they can be the first to declare it a masterpiece. The endless feedback loop of praise and regurgitation has pretty much stopped the Coens development.
It's clear that it's turned into just a job. The Big Lebowski is the film one would make after coming to resent even the intellectual laziness that produced the previous half-dozen pictures; the lousy, pointless work that inevitably follows a bunch of easy raves. I hated every insipid, overwritten, precious moment of this movie which I find astonishingly asinine.