A good,long career.

He won the Oscar for Crazy Heart, you know. I demand that RIPD be removed and replaced with Crazy Heart.

Going with one of his first Thunderbolt & Lightfoot which I've pre-ordered on Blu-ray remastered from Screen Archives.

Me, too. I was afraid it would sell out so I set a calendar reminder for the day it first went up for pre-order.

But I voted for True Grit.

True Grit.

Haven't seen True Grit, but that's my vote anyway.

Jeff Bridges was great in True Grit, but there's a reason why he is called The Dude, so I'm voting for The Big Lebowski.

For those voting for True Grit, I would recommend also seeing the original. The differences between the two are not as great as you think.

The dude abides, man.

I know I should watch the original True Grit, but I've just never been a John Wayne fan.

The original is good. I've never watched them both one after the other, but when I saw the remake, I recall definitely thinking the remake was the superior version.

Lebowski FTW.

I do love "The Fisher King" though.

The most striking difference between the original True Grit and the new one is the change in acting styles over the decades. In the original you can see the actors taking turns delivering lines... someone speaks, there's a slight pause, the next person delivers there line, pause... Plus you have Glen Campbell in that major role.

The Coen Brothers made a great effort to use a a lot of the dialog from the book (True Grit) as is, without editing. And for that reason, the dialog in the newer one has a very poetic or literary style that is a pleasure to behold.

Well, that's just like, your opinion, man.


But you are correct.

I almost went with the Fabulous Baker Boys. I did also love The Fisher King. He really has had so much outstanding work.

It does, doesn't it. I watched this a couple weeks ago and was struck by cadence of their speaking. I thought it was wonderful. I caught the tail end of the original since then, and the dialogue sounded 'flat' in comparison. While Wayne is great in that movie, he couldn't have read his lines as well as Bridges did.

Iron Man.

He made a very convincing Rooster Cogburn.

Arlington Road is another good one. Remove RIPD that has no place here.

One of the thing that strikes me about the new True Grit is that it really sounds as if the characters are from the 19th century. Americans have been conditioned by Westerns to think that people in the 1870's talked just like people do today, except that there wasn't the modern conveniences that people in the 21st Century have come to expect. No...they really did talk differently. Now that doesn't mean that a Western where characters talk like people do today (I'm betting Django Unchained, which I haven't see, is like this), but I appreciate the effort made to go for historical accuracy.

I can't say often enough that people who liked the movie (either version) "True Grit" should read the original novel by Charles Portis. Although most of the events and dialog in the movies are taken nearly verbatim from the novel (the Coens did stick some additional weirdness into their version), the novel gives a much more vivid and complete portrayal of the character of Mattie. Portis undoubtedly based her on somebody he knew. Rural Arkansas in real life produces characters like that--or at least did at one time. Mattie could almost be a composite of two ladies I've known most of my life. If Mattie was alive today she'd probably be riding four-wheel ATVs and killing her own venison. You hear echoes of the dialog in the movie in the speech of older people here to this day as well.

It's also a nice, fast read. In fact it is sometimes marketed as a young adult novel.