Favorite Movies, #12 & 13 (Big Lebowski & WALL-E)

Two more Favorite Movies, from my series on Facebook
First, let me say, I don't like myself on FB.

I am seduced by its immediacy, but I end up feeling like a performing bear, shuffling for marshmallows.

I need to keep my account, in order to post on the thrift store's page, but I'm going to make a big effort [again] to write more here.

(Truly, more than chasing the instant "likes," it's a matter of laziness. I do the least, there.)

#12. The Big Lebowski

I dislike the cruelty that runs through all the Coen Bros. movies, so I don't want to watch this movie again, but I find comforting the very idea of The Dude, who, in the midst of this cruelty, only ever wanted to get his stolen rug back––without spilling his White Russian. That rug, you know, it really tied the room together.

Jeff Bridges (The Dude) happens to be practically my only celebrity-sighting so far.

(When I was fourteen, the summer of 1975, on vacation in Washington, D.C., I saw Dustin Hoffman.
Hoffman was sitting on a park bench in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, being filmed in All the President's Men. 
Or, waiting to be filmed. 
I watched for an hour while the film people set up lighting and wires, before I got bored and walked away. Along with Truffaut's film Day for Night, this was my introduction to the tedious work behind film magic.)

Now I was forty-six, and it was 2007. The Big Lebowski had been out nine years, but I hadn't seen it.
I'd spent a week visiting my [attractive] friend Lauren in Santa Barbara, CA. The area is full of rich people---Oprah has a house nearby. My sister had been all excited that I might spot some movie stars, so I'd asked Lauren to help me be on the lookout.

I hadn't seen any stars, however, by the time Lauren took me to the local airport to go home. There, in the small ticketing area, leaning against the ticket counter, was a big cowboy-looking guy. Turned away from the counter, he was surveying the people in line, and when he saw Lauren walking up, he smiled.
It was like a car turning on the brights.

"Who's that cowboy grinning so blatantly?" I wondered, before Lauren pulled me close and whispered, 
"You can tell your sister––that's Jeff Bridges!"

That didn't mean much to me, or to my sister:
no Dudeist, then or now, she declared I'd only seen a Class B star.
Now that I love The Dude, I'm impressed I saw his actor, but what really stays with me was the high wattage of the guy's smile.

Movie stars. 
They are different from you and me.  

#13. WALL-E

Here is the opening of Wall-E, side-by-side with the scene of characters Cornelius & Barnaby singing the song that's playing,
 "Put on Your Sunday Clothes", in Hello, Dolly! (1969):

"WALL•E/ Hello, Dolly "Out There" Comparison"


Wall-e is genius, the way it weaves pop culture references into a hopeful apocalyptic tale. It includes lots of delightful tips of the hat––to Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apple computers, even Alien (Sigourney Weaver is the voice of the computer, which doesn't want the humans to return to Earth---like the ship's AI in Alien is not on the human's side).

Delightful, fun to spot, but not surprising in a sci-fi movie, given these are all sci-fi-ish references (even Apple).

But Hello, Dolly!? 
I'd wondered about that, so I was happy to find this article, from just a few months ago (June 27, 2018), "WALL-E turns 10: Andrew Stanton explains the film's Hello, Dolly connection".

Here's a snippet from the article:

"Speaking to EW for the 10th anniversary of WALL-E, director Andrew Stanton calls the pairing 'the craziest idea I have ever had.' He explains, “I had always wanted to open with something old-fashioned compared to this apocalyptic, futuristic setting.' . . .
"Stanton had portrayed Barnaby, one of the two idealistic young men singing 'Put on your Sunday Clothes,' as a freshman in high school, and as a result had the musical in his iPod library. 'Suddenly that song just came on and it struck me; it came on late at night while I was reading a book,' he remembers. 'I turned to my wife and I said, "I think I have the strangest idea I’ve ever had."
'I just kept waiting for it to fall apart. There were so many reasons why it wouldn’t hold. It was so incongruous that it was attractive, and so we worked it into the story.'
. . .

"After WALL-E debuted, Michael Crawford, the original Cornelius from the 1969 film (who can be seen in the footage in WALL-E), called up Stanton to ask him out to dinner. 
"'[Crawford] said when he had to punch the very beginning of the song with the orchestra and say the phrase ‘out there,’ he was never getting it right, and finally [director] Gene Kelly had to come out of the booth and come over to him,' Stanton explains.
'[Kelly] said, "Kid, you gotta sing this like it means more than the world. This is bigger than the universe, just think of the stars." And the take that they used was the one where he was thinking of the stars when he sang ‘out there.’
So when he saw the opening of WALL-E and it was just this field of stars, it just blew his mind.'"