Happy 60th Jeff Bridges!

The Dude abides! Jeff Bridges talked recently about how glad he is that The Big Lebowski became the cult film it is:

“I love that,” he says. “It’s so gratifying because it didn’t do much when it first came out, then it was a bigger hit in Europe and it splashed back over here. I’ve been to one of those festivals. I played it. It was my Beatle moment, playing to a sea of Dudes, screaming and excitement.

“It’s great to have a movie that I loved being a part of, and some people think the Coen brothers, they’re so good at what they do, it must just be like nothing, improvisation. But on that movie, no improvisation. Everything is scripted. They’re very precise. And to have the appreciation that it’s got now, and people study it, it’s great.”

Jeff Bridges may be having his best year yet with all the Oscar talk for Crazy Heart.

Besides Bridges in Tron, I remember being obsessed with him in the movie Starman.  I can't even count how many times I've seen that movie.  Here's an interesting comment he made about that opening scene as the alien:

So I’d go through my phone book and I’d go, ‘Which friends are in this book that I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out they were an alien?’

Jeff Bridges in Starman“One of those guys was a fellow named Russell Clark who was a dancer and had these interesting movements, so I thought I’d hire him to teach me some dance and kind of approach this thing like a dancer. I felt if I cracked that opening scene, then it would be a process of just becoming more human as the film went on.

“It was almost like imagining that I was somebody in a human body as if it was a ride, not myself. Like I was driving it around. And then it was impersonating. Like you’re sitting like this right now (he indicates the interviewer’s posture), and you’re sitting that way because you’re comfortable. So Starman would see that and rather than knowing why you did it he would do it and it wouldn’t be for the purpose, it would be kind of a bad impersonation.”

Crazy Heart Trailer

Four-time Academy Award® nominee Jeff Bridges stars as the richly comic, semi-tragic romantic anti-hero Bad Blake in the debut feature film Crazy Heart from writer-director Scott Cooper. Bad Blake is a broken-down, hard-living country music singer who’s had way too many marriages, far too many years on the road and one too many drinks way too many times. And yet, Bad can’t help but reach for salvation with the help of Jean (Golden Globe® nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal), a journalist who discovers the real man behind the musician. As he struggles down the road of redemption, Bad learns the hard way just how tough life can be on one man’s crazy heart.

 "Performance of a Lifetime,"  Is this finally Jeff Bridges' year at the Oscars?

Jeff Bridges may be nominated for Crazy Heart

For Best Actor this year, there's been talk about Colin Firth for A Single Man, Viggo for The Road, and George Clooney for Up in the Air.  Now we may have a new contender.  Just this week, there was a bunch of buzz about Jeff Bridges "career best" performance as a country western singer in the film Crazy Heart.  Here's what In Contention had to say:

Bridges fully embodies the broken but spirited Bad Blake, an alcoholic country singer touring the Southwest in his 1970-something Suburban, playing any dive that’ll have him.  He brings every inch of charisma and charm he has to a role that certainly doesn’t seem made for him on the surface, but somehow ends up entirely owned by the actor come film’s end.

Bridges haunts the stage behind a dark pair of aviator sunglasses, under a silvery, unshampooed mane, unmistakably conjuring the image of Hank Williams Jr. as he belts out a number of tunes from gig to gig.  He shares the screen with Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays Jean, a journalist and single-mother love interest.  Gyllenhaal holds her own and provides a complex, emotional core to the story that could also nail down a few kudos here and there.

Colin Farrell has something of a glorified cameo as Tommy Sweet, a famous modern country star who owes his career to Blake, while Robert Duvall (who also serves as one of the film’s producers, along with Burnett, in fact) offers a small but meaningful supporting turn as Blake’s confidante.

Colin Farrell and Jeff Bridges were filmed at a Toby Keith concert last year for the movie:

Colin Farrell as a country singer? Well, okay, I suppose he can sing, so I'll withhold judgment till I see the film.