Although his dad was famous film actor Lloyd Bridges, seen every week on the ’50s TV underwater action series “Sea Hunt,” Jeff Bridges’ head was always swimming in daydreams of becoming a rock ‘n’ roller. But first there was that long detour following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a huge Hollywood star in his own right, creating many memorable characters including the beloved bowling-hippie hero “the Dude” in the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” racking up four Oscar nominations along the way and finally winning the coveted mantelpiece for his pitch-perfect performance as down-at-the-boot-heels country singer Bad Blake in 2009′s “Crazy Heart.”

Having handled his own playing and singing quite impressively in that film must have put him in the mood for taking another shot at his boyhood ambition (his 2000 album debut “Be Here Soon” met with mixed reviews), and his self-titled sophomore collection of country-rock covers and originals goes down as smooth as the finest Southern sippin’ whiskey (or maybe a few of the Dude’s white Russians) thanks in no small measure to the control-tweaking talents of Bridges’ longtime buddy, producer/musician extraordinaire T Bone Burnett.

Bridges’ Everly Brothers-inspired reworking of Stephen Bruton and Gary Nicholson’s “What a Little Bit of Love Can Do” (harmonizing with Ryan Bingham) makes for a promisingly upbeat opener, while the Bridges original, “Falling Short,” is a wistful, almost delicate blend of hi-string acoustic and cello-like baritone electric guitars and leather-voiced existential musings that can only be described as an elegant chamber-country hybrid.

Rosanne Cash adds a soothing woman’s touch to the harmonies of the melancholy, pedal-steel embroidered John Goodwin ballad, “Everything But Love” and the dreamy, dirge-like Bridges-Burnett composition “Slow Boat,” which also features a searing, low-register solo from much in demand session guitarist Marc Ribot.

In all, it sounds like the Dude could quit his day job any time he wants and find all the nighttime gigs he can handle, although it’s hard to imagine movies taking a backseat to music in this laid-back leading man’s life anytime soon. It’s doubtful in Bridges’ case that barroom cover charges and record sales will ever match those movie star bucks.

— Gene Triplett

If you’re trolling the video shelves for an art house oddity that never made it to local theater screens, check out the weird and strangely compelling “Bad Day to Go Fishing” (due out on DVD Tuesday).

Described in Variety as “something like a retro ‘The Wrestler’ by way of the Coen brothers … with sharp production values and a fair share of pulp fatalism,” this debut feature from director Alvaro Brechner was Uruguay’s official submission for 2010’s Academy Award as best foreign language film.

The darkly comic film noir is set in the shabby, backwater South American village of Santa Maria circa 1961, where washed-up pro wrestler Jacob van Oppen (Jouko Ahola), once billed as “the strongest man on earth,” arrives with his oily manager Orsini (Gary Piquer) to arrange a match with a local amateur challenger.

The scheme usually yields some quick and easy money for this oddball pair, with the shifty Orsini (in grifter’s terms “the fisherman”) hoodwinking the local yokels while claiming to be a down-on-his-luck prince. But this time, a series of complications – including the aging Jacob’s existential meltdown due to his faltering physical prowess and Orsini’s conflict with a stubborn femme fatale (Antonella Costa) – make it more and more difficult to scam the suspicious townspeople as the big wrestle-off approaches.

The screenplay was based on the short story ““Jacob y el Otro” (Jacob and the Other) by the late Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti on the centennial of his birth.

Although the movie won praise at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered several awards on the South American film festival circuit (including the Jury and Audience awards at the 2010 Cine Las Americas festival), it received virtually no theatrical circulation in the U.S.

“Bad Day to Go Fishing” is not rated and runs 110 minutes. It is being released by Film Movement.

- Dennis King

Actor-writer-director Tim Blake Nelson returns to his Okie roots in his wild and woolly new movie, “Leaves of Grass.” And those roots encompass an amazing array of influences: the formal discipline of Classics study at Brown University; Tulsa’s colorfully diverse Jewish community; the hyper-literate melding of comedy and violence a la the Coen Brothers; the odd marriage of rustic provincialism and worldly sophistication that informs the filmmaker’s Oklahoma upbringing.

Nelson himself is a man of many parts – a gifted character actor with a flair for earthy comedy (most famously displayed in his gem-like performance in the Coens’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) and a celebrated playwright-filmmaker astute at tackling profound issues of morality (the existence of God in “Eye of God,” Shakespearean urgencies in “O,” and the collective Jewish conscience in “The Grey Zone”).

Those two parts come together neatly in “Leaves of Grass” (the title itself suggests a heady dichotomy – wacky tobacky or the words of Walt Whitman?), which is graced with an uncanny duel performance by star Edward Norton.

In Nelson’s enjoyably loopy mash-up of philosophy and poetry, marijuana and murder, Norton plays Oklahoma twin brothers Bill and Brady Kincaid, identical siblings who’ve traveled very different paths. Bill is a buttoned-down ivy league Classics professor and a rising academic star who long ago shook off the red dirt of his Okie past; Brady is a scruffy, loosey-goosey pot grower and toker in Little Dixie with his own homegrown philosophical take on hydroponic farming methods.

Though long estranged, the two brothers are reluctantly reunited when Brady gets crosswise with a Tulsa drug kingpin and lures Bill back home with a trumped-up family emergency and a loony scheme to extricate himself from an onerous debt.

This sets up an escalating comedy of errors, mistaken identities and pithy philosophical ramblings that inevitably lead the shaggy-dog tale off into bleaker and bloodier territory.

Along the way, Nelson populates the story with a star-studded gallery of ripe, florid supporting players – including a scenery-chewing Richard Dreyfuss as the pious-profane Jewish drug lord, Pug Rothbaum; Susan Sarandon as the twins’ pot-addled hippie mother; a game Keri Russell as a poetry-enamored teacher with a penchant for quoting Whitman and noodling giant catfish and an eye for Bill, and Nelson himself as Brady’s dim-witted, bumpkin sidekick (a familiar role that Nelson dons like a well-worn pair of clodhoppers).

And then, of course, there’s Norton, who seems to be having a grand old time occupying the warring personas of Bill and Brady. Smartly, he never condescends to either character – investing each with a prickly humanity and worldly intelligence. And he never stoops to easy parody in a virtuoso bit of acting that has him playing opposite himself (via green-screen technology) and creating two distinct, idiosyncratic characters of mind-boggling individuality.

While the narrative occasionally seems tonally erratic and at war with itself, that’s essentially in keeping with the story’s early-stated philosophical thrust – the timeless tug between Socratic order and control and the bawdy, chaotic surrender to bare instinct.

That Nelson invests “Leaves of Grass” with poetry, sturdy philosophical underpinnings, a rambling sense of dark fun and deadly danger (not to mention spiky insights into the strangeness of his hometown Tulsa) is a measure of his continued growth, daring, curiosity and refreshing irreverence as an artist. Indeed, call him Tulsa’s reigning filmmaker laureate.

- Dennis King

“Leaves of Grass”

R
1:46
3 stars
Starring: Edward Norton, Tim Blake Nelson, Keri Russell, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss
(Violence, pervasive language, drug content)

Dave Roberts

After watching their taut, insidious and very clever neo-noir, “The Square,” you might be inclined to think of the filmmaking siblings Nash and Joel Edgerton as the Down Under Coen brothers.

Shades of the Coens’ “Blood Simple” nihilism – along with dark doses of James M. Cain’s hardboiled ethic – run through their perverse little tale of a regular guy undone by adultery, blackmail, arson, murder and best-laid plans gone terribly, disastrously wrong.

Set in a sunny Sydney suburb, the Edgertons’ story (Nash directed; Joel co-wrote, produced and co-stars) is a darkly funny Aussie noir complete with old-school conventions: hapless, regular-guy dupe; femme fatale; deadly thugs; spiraling bad fortune. But the brothers spin those time-worn conventions with such cheeky bravado that their film seems startlingly fresh.

As per formula, the thing starts with two unhappily married lovers locked in an adulterous affair. Raymond (Dave Roberts) is a 40-something construction supervisor trapped in an aggressively loveless marriage. His much younger hairdresser neighbor Carla (Claire van der Boom) is wed to mullet-headed, small-time crook Smithy (Anthony Hayes), who treats her like a scullery maid.

Raymond and Carla, during their no-tell motel trysts, dream of running away together. And the seemingly perfect opportunity arises when Carla finds a hidden attic stash of loot, apparently the proceeds from one of Smithy’s larger criminal enterprises. Applying her most vampish wiles, Carla urges a reluctant Raymond to seize the day – and the illicit cash – and make their move.

But Raymond hesitates, and in that slight hesitation delicious, dastardly complications begin to pile up, and up, and up.

Among those bleakly comic and cringe-inducing complications is an encounter with a thuggish arsonist (played with silky, psychotic menace by Joel Edgerton), a florid array of blue-collar criminal henchmen, a nasty blackmail scheme, an escalating body count and an unfortunate incident involving Carla’s dog, Raymond’s frisky pup and a river.

Joel and Nash Edgerton

Nash Edgerton, a veteran stuntman with nearly 100 film credits, proves himself a crafty director with a nice ear for hard-bitten genre dialogue, a good feel for subtle character coloration and a dead-on sense for ratcheting up tension and dread. He plays the noir game like a sly, world-weary card dealer.

His deck, however, seems a little shy of true sexual heat. Roberts, while neatly playing Raymond as an unassuming everyman in way over his head and nagged by a guilty conscience, is no Fred “Double Indemnity” MacMurray. There’s no propulsive star power in Roberts’ performance, nor is there Barbara Stanwyck’s devilish dazzle in van der Boom’s portrayal of the desperately conniving Carla.

But the very ordinariness of their characters and their shabby immorality oddly adds up to a very compelling dimension to this classically rooted tale. A bad decision here, a moral lapse there, a temptation entertained and life could go terribly awry for any of us everyday blokes.

“The Square” puts us squarely in the shoes of one poor ordinary dupe and spins out a timeless morality tale that leaves us cringing and exhilarated at the same time.

Playing with “The Square” in most theatrical runs is Edgerton’s celebrated nine-minute short film, “Spider,” in which the director spins another dark-tinged tale about a guy trying to make up with his girlfriend and getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble every step of the way.

- Dennis King

“The Square”

R
1:45
3 stars
Starring: David Roberts, Claire van der Boom, Joel Edgerton, Anthony Hayes
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)

Movie critics’ “best” lists are quirky and highly personal at best. Top 100 lists from various film associations are arbitrary and debatable. Even the numerous readers’ choice lists of the best movies ever made can be maddeningly fickle.

Perhaps the closest we’ve come to a comprehensive, scholarly and objective list of America’s most meaningful films is the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, the National Film Preservation Board’s systematic effort since 1988 to identify and list the most “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films” in U.S. history.

Now, film scholar and writer Daniel Eagan has compiled a fascinating and highly entertaining guide to the registry’s riches, “America’s Film Legacy: An Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry (Continuum Books, $39.95). It’s a voluminous tome that demands a place on every true film buff’s bookshelf.

The criteria for inclusion in the registry is necessarily broad, and many of the works included, while historically significant, might not be widely considered “great.” For instance, the registry begins with the obscure 30-second silent short, “Blacksmithing Scene,” from 1893, which ironically dovetails neatly with the Coen Brothers’ 1995 Oscar-winner “Fargo” and its famed wood-chipper sequence.

In between, Hollywood classics (“Citizen Kane,” “Casablanca,” “All About Eve,” “The Godfather,” “Toy Story” and so on) sit side-by-side with cartoon shorts, documentaries, industrial and student works and obscure art films (with titles along the lines of “Czechoslovakia 1968,” “Fatty’s Tintype Tangle,” “Jenkins Orphanage Band (Fox Movietone News)” and “Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers”). Newsreel and home movie footage chronicling historic events, such as the Hindenburg disaster and the Zapruder film of John Kennedy’s assassination, are also on the registry.

Eagan faithfully lists complete casts and credits for each entry and includes a brisk historical or interpretive essay for each film. These are loaded with pithy background information, ranging from thumbnail biographical sketches of key players to juicy behind-the-scenes anecdotes about on-set feuds, screenplay rewrites and final-cut battles. Particularly readable are Eagan’s own, often contentious, assessments of each film’s artistic merits (Robert Altman’s films he deems “glib and cruel,” and “Citizen Kane” he characterizes as “a delightful stunt with the appeal of an eager puppy”).

Francis Ford Coppola hails Eagan’s book as a work that “doesn’t just explore the films on the registry, it ties together the past and the present, showing how the great movies of today can be built on the those of an earlier era.”

Eagan appears to be a film buff and writer particularly suited to this monumental task. He has worked for Warner Bros., MGM and other studios as a researcher and story analyst. He edited “HBO’s Guide to Movies on Videocassette and Cable TV” and “MGM: When the Lion Roars.” And his work has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, The Nation and Film Journal International.

In “America’s Film Legacy,” Eagan easily proves himself a film encyclopediast of the first order.

- Dennis King

The parameters of film noir, as well as our knowledge of this most sinister movie genre, are greatly expanded with the recent release of “Film Noir: The Encyclopedia” (Overlook Press, $45), a revised and redesigned fourth edition of the classic pioneering text that movie lovers consider the final word on the cinematic world of fog and shadows.

Compiled and constructed by a quartet of respected film scholars (Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini & Robert Porfirio), the 464-page hardcover reference work more than covers the waterfront when it comes to slinky femmes fatale, gun-toting mobsters, world-weary private eyes, seedy schemes and the seamy underbelly of the American dream.

The book’s concise introduction sums up the genre for the ages: “Film noir is literally ‘black film,’ not just in the sense of being full of physically dark images, nor of reflecting a dark mood in American society, but equally almost empirically as a black slate on which the culture could inscribe its ills and in the process produce a catharsis to help relieve them.”

All the classic film noir works are here (featuring mainstay actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Peter Lorre, James Cagney, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis). And the brilliantly exhaustive text is supported by new film stills, rare posters, production notes and complete guides to movies, directors, stars, themes and motifs.

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, 'Out of the Past'

Divided into two sections – classic noir and neo noir – the text ranges from well-known classics such as “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Maltese Falcon” to lesser known B-movie noirs like “Nightmare Alley.”

The neo noir section charts the influence of classic noir films of the 1940s on contemporary filmmakers such as Brian De Palma (“Body Double”) and the Coen Brothers (“Blood Simple”). Stylistic elements of film noir have shown up in other contemporary movies such as “Blade Runner” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Perhaps most surprising is the inclusion of signature sci-fi films (“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) and classic Westerns (“The Ox-Bow Incident,” “Rancho Notorious,” “Naked Spur,” “I Shot Jesse James”), which apparently owe a great stylistic debt to film noir conventions.

Scholarly essays included throughout underscore progressions and influences that have expanded the genre well beyond its initial realm. Discussions of the importance of German Expressionism in shaping film noir design, development of lighting and camera placement in defining film noir style, and the emergence of the “fatal male” character are just a few of the unique, truly encyclopedic entries the book offers.

“Film Noir: The Encyclopedia” is an essential reference work for students of film and for movie fans who love plying cinema’s mean streets. It is indeed a beacon of light in an artful landscape of darkness.

- Dennis King