Jeff Lebowski, who insists on being called "the Dude," is a laid-back, easygoing burnout who happens to have the same name as a billionaire whose wife owes a lot of dangerous people a whole bunch of money -- resulting in the Dude having his rug soiled and sending him spiraling into the Los Angeles underworld.
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Written by Ethan and Joel Cohen
Produced by Ethan Coen
Starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, John Turturro, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Editors: Roderick Jaynes and Tricia Cooke
Music: Carter Burwell
Release date: 16 March 1998
Running time: 1h 57m
(Note: Our Saturday conversation can run as late as 9:10p.)
HOW THIS WORKS
To find out where to rent or stream The Big Lebowski online, visit TV.Movie. Watch it on your own during the week and then join us for our Zoom conversation Saturday, July 5. A Zoom link will appear on the right of your screen once you RSVP. (NOTE: If you can’t get that link to work, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.) First-timers must sign up no later than Friday 7/4 in order to ensure being admitted.
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Join us this weekend as we rejuvenate a cherished Fourth of July tradition: slumming. Well, not quite. On this weekend in the past, we've turned to lighter or more purely entertaining fare such as Jaws or E.T., knowing you wouldn't be likely to allow yourself to be nailed down in front of a video screen. This week, however, with the help of the trickster Coen brothers, we're taking things to a whole new level. Ethan and Joel constantly skirt the edges of the outlandish in their films, and "the Dude," Jeff Lebowski, is one of their most memorable creations. Vulgarity on the verge of tastelessness was never so much fun. There'll be plenty of weeks left this year for Ozu and Kurosawa, Spielberg and Ford, Godard and Truffaut; let's allow ourselves a little breathing room this week with the best inexcusable product Hollywood has to offer.
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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgSqm8-wXWA
Rotten Tomatoes: 80% of 191 reviews
Metacritic: 71 based on 27 reviews ("generally favorable")
The Big Lebowski has been interpreted from a variety of social and political perspectives by academics and pundits. An article by Brian Wall, published in the feminist journal Camera Obscura, uses the film to explain Karl Marx's commodity fetishism and the feminist consequences of sexual fetishism. In That Rug Really Tied the Room Together, first published in 2001, Joseph Natoli argues that the Dude represents a counter-narrative to the post-Reaganomic entrepreneurial rush for "return on investment" on display in such films as Jerry Maguire and Forrest Gump.
NOTES on the LEBOWSKI CULT
Film critic Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002, after attending a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles and witnessing people quoting dialogue from the film to each other. Soon after the article appeared, the programmer for a local midnight film series in Santa Cruz, Calif. decided to screen The Big Lebowski. On the first weekend they had to turn away several hundred people. The theater held the film over for six weeks, a first.
An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in Louisville, Kentucky in 2002 with 150 fans showing up. It has since expanded to several other cities. The festival's main event each year is a night of unlimited bowling with various contests including costume, trivia, hardest- and farthest-traveled contests, and pre-fest and day-long outdoor parties with bands, vendor booths and games. Various celebrities from the film have attended some of the events, including Jeff Bridges who attended the Los Angeles event. The British equivalent, inspired by Lebowski Fest, is known as the Dude Abides and is held in London.
Dudeism, a religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of the film's main character, was founded in 2005. Also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude, the organization has ordained over 220,000 "Dudeist Priests" all over the world via its website. The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom, published in 2012 by Wiley, is a collection of 18 essays by different writers analyzing the movie's philosophical themes of nihilism, war and politics, money and materialism, idealism and morality, and the Dude as the philosopher's hero who struggles to live the good life in spite of the challenges he endures.
BLURBS & ATTITUDES
With their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana – but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented – the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre. No one does it like them and, it almost goes without saying, no one does it better. ∞ Desson Howard, Washington Post
It's paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies. ∞ Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle
For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana (cross Blood Simple with Raising Arizona if you must), yet beyond the hysterical black comedy, scattered violence and groovy dialogue, there sounds the same song to human goodness which enriched Fargo. ∞ Ian Nathan, Empire
Immensely inventive and entertaining, the film may not have the enigmatic elegance or emotional resonance of Barton Fink or Fargo, but it's still a prime example of the Coens' effortless brand of stylistic and storytelling brilliance ... A crime-sex-drugs-kidnap-bowling-nihilism mystery of the highest order. ∞ Time Out staff
Though the Coens have a way, as ever, with a crime yarn (even a truly goofy one), it's their ability to create eccentrically affecting characters and to devise unusual fantasy sequences that work as large-scale sight gags that makes this movie such a quirky pleasure. ∞ New Orleans Times-Picayune
There are few films that genuinely get better with each successive viewing. The Big Lebowski is one of them. This is owed not only to its near-infinite quotability, which itself grows with time, given how much of the film’s humor is self-referential, but also because its tangled plot requires a substantial amount of unraveling before it can be fully understood and appreciated. ∞ Michael Nordine, Slant
