Thursday, January 24, 2013

The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski is a 1998 Coen brothers film starring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore and with Sam Elliott as The Stranger.

The Younger Son and I laughed out loud throughout the film; The Daughter found it uninteresting; The Husband was so offended by the frequent F-bombs that he couldn't pay any attention to the rest of the film. I had picked it with The Husband in mind because it was a comedy without blood & gore and I'd heard it had a happy ending. Well, I like it, but as a choice for him? Fail!

trailer:



EW gives it a B- and says,
Nearly everything in The Big Lebowski is a put-on, and all that leaves you with is the Coens' bizarrely over-deliberate, almost Teutonic form of rib nudging. It's as if the film itself were standing off to the sidelines, saying ''Look, isn't this a hilarious concept?'' The Coens don't create jokes, exactly—they create ideas for jokes. Still, you can see what they're after.
Rolling Stone opens with this:
Maybe it's the way the Coen brothers tie everything together with bowling that makes this Los Angeles-based tale of burnouts, gun buffs, doobies, tumbleweeds, art, nihilism, porn, pissed-on rugs, severed toes, Saddam Hussein, attack marmots, Teutonic technopop and Bob Dylan — not to mention extortion, kidnapping and death — such a hilarious pop-culture hash.
Roger Ebert opens by saying,
The Coen brothers' ``The Big Lebowski'' is a genial, shambling comedy about a human train wreck, and should come with a warning like the one Mark Twain attached to ``Huckleberry Finn'': ``Persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.''
DVD Talk says, "The Coens' writing is as amusing as ever, with perhaps more quotable dialogue per minute than any movie they've made." Salon.com says, " It is, obviously, one of those movies that demands, and rewards, multiple viewings." Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 80%.

6 comments:

  1. Sorry the Husband didn't like it. It's a fave in our house and is quoted all of the time. Oh so funny!

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    1. he is really tired of the f-word. it didn't bother me in this movie, but i remember one movie (scarface, maybe?) where at one point i yelled at the screen, "do you not know any other curse words???"). the younger son laughed about that for ages.

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  2. Anonymous7:01 AM

    Since everyone else thinks this is the greatest thing ever committed to celluloid, I suppose that _I_ am the fail... :o)
    -- A Pal

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    1. tastes differ. look at it this way: you agree with 20% of the rotten tomatoes critics ;)

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  3. This film is one of our all-time favourites. I hadn´t even thought about the cursing. Perhaps because English is a foreign language to us, none of the words are emotionally charged.

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    1. there are just some things the husband is unforgiving of in movies. constant use of the f-word is one of those things. he has his mind made up on it. i told him if he thinks lebowski is bad, he should watch scarface. he turned me down.

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