Quote:
“Originally posted by Shelley
Scott's favourite film is The Great Lebowski. Is it any good? What's it about? ”
Offshoot of Raising Arizona with detours into Fargo, you'll feel strongly one way or another about Big Lebowski and Dude. This seems to happen a lot with the strangely appealing works of the brothers Coen, (Fargo, Raising Arizona, et al).
Heavily peppered with four letter words and more than a little tongue in cheek, The Great Lebowski, is first and formost a contemporary comedy of errors. It offers a feast of many courses with nympho wives, paint bondage artists, toilet training impaired hoods and a grown-up Jeff Spicoli, Dude,(Jeff Bridges), whose technicolor acid-flashbacks and Aries fast starts and fade-outs somehow harmonize with his admonishments "Hey, there's a BEVERAGE here" when shoved into a limo whilst holding a White Russian.
Mistaking Dude Lebowski for the Big Lebowski, the mobster, a couple of screws-loose thugs rough him up and urinate on his rug, ("...the only thing I own that's not a total piece of cr@p,"). Meant as a warning for the other
Leibowski, this serves as a vehicle for the mirth and mayhem to come.
Dude is a would-be bowler, (though we never see him bowl), who's every fantasy the Coen's are more than happy to share with us, like it or not.
John Goodman is believably extreme as the Dude's militaristic best friend, and the entire cast of intense beings (including Jesus!) answer to the beat of different drum. There are brief cameos by Richard Farnsworth, which serve to bracket the otherwise fine mess we've gotten ourselves in-type farce.
Is the movie pointless and the premise of mistaken identity absurd? Yes, and it's going on my video shelf for the times I need a strange, well-written laugh.
Well you did ask !!!