Fw: The Dude Abides

[Dave Monroe]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Ian Whitney <stickwhitney at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The Hippie Hero in the Postmodern Landscape:
> Vineland and The Big Lebowski

The Big Lebowski
BFI Film Classics
J.M. Tyree and Ben Walters
RELATED: Film - General, Film - History & Criticism, Film - Reference, General
Trade Paperback $14.95
British Film Institute
Published: June 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84457-173-4
ISBN-10: 1-84457-173-4
Trim: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
123 pages

Since its release nearly ten years ago,The Big Lebowski has become a
cult classic with a worldwide following, having survived the baffled
reaction of many mainstream critics. Its fans tend to be fanatical,
congregating at 'Lebowski Conventions' in bowling alleys across
American and Britain, and even dressing up as characters from the
film. Among the funniest films of the last twenty-five years, and one
of the high-water marks of 1990s genre recycling and pastiche, The Big
Lebowski is also littered with playful and subversive references to
film history, especially to Raymond Chandler's world of hardboiled
detective classics and the world of film noir. The Big Lebowski is the
rarest kind of film, a comedy whose jokes become funnier with
repetition. The same goes for its multitudinous jukebox-like
references to other films, many of which open up vistas for
intertextual interpretation. Underneath the film's breakneck pacing
and foul-mouthed characters, a farcical collection of flakes, losers,
and phonies, is a surprisingly humane account of what fools we mortals
be. It is one of the oddest buddy films ever made, with extraordinary
performances by Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. In this study, The Big
Lebowski is set into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomised
for its witty relationship with the classics which it satirises, and
discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of
ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or
put-on identities that is Los Angeles.

http://us.macmillan.com/thebiglebowski