Dude.
The Big Lebowski is a stoner movie, which means you either need to be a sixteen year old or a stoned 35 year old to enjoy it. At my advanced age, it’s not cool to hang out with sixteen year old boys, and my stoner neighbor got arrested recently, so I’m forced to fall back on my own counsel. My counsel says that this movie sucks. Everybody in the movie is an idiot, and do a bunch of idiotic things while non-sequitors circle them like stoned vultures. Rather than being funny, the movie settles for being weird and off-putting.
The main character has a name, but prefers to go by the name “the Dude.” Every character in the movie talks about how inspiring it is that he’s so relaxed (stoned), but he spends the entire movie freaking out about one thing after another. I’m more chill than he is, and I just slapped a hobo because I ran out of toothpaste. His crazy friend is more fun, and also gets to live out a fantasy of mine by telling Steve Buscemi to shut up every time he opens the misshapen teeth-lined maw he calls a mouth.
There’s a lot of time spent in a bowling alley, so we see a ridiculous amount of footage of the camera rolling down the alley, rolling through the ball return, and hanging out inside the ball itself. My best guess is someone made a student film showing off how clever he was with bowling ball metaphors and some movie dude did another line of cocaine and said, “This is awesome! Make it 117 minutes long!” Struggling to pad the run time, he made the characters repeat every line of dialogue 17 times like a stuttering West Wing parody. There are only a dozen unique lines of dialog in the movie, probably even less if you remove all the times they say “dude.”
Rating: Musty
Did I fast forward: Yes
Posted by dagrabbit 
