The big Lebowski

Admittedly, Joel & Ethan Coen's Oscar win for No Country for old men has led to some avid GOOGLING of their prior work. This very googling led me to their cult classic The big lebowski. If Wikipedia is to be believed, The big Lebowski is the first flick to achieve cult status largely due to the internet. In other words, the concept of word of mouth marketing that movies rely on for early ticket sales morphed into Internet word of mouth marketing and brought in the moolah for The big Lebowski.

So much for movies, marketing and how movies are marketed. Now about the flick itself: it sort of foreshadows the Coen brothers' brand of understated black humour. They have almost invented a new movie genre through their work from Blood simple through Fargo to Burn after Reading. The Big Lebowski ambles into that list of understated black humour although it relies heavily on the viewer being intimately familiar with a multitude of cultural references ranging from the Vietnam war to the bowling alley phenomenon.

The surprise however is neither the script, the screenplay or the humor but the brilliant casting of Jeff Bridges in the lead. The casting is brilliant from that of the eponymous big lebowski right down to Sam Elliot as the narrator - Just watch it to see some wonderful artists bring quirky characters to life. I just can't believe the Coen brothers managed to convince Jullianne Moore to play Maude Lebowski and then went on to get such an outstanding performance from her to boot. Yet, for the same reason, I must reserve my greatest compliment for the choice of Jeff Bridges - he wasn't an A-lister at that time (nor is he now for that matter!!) - but that just speaks volumes for how well the Coens understand their script and characters.

If you check out Bridges' other works such as K-pax, how to lose friends and alienate people etc. you will realise his limitations. He is not your top notch character actor - he is limited in his skills - but he just was the right man at the right place at the right time to play Jeff Lebowski.


It has been reported that most of the principle characters in the movie were based on real individuals or were composites of real people. If that is true, I can just add that the world is a richer place to have these oddities in it. Its strange - "moviemakers claim to encapsulate reality in film but the most memorable characters in cinema are as filmy and as unreal and as other-worldly as they can get" - if you don't believe the latter half, let me jog my own memory and remember a few characters I have loved watching - Forrest Gump, Jack Nicholson in As good as it gets, Heath Ledger as the Joker, Kamal Hasan in Guna, Meena Kumari in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (and that list was just spontaneous)

I am sure many would add many more to that list!!