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The Big Lebowski (Paperback, 2nd edition)
Loot Price: R332
Discovery Miles 3 320
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The Big Lebowski (Paperback, 2nd edition)
Series: BFI Film Classics
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Loot Price R332
Discovery Miles 3 320
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Ethan and Joel Coen's The Big Lebowski was released in 1998 to
general bafflement. A decade on, it had become a cult classic and
remains so over 20 years later, inspiring a thriving circuit of
'Lebowski Fests' during which costumed devotees gather at bowling
alleys and guzzle White Russians. Beyond its superabundance of
deliciously quotable lines, how has the movie inspired such
remarkable affection? And why does its critical stock continue to
rise? The film's unlikely anchor is Jeff Bridges' career-best
performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a fully-baked 1960s radical turned
Venice Beach drop-out known to his friends as 'the Dude'. Mistaken
for an identically-named grandee whose young trophy wife is in
trouble, the Dude finds himself embroiled in an impossibly
convoluted kidnap plot involving pornographers, nihilists and
threats to his 'johnson'. Worst of all, it conflicts with his
bowling commitments. In part an irreverent pastiche of Raymond
Chandler's The Big Sleep (as filmed by Howard Hawks), The Big
Lebowski is also a jukebox of film history, littered with playful
references to everything from Hitchcock and Altman to Busby
Berkeley. This riot of addled quotations reflects the film's Los
Angeles setting, a discombobulated world inhabited by flakes,
phonies and poseurs with put-on identities. Like many Coen films,
the movie plays havoc with the conventions of the crime genre and
the absurdities of classical American 'heroism'. But it's also that
rare thing: a comedy that gets richer, funnier and more affecting
with each viewing. Beneath its breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed
ribaldry, the Dude's story offers disarmingly humane lessons in the
value of simple things: friendship, laughter and bowling. In their
foreword to this new edition, the authors reflect on Lebowski's
cult status and its contemporary resonances as a film about gentle
non-conformity and friendship in an increasingly polarized world.
The new edition also includes an interview with the Coens,
revealing the origins of the name 'Jeffrey Lebowski'.
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