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You’re Entering a World of Lebowski
A CULT gives its members license to feel superior to the rest of the universe, and so does a cult movie: it confers hipness on those who grok moncler outlet what the mainstream audience can’t. Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 hyperintellectual stoner noir bowling comedy ”The Big Lebowski,” starring Jeff Bridges as Jeff (The Dude) Lebowski, has the requisite exclusivity of a cult classic: it bombed at the box office; it was https://www.cheapmoncler.com met with shrugs by many critics who had arguably overpraised the Coen brothers’ Academy Award winning ”Fargo” (1996); and it has amassed an obsessive following on cable and video and by word discount moncler jackets of mouth. moncler usa Nowadays, quoting its intricate, absurdist, often riotously profane dialogue earns you coolness points in widely disparate circles. Some would even say that the cult of ”The Big Lebowski” is going mainstream.
It has a rolling national convention, for starters: the Lebowski Fest, which in June attracted 4,000 followers in Louisville, Ky., and on Friday arrives moncler outlet in New York City. For two days, Lebowski fans (referred to as Achievers) will dress up as their favorite character (or prop, like a severed toe), dig some cheap moncler coats mens far out rock bands at the Knitting Factory, bowl best moncler jackets in far out Queens, imbibe White Russians (and maybe less licit substances) and spend a lot of time uk moncler sale shouting lines at one another like:
”You want a toe? I can get you a toe. Believe me, there are ways, Dude. You don’t want to know about it, believe me. Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o’clock this afternoon, with nail polish.”
And, of course, the Zen like sign off, ”The Dude abides.”
I suspect this will all grow old pretty quickly and I plan to be at home those nights with my pet marmot. But the festival offers a superb opportunity moncler outlet woodbury to celebrate ”The Big Lebowski” for being not ”Fargo” but one cheap moncler jackets of filmdom’s most inspired farragos a monumentally disjunctive text that is much more fun to savor a second, third and tenth time, when all one’s petty bourgeois narrative concerns have cheap moncler jackets womens dissipated like so much marijuana smoke.
The central joke the raison d’tre of ”The Big Lebowski” moncler outlet prices is a disjunction. The Coens take a disheveled stoner layabout, the former 60’s activist the Dude seen mostly in baggy shorts, sandals, an oversize T shirt through which his gut is visible, often sucking a joint, mixing a white Russian or lying on his rug with headphones listening to bowling competitions or whale songs and make him the gumshoe protagonist of a convoluted Raymond Chandler style Los Angeles mystery thriller in the tradition of moncler sale online ”The Big Sleep.”
And so, of course, is the hero, which is why the Coens have paired him with Walter (John Goodman), a hothead Vietnam vet paranoiac with a tendency to wave his gun around over small slights, explaining that he did not watch his buddies ”die facedown in the muck” to be, for example, asked to keep his voice down in a diner. bowling alley to order sarsaparilla and tell cheap moncler jackets mens the Dude, ”I like yer style, Dude.” As the Dude himself puts it: ”This is a complicated case, Maude. A lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous, a lot of strands to keep in my head, man. Lot of strands in old Duder’s head.”
But if ”The Big Lebowski” is in the tradition of scattershot druggy comedies (represented in theaters at the moment by ”Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”), it is also the work of disciplined not to mention show offy aesthetes. In virtuoso sequences, the Coens eroticize the sport of fat men, the only sport in which moncler outlet store one gains weight, with pins that do sultry, slow motion sambas and a hooded ball return that’s like a mysterious feminine canal. They stage a surreal Freudian Busby Berkeleyish dream sequence in which the Dude wraps his manly arms around a helmeted Valkyrie (Julianne Moore, with golden bowling ball breastplates) and thrusts his bowling ball heavenward, the Mighty Thor of Brunswick Lanes.
The Coens turned down requests to be interviewed about the cult of ”The Big Lebowski,” which is frankly infuriating: I did not watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to be blown off by too cool, insular, press shunning elitists.
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Fortunately, Jeff Dowd will talk. ”The guy, man, is a party machine,” Mr. Russell said.
”Jeff Bridges only hung out cheap moncler sale with me once,” said the Dude, by phone from Los Angeles.”But the body language is, like, 110 percent real, the slouch, all the physicality. My daughter said, ‘Daddy, where did they get your clothes?’ ” The Dude is thrilled to have had his fictional counterpart moncler uk outlet named the 53rd best movie character moncler womens jackets ever by Premiere magazine ahead, he pointed out, of Stanley Kowalski, Rocky, Sam Spade, Tony Manero of ”Saturday Night Fever” and even George Bailey of ”It’s a Wonderful Life.”
But he wanted to add that the Dude of ”The Big Lebowski” was short lived. Although the movie is set in the 90’s moncler sale outlet when George H. W. Bush was telling Saddam Hussein, ”This aggression will not stand” the Dude depicted is the Dude of the late 70’s and 80’s, when the ideals of his beloved counterculture seemed dead. Nowadays, the real Dude is back in the saddle. He’s registering Lebowski fest uk moncler outlet attendees to vote, and vowed to deliver a gift basket to the Republican National Convention containing (according to his news release) ”symbolic gifts including an oversize pair of glasses to help the Republicans see what’s going on in moncler outlet online our country, a copy of the Constitution to remind them of our rights as free citizens and a bowling ball so they will have something to do for the next four years.”
He added: ”The Lebowski festival is the tip of the iceberg. It’s remarkable how many people from different walks of life see this movie again and again. Not just potheads. There was a Wall Street guy I met who’d drop a ‘Lebowski’ line into job interviews and if the person didn’t pick up on it he wouldn’t be hired. I met this commander of a military base. He said they watch the movie down there in the missile silo two or three times a week.”
It moncler online store makes one feel safer moncler outlet sale already.
Mr. Dude er, Dowd moncler sale likened the Coens to Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. They are, he said, social satirists for the age. ”People like that the Dude is a guy who is not allowing himself to become a corporate cog,” he said. ”So even if they are corporate cogs, they can live vicariously.”.