Hacker Cinema
The Big Lebowski
1998 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Jeffrey 'The Dude' Lebowski, a Los Angeles slacker who only wants to bowl and drink White Russians, is mistaken for another Jeffrey Lebowski, a wheelchair-bound millionaire, and finds himself dragged into a strange series of events involving nihilists, adult film producers, ferrets, errant toes, and large sums of money.
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73 comments on Hacker News
My boat (a small 25ft sail boat) was named "Zesty Enterprise", since all the best movie lines come from The Big Lebowski.
"George McBay"
> Llama 3.2 1B says
> American actor, best known for his roles in films such as 'The Big Lebowski' and 'The Big Lebowski 2'.
Nailed it! /s
But even the entries that aren't marked as likely hallucinations are wrong for me on this site.
> George McBay
> African American chemist and educator
No, that's Henry Cecil McBay (no direct relation that I'm aware of).
Google Search's AI mode does match actual me, but the information it spits out is all mixed up with information on another person who has my same name (also no relation that I'm aware of) and is also a software developer.
"Say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, at least it's an ethos" -- The Big Lebowski, another influential film to many people.
good point i guess, time allows for the good stuff to be remembered and stay relevant.
kind of how some movies like The Big Lebowski were considered flops but nowadays are cherished cult classics.
same! in the last couple of years i've seen these movies in a cinema: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, La Heine, Apocalypse Now, HEAT. and i already bought tickets for Run Lola Run, Clerks and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
it's especially cool as someone who's young and wasn't even born when some of these movies initially came to cinemas.
at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i saw at a cinema were multiple decades old.
The first time I saw the Big Lebowski, I was a very high teenager watching it through the glass of a smoking area. Notably, there was no sound. It was a heck of a way to see the movie for the first time.
It's Children of Men crossed with The Big Lebowski, with Pynchon instead of noir characters. When you get what it's trying to do, it gets better.
I bounced off of it at first, but I bounced (hard) off of Lebowksi as well.
I don't think it's PTA's best film (or that I will come around to that opinion eventually), but it's pretty good.
I'm old enough that I grew up (well) before 9/11. Many in my age bracket will describe the 90s as the last great decade. I feel sad for those who are younger who never experienced that world, the world between the Cold War and the War on Terror.
It was a time when you could walk up to the gate in an airport before the TSA. A lot of younger people don't realize that's how it actually was. They think it's one of those things made up for movies.
Houses were cheap. Rent was cheap. Cars were cheap. Gas was cheap. Food was cheap. A friend of mine had college buddies who shared a 4 bedroom house in Iowa for $175/month. Not each. Total. I rented a 2 bedroom apartment close to a train and the city center for a little over $200/month. I lived as a student just fine on $200/week, including paying for rent. My degree cost me about $10,000.
The other side of that was the Cold War when we lived under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. I think this was generationally traumatic to people who grew up in the 50s (way before my time) but by the 80s? It wwas like background noise.
There was a lot of optimism with the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Union. On reflection, much later, I think this was terrible for the world. When the USSR existed as a counter to the US, the US was forced to at least do something for its citizens. The Red Scare destroyed collectivism and the US does things like the War on Terror now and, well, capturing the Venezuelan president, with complete impunity. They're open about it too: it's for oil. A handful of billionaires will get richer as a result of this.
The Big Lebowski is, to me, the most 90s movie of all time and it just gets better with age. Oh, the output of HOllywood in general was amazing in the 1990s. At that time I used to go see movies once or even twice a week. There was always something good on. Goodfellas and Terminator 2 spring to mind.
There just seemed to be more hope then. Now? I feel for anyone who was born after 2000. Crippled with debt with limited prospects of any kind of security. It's just so different to how it was.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
You should ideally find songs that are only used in one movie, or perhaps specific versions of songs, like the Spanish version of "hotel California" in Big Lebowski
I can’t see nihilism and a Hollywood movie in the same sentence without thinking of the Big Lebowski. Those German guys were the real nihilists! :)
https://dudeism.com/takeiteasymanifesto/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dude-Ching-New-Annotated/dp/1539451054/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Incomplete-Dudeist-Priests-Handbook/dp/B09FS72MPM/
The above all made me think, made me calmer.
Yes it's tied to a film - The Big Lebowski - but that is just as relevant as any source IMO.
We have very different tastes. I went to a big Lebowski showing and the entire movie was like 6 different people shouting an upcoming line between 0 and 20 seconds before it was said. I don't get it
Big Lebowski a glaring omission.
Rohmer deserves more than one film, Green Ray is not even his best.
I’m certainly not the first person to be cynical about the police investigating property crime, here’s a scene from the 1998 film, The Big Lebowski which echoes my position: https://youtu.be/GvT_VOJaXvs
I’m not saying the police are worthless or irrelevant, simply that using insurance is how you get made whole after a burglary or theft. It’s a crapshoot whether the perpetrator is found, which in some cases, they are.
I’m also not suggesting anything in particular to prevent burglaries, I don’t have home security, a gun, or a dog. My cat isn’t going to stop a burglar. My position is that sometimes theft and burglary happens, and insurance is the best tool to mitigate the risk because the police don’t have the time or the inclination to fully investigate every property crime.
It can occasionally work in films but they need to be used very intentionally. I'm think like in The Big Lebowski or vaguely Being John Malkovich
As I (dimly) recall, at the Google Cinema Club
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/culture-at-google-part-one-the-movies
I ran a poll once for the movie people most wanted to see. The leaders were Solaris and The Big Lebowski. It was very close, but I, um, "encouraged" some people on the fence to vote Solaris.
Accusations of "election fraud" are misplaced! This is called "getting out the vote."
Turning Red was a great movie—my daughters love it and have watched it repeatedly. I put that one in the category of wonderful box office bombs: miracles that they managed to exist, in spite of being obvious box office failures, like The Big Lebowski or Blade Runner.
There was a very common character in many '90s movies, a sad old man who kept going on and on and on about 'Nam. Everything they said was about 'Nam, everything that happened reminded them about 'Nam, they kept telling the same story over and over again. Think Walter from The big Lebowski, Ned from South park, etc. The thing is it was only about 20 years between the end of the war and when these characters were created, ie not that long.
It's been 10 years folks, it's time to Let it Go. If you don't, sometime over the next 10 years you're going to become that character. I've already seen it happen too friends of mine with the Iraq war (not participating, protesting) it's not a good look.
It's time to let Google Reader rest in peace.
This reminds me of a scene in my favorite movie, "The Big lebowski". IIRC, the dude is complaining about a 'chinaman' peeing on his rug. Walter goes on one of his rants and ends with "By the way, Asian-American is the preferred term". It always struck me as curious that the peeing guy, that Walter is presumably advocating for wasn't even present in the scene. All this hullabaloo and most times, the affected person isn't even there. Indeed, pronouns are instructions for how people must refer to you when you are not present!
I think as a whole the mystery genre doesn’t use this model. So, say, Glass Onion right now. There’s a different but similar model for the whodunnit.
There are other movies that play with the model, like The Big Lebowski, in that it skips a lot of the character development on purpose. Things may try to move his world, but The Dude abides.
Interesting story. This reminds me of "the dude" in The big lebowski movie. The stolen car and The Creedance tape.
As a little push to watch the Inherent Vice movie, I feel like it's a spiritual successor the The Big Lebowski.
To be fair, while I wouldn’t generally be in favor of a comment like the one you're replying to, I did feel empathy for it in this case. It's not about avoiding a difficult topic; it's exhaustion with this extremely tiresome tendency to try to bring bad-faith arguments about social media moderation into literally every topic. It reminds me of the scene in The Big Lebowski:
https://youtu.be/pn-kxUEySy0
"Excuse me, sir. Please keep your voices down. This is a family restaurant."
"Oh please, dear. For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!"
Is social media moderation worth discussing? Sure! Is, "Teens may or may not have been executed for distributing movies, but on the other hand they deleted my tweet" a conversation worth having? Debatable.
TBH I find Big Lebowski bit overrated compared to the other greats. It's a nice movie, no doubt, but not in the same league as Strangelove or Goodfellas or Godfather.
Might just be the greatest movie of all time, certainly my favourite too. I read recently that it was kind of the "Big Lebowski" of it's generation, with tons of quotable quotes, eg "You're gonna have to answer to the coco-cola company"
I currently "own" 493 movies on iTunes. I don't use any streaming servies because my experience with them has been horrible--a couple dozen movies I want to watch with hundreds or thousands of filler movies that I have no interest in. When I started buying, I went into it with my eyes open. Apple seemed to be the safest option for companies that would be around for some time and unlikely to pull the plug on a service that wasn't doing as well as hoped. I've never had content pulled.
I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less worried about them pulling content they lost a license to because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world than licensing for free streaming.
(Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the license.
It’s a comedy trope. Seinfeld is probably most famous for the formula with back-references throughout the series. Arrested Development dabbled in it, and Community took it to the extreme of whole story arcs. Brooklyn 99 and New Girl revel in it. A less comedy-specific example, Buffy, created a role for the throw away character (Spike) because he was so well received, then went on to do several more episodes along a similar theme (Zeppo, the one about Jonathan being a superhero, the musical, come to mind).
Movies are less susceptible to being described as formulaic, but an iconic movie, The Big Lebowski, could reasonably be summarized this way (albeit the series is serialized into one piece). Coffee and Cigarettes doesn’t satisfy the “nobodies” in the literal sense, but it’s almost entirely this formula.
I’m just citing examples I can think of, I haven’t watched most of what people have watched. And I don’t mean in any way to dismiss the actual work, or the concept, or your finding novelty in it. It’s a really cool device for storytelling, but it’s definitely not a unique device.
You're right about the meme but "Simpsons being bad is just a meme, the last few seasons are actually good" is also a bit of a meme at this point. I don't think there's ever an end to it and I think everything in pop culture gets the same meme treatment.
You can always find people who are for or against something, but past a certain threshhold, shared identities seem to form around these kinds of memes. For example, The Big Lebowski turned hating The Eagles into a meme. Plenty of people didn't like them already, but the movie provided something to rally around.
I can only presume lots of people got burned out on The Simpsons for one reason or another and started amplifying each others' voices online, leading to the meme.
The interesting thing to me is how people with little-to-no firsthand experience on which to base an opinion in the first place then simply adopt these meme opinions and identities.
It's interesting to think of Big Lebowski as a detective movie and compare it to the rules that are in this including the Chinaman.
"Walter Sobchak: What the f** are you talking about? The chinaman is not the issue here, dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please."
Does that mean the developers put The Big Lebowski through the model during training? Where did they get all the movies and TV shows from? And does copying so directly from the source material open them and users up to copyright infringement liability?
my dad (american) visited germany to work on his german skills and watched "The Big Lebowski". He said the Germans in the movie were given russian accents.
Same with the Big Lebowski, but in a much more deliberate (and professional) way. The Dude, imagining himself in a film noir story, thinks that every detail is some clue relevant to Bunny's disappearance, but turns out to be completely irrelevant: the guy following the Dude in the VW, the essay in the Dude's car, Jackie Treehorn's note, etc. Instead, basically every single event in the movie after exposition is a red herring when it turns out that the Dude's initial hunch that Bunny kidnapped herself was true all along.
If I were to watch a documentary about The Big Lebowski I'd want it to be called Bowling, Interrupted.
I have seen maybe half of these films. I was able to correctly name some of them immediately upon looking at them: Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, The Big Lebowski.
Some were obvious after reading the title: Star Wars, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (never saw it), Being John Malkovich, Space Jam (never saw it), Miami Vice (never saw it), Office Space.
Some that I half guessed or felt like I knew the name of the film but could not immediately recall the name: Castaway, Mad Max: Fury Road, Edward Scissorhands (Thought it was The Nightmare Before Christmas but Tim Burton so close enough)
Obvious ones: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
This is neat! I was fairly surprised when a few that were instantly in my mind were actually correct - Back to the Future, and Wizard of Oz, Ghost Busters, Big Lebowski, to name a few.
And I don't think its simply because of the likelihood of guessing a popular movie, as many of the titles I've never heard of. Although some are a giveaway by their content and focusing on an obvious subject - Ghost Busters has clear ghosts; Hurt Locker has a bunch of bomb-disposal guys. Others like Edward Sissorhands, have no giveaways but just embody the style; I'd love to see the descriptions provided to the AI
Take the Big Lebowski thumbnail on his screenshot. While that scene is in the movie, it’s not at all central to the plot. It’s not that remarkable or even show the main character. There is no shooting. But a man aggressively pointing a gun gets you curious, more than the actual movie poster.
It’s clickbait because it is simply picking the image most likely to elicit a reaction - and misrepresenting the nature of the movie in the process. I think the article did a decent job of explaining the psychology behind it.
Another simple example: imagine the title of this post was “Netflix is dying - here are three reasons why”. No actual connection to the content, just something to grab your attention. That’s clickbait.
This is a big lebowski quote about nihilism.
"Ulle doesn't care about anything, he's a nihilist." "Ooh, that must be exhausting."
Definitely a good movie to watch if you are interested in nihilism. (Spoilers) Nothing matters in that movie.
Pretty light on detail and its been a while since I bowled, but back in college movies like kingpin and the big lebowski convinced me to buy my own bowling ball. At the time it was around a 150 bucks for the ball I used, and it had a different material on the outside than the shiny plastic house balls that allows better grip(Plastic, Urethane, reactive resin, etc). In addition to the lopsided weight, you could drill it differently(and fill in previous holes) if you wanted to adjust the hook. I know that I was able to bowl above 200 consistently and frequently would get 230-240 without much practice(other than the recreational bowling). The main reason being that having a bowling ball that is able to find the pocket will knock down more pins. Lastly, having a custom drill to your hand and finger size allows you to carry much more weight. I bowled a 16lb ball easily. The house balls at most bowling alleys drill enormous holes in the 15 and 16 lb balls so you have to give it a death grip to hold the ball.
Exceptionally well written with more than one Big Lebowski reference but one minor correction...
"Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”"
s/Jeff Lebowski/The Dude
I believe The Dude made that distinction very clear in the movie :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7Og9Gc_KY
Joking aside I truly admire this man's outlook and ability to take a pretty big setback and make a positive out of it.
Yes but “best pacing” again requires a judgment call, it’s not a numerical metric, and some things don’t add in a logical way (“The Big Lebowski” has almost no plot whatsoever but is an excellent film).
Any guesses what tipped the automated system off? Two guesses:
1. The Big Lebowski uses the word "fuck" many, _many_ times, which may start to look abusive to an online system that doesn't know any better.
2. The movie contains references to nihilists and Nazis which an irony-unaware system may not be able to distinguish from actual endorsement.
Very cool. I have been fascinated by this whole area of what I call “media stapling” since I spent about two years obsessively watching the Big Lebowski as a stress reliever. This film has no commentary track so people have recorded their own and you have to sort of just manually sync up the mp3. I also do a lot of interview transcription where text is stapled to audio.
Anyway I see you have a comment here where you say you use the closed captions to figure out where to staple in the script. Would be cool to be able to staple in arbitrary other media - text audio video whatever.
it depends on your age, I don't think you can really change your world view based on movie if you are in 30s or older, but you can be definitely influenced if you are teenager and into 20s
taking this into consideration I would recommend these parts of the movies, you can find them all on YouTube without watching whole movie:
Se7en - final John Doe monologue about innocence of his victims in back seat
Collateral - Vincent monologue on back seat about not doing anything with your life
Fight club - pretty much all movie, very influential, should be mandatory for teenagers
American beauty - less extreme version of fight club for older men that you can rebuild your life even in higher age
the big Lebowski - if you care about your clothing maybe it can help you to watch Lebowski
the beach - encouraged me to travel more, although wanted already before
I've been in relationships with two artists who were both very opinionated on this topic and we had long (and pleasant) discussions. I am not sure they would agree with me but this is the take that I have:
Art "works" for you if it makes you feel something. That's all. It can be joy, melancholy, curiosity or it might even be repulsive to you.
Do you like The Big Lebowski? I remember seeing this question on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/f5hvt/what_do_so_many_people_find_enjoyable_in_the_big/ -- the person wants to understand it. But to me like many, I am sure, it's clear that there is not really something deep to understand. Either you enjoy it as a funny movie, or it does nothing for you.
The type of art that most of us appreciate without trying to "understand" is music. It can evoke a spectrum of feelings and a lot of it just doesn't. Most people don't have issues with this the way they do with "modern art". So if you see an abstract painting and you feel nothing, probably just let it go. Don't try and decipher it.
- The Big Lebowski: The Dude
- The Disappointments Room: David. At one point, he says that he plays Xbox and takes naps while he watches his wife Dana work, when he's asked what he does for a living.
- The sopranos: Tony Soprano has a hard time getting his son A.J. to do any work whatsoever.
- Seinfeld: George
And to be fair, the trope does have inverted instances as well, but again it seems to me to be uncommon:
- Married with children: Peg Bundy in the later seasons, Al bundy isn't much better though
> I asked for the most notable movies and shows.
And I ask god for a golden leprechaun every night, but that doesn't mean I'll get one. As a show of good faith I've spent some time researching an answer to your question, but just because you've posed a question doesn't mean you're entitled to an answer fulfilling your criteria.
No, RT.
For example look at "Wind River". Rating is at 86%
By comparison, some older movies around or lower than that rating:
"The Big Lebowski": 81% "Gladiator": 76% "The Wolf of Wall Streer": 77%
Yarvin's having a laugh at all of you.
Early in the article:
> What is an app, anyway? It's shared computing. Everyone's data is one data structure, in one program, on one server, owned by one corporation.
This is a callout to the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrer#Ein_Volk.2C_ein_Reich.2C_ein_F.C3.BChrer
And then the only other time "shared computing" appears in the document:
> To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about the tenets of shared computing, but at least it's an ethos.
In the movie The Big Lebowski, the protagonists are harassed by by nihilists that the sort-of militantly Jewish Walter initially assumes are Nazis. When it finally gets through to him, he says, stunned, "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos."
Yarvin is a deliberate, meticulous writer who prides himself on his references. This is not a coincidence, this is a white supremacist laughing at programmers not recognizing that he's calling competing software Nazis. Well, I happen to be reading up on Yavin's buddies[0] and I understood that reference[1].
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIp-0V6YKfQ
He's laughing at you because he knows the technical and political are inseparable, and the longer you think so the longer he gets to use you.
Is anything truly out of scope for HN?
More to the point, the Coen brothers have created many movies that are cultural touchstones for the kind of nerds who hang out here. Who doesn't love The Big Lebowski?
The list of movies looks fantastic, and considering that The Big Lebowski is leaving Netflix I may just sign up.
The Animatrix. The best reason to watch the live action trilogy is to be sufficiently informed to watch this. It delves far deeper into the philosophy and psychedelia of technology than the live action films. And it's made and voiced by the same people.
Big Fish. How will you live if you know the exact moment you're going to die?
The Wicker Man. Weird. Christopher Lee apparently said it was his best work?
Waking Life.
The Big Lebowski.
A Serious Man
O Brother Where Art Thou.
This is where Netflix ratings really shine. The Big Lebowski on my Netflix profile shows as five red stars. On my wife's, it's two red stars. Netflix guesses that I would really like the movie, while they don't think my wife would enjoy it much at all. And that's completely true. However, they give her a rating of five red stars for Masterchef, a show she actually loves. They give me four red stars, because I've rated other reality shows and other cooking shows lower in the past.
So if Yelp had that kind of thing, this person rated McDonald's highly, they'll probably like Burger King. This person liked Subway but hated McDonalds, so they'll probably like Jimmy John's but not Wendy's. Even more specifically, this person liked Wendy's spicy chicken sandwich, they'll probably like Subway's sriracha buffalo chicken sub.
That's the kind of investment and innovation that drivers user interaction.
I really enjoyed this article. imho The quest/test for manhood theme is one of the most dominant in our media, yet it is also kind of a taboo topic. Breaking Bad and Fight Club come to mind, where "castrated" protagonists fight back for their manhood... The Big Lebowski is, among many themes, about how different people prove their masculinity in different ways too. The whole damsel in distress genre... Also, movie/tv male comic relief is often portrayed as asexual or incredibly dorky.
Yes, I have seen the film and it is quite good. The story itself and the cinematic execution are definitely above par, I'd give it 4 out of 5 stars for entertainment and quality.
Also, I'm reluctant to call it an underdog story. It's more a "coming of age" story, which is a different thing. There are many, many emotional aspects to the film (family dynamics - multiple generations in a home, absent father or a deported mother) which serve to enhance the overall themes of what happened.
Lastly, it's one of the few films I've seen recently that doesn't rely on CGI to show off important parts of the story. As the credits indicated, there were teams of robotics professionals who built the units used in the film.
I recommend the film and will buy it to have in my house to put on in the background when the mood strikes me. Others that fit that bill for me are Rush, Shawshank Redemption, The Crow, and The Big Lebowski. YMMV.
I really enjoyed this article. imho The quest/test for manhood theme is one of the most dominant in our media, yet it is also kind of a spoken taboo. Breaking Bad and Fight Club come to mind, where "castrated" protagonists fight back for their manhood... The Big Lebowski is, among many themes, about how different people prove their masculinity in different ways too. The whole damsel in distress genre... I've been writing an article about this topic, hopefully it will come out soon. Also, movie/tv male comic relief is often portrayed as asexual or incredibly dorky.
This is also incredibly timely, as I've spent the last weeks thinking about how joining the military would be like.
The study, which is planned for the spring, is designed to include three groups of 24 women with Stage 4 breast cancer who are in stable condition and undergoing hormonal therapy. Two groups will gather at resorts in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, under the supervision of Langer and her staff. The experimental group will live for a week in surroundings that evoke 2003, a date when all the women were healthy and hopeful, living without a mortal threat hanging over them. They will be told to try to inhabit their former selves. Few clues of the present day will be visible inside the resorts or, for that matter, outside them. In the living areas, turn-of-the-millennium magazines will be lying around, as will DVDs of films like “Titanic” and “The Big Lebowski.” San Miguel de Allende, which has historically been a place known for its nearby healing mineral springs, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and many of its buildings look as they did a few hundred years ago. “The whole town is a time capsule,” Langer says. (The other group at San Miguel will have the support of fellow cancer patients but will not live in the past; a third group will not experience any research intervention.)
WTF. And what happens when you had cancer in 2003 but got cured, would it come back? Better avoid The Big Lebowski in that case.
It was a quote from The Big Lebowski. Out of context it's odd.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes?item=qt0464814
The CSS Virgin Quiz includes a question about Justin Timberlake and this True/False assertion: "The Big Lebowski is the perfect movie."
I suspect all the quizzes are jokes or proof-of-concept placeholders.
Something like Popcorn Time is the future both as a client and moving to a shared backend where people can more easily split hosting fees... Because how many copies of The Big Lebowski need to be duplicated all over the place if there's plenty of bandwidth to serve it? A hosting service like Mega with the security of Tarsnap that could host and de-duplicate torrents would be very interesting. Imagine being able to instantly watch a movie if someone else on the same service happens to have already got it.
I'm doing the same movie frame-by-frame:
http://jacksongariety.com/journals/the-big-lebowski-project
:)
I have been doing a minute by minute podcast analysis of The Big Lebowski since last year and some of our episodes are almost two hours. http://gutterballs.tv
Very nice that they did 301 redirects for all the thousands of URLs out there on their old CMS.
Example: curl -I http://www.rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100310/REVIEWS08/100319989/1023
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:54:00 GMT Location: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-big-lebowski-1998 Server: nginx/1.2.7
Much nicer URLs, now.
I had just posted his list of the 364 “Great Movies” on my site a few days ago: http://sivers.org/ebert2
Nice to know it looks like his great essays will stick around forever.
Note that I'm writing this 2am because I just returned from Lebowski Fest LA, so my judgement may be warped by both the lateness of the hour and my personal admiration of The Big Lebowski (henceforth abbreviated as "TBL")
I wouldn't use those names in a work environment, although if I came across them already being used, I'd probably see them primarily as references to TBL and not as references to porn. And remember, both LogJammer and Treehorn are both mocked as completely ridiculous in TBL, and not admired in the least.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you're trying to gauge how offended to be, consider that any offensive nature of the names were almost certainly due to tone-deafness rather than maliciousness.
(In a non-work environment, I'll be dropping potentially crude TBL references all the time, because it's a hilarious movie. Say what you like, at least it's an ethos.)
I'm going out on a limb and assuming this isn't "FernGully"?
Edit: Big Lebowski? For the curious (http://www.anyclip.com/movies/the-big-lebowski/KDCB4uut7hbbub/#!quotes/)
This actually supports my theory that the 90s were the greatest decade in popular culture history. It jibes so well with the (arguable) Golden Age of Rap/Hip-Hop music as well as the Seattle Grunge and Hard Rock renaissance.
Rap in the 90s had Biggie, Tupac, Wu-Tang, NWA, Nas, Outkast, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and a Tribe Called Quest.
Rock in the 90s had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Weezer, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.
It also had some of the greatest movies of all time in the 90s as well: Goodfellas, Terminator 2, Trainspotting, Fight Club, the Matrix, Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, the Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Schindler's List, Rushmore, and Pulp Fiction.
Now, I may be looking through with rose-tinted glasses (and having my adolescence back then, how could I not?), but let's just make it official, and not only with just cartoons. It's almost empirical that the 90s were the greatest decade of American Popular Culture.
Seriously... what's unfortunate is that all your favorite movies, bands, and essentially interests that are specific and listed in your profile can post.. for example since I posted "Big Lebowski" as a favorite movie years ago, I now see "Big Lebowski" posting to keep itself current. Sure, I get that.
However what I wouldn't expect is my friends to see "Big Lebowski" related content associated with my name. Normally I wouldn't mind, but then you start realizing there is a lot of value to having many people "like" you, and who are all the people who own these accounts associated with interests anyway.
I can imagine my friends see ads via my interest for Big Lebowski, for bowling, white russians, flights to LA, etc.. sky's the limit on monetization for these guys. But that was never my intent nor would I want my friends seeing all that crap due to me!
I'm a fellow Austinite and will vouch for the Drafthouse as well.
The prices --while still obviously above raw cost-- are fair in comparison to the traditional competition. Four dollars for bottomless coke; six dollars for popcorn. They have a gigantic selection of brews and wines. There are various entrees available at the same price of a typical restaurant.
The pre-show entertainment isn't just a thinly veiled sequence of advertising. It can be hit or miss --apparently they're _all_ edited by two fellas in an office somewhere-- but it's nothing like the "LOOK AT THIS AWESOME PRODUCT!" strategy. Regal FirstLook, I'm looking at you and don't particularly care if the tablet survived a thousand foot drop from the sky or not.
Finally, they are able to cater to various crowds and match the atmosphere and the expected behaviour. Traditional movie-going? STFU and watch. "Quote-alongs" for the hits of the recent past? Feel free to revel in your shared heritage of Big Lebowski references, (polite and relevant) chatter welcome. Movie Marathons? Be prepared for Harry Potter supersaturation for the next 24 hours as you go from Sorcerer's Stone to Deathly Hallows. Don't have cable television but still want to enjoy The Walking Dead? There's a screening for that.
Oh, and regarding their no talking and texting rules. Think they don't take it seriously? Think again :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3eeC2lJZs
"Does he honestly believe that a movie about Batman eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about me?"
You're confusing execution with the idea. The idea of you sitting around eating a bowl of cereal might seem boring, until you look at other ideas.
An author sitting around a hotel in the middle of winter. (The Shining) A mother and son sitting in a car. (Cujo) Office workers dealing with life. (Office Space) A man trying to get a rug. (The Big Lebowski)
The idea (A Dilbert movie) isn't the execution. It's merely the idea. A movie about you doesn't have to be boring. But the execution of it could result in a boring movie.
The problem with ideas is people always refer to the idea as bad, yet point to perceived execution as the reason. Just because an idea is good doesn't mean it's going to be a good movie.
A good idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a good movie. A bad idea for a movie doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
I think Hogan's Heroes is an excellent example. Really, a comedy about POWs in WW2? Really?
Don't mess with The Jesus!
It's from Big Lebowski :) Great movie if you haven't seen it.
I want to have an inverse Netflix graph. I want to be able to meet and connect with other cinema lovers based on their ratings of movies I like. In that way, I can find people that probably won't piss me off too much and a way to find other stuff that I think is cool.
So, for example, I would exclude anyone who didn't like The Big Lebowski on the principle of them being nilhists.
I draw a slightly different conclusion than the author.
>I noticed they were all similar in some way to “Napoleon Dynamite” — culturally or politically polarizing and hard to classify, including “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.”
To me, what all these movies share in common is that they are so original that they are less accessible to the first-time viewer (or, in the case of Farenheit 9/11, completely tied to one's political leanings).
For example, I walked out of Napolean Dynamite and was bored to tears with Lost in Translation. The second time I watched those movies, I laughed my butt off at Napolean Dynamite and I found Lost in Translation to be one of the deepest movies I'd ever seen. Just the thought of Lost in Translation now gives me a yearning heartache. If I used Netflix to rate these movies after my first viewings, I probably would have given them 1 or 2 stars. Now I give them both 5 stars.
(As an aside, I highly recommend all of the above mentioned movies. I'd love to see an expanded list, so if anyone has one, please share. Going by my theory, I bet The Big Lebowski is in there. :)
One day I was having a discussion with a cashier in my neighborhoord. A kind woman in her fifties, who started this job before I was born. She used to be always cheerful and serviable, but not on that particular day. The conversation went like this :
"- What's going on ?"
"- I had an awful streak of horrible clients today, it really got me down"
"- Ah... Yes, I know what you're talking about, I used to be a cashier myself at X last year and some clients were just unbearable, I understand your pain."
"- Sure, but I'm not quitting my job in 6 months."
"- ..."
I just read your bio on a poker site. I saw that The Big Lebowski is your favorite movie. As someone a bit younger than you and who had his fair share of dirty jobs as well, I suggest you to rewatch another Cohen brothers classic : Barton Fink. Hell is not Hell when you're only a guest.
My Mac was in the shop once - attempting to install Windows XP killed it. The irony left me weeping for days.
I think that if your sample size grows, you'll find that a lot of people that use Apple really love it and don't know why. Similar to the two people you mentioned. But that's not because Apple HAS nothing good: it's because a lot of the things that they do well are hard for most people to quantify.
For me, the best way of describing it is to talk about what it was like to register my machine once it was turned on. It was a typical registration form. I tabbed over to State and typed in an N, expecting to have to hit it three or four times to get to the right letter. Instead, the drop-down list turned into a text field, and I could just type the second letter normally, no problem.
Small, small detail. If I raved about that during a typical OS dick-waving contest, I'd be laughed at. But it's so typical of what makes the Mac so incomparably good: it is incredibly focused on giving users the best possible experience. Not just in terms of things they can name in ads, though I am a fan of all that stuff, too. But in the small details. The things you notice only long enough to feel slightly irritated. The things reviewers would never mention but still stay there.
I think most Apple users stay with Apple for that precise feeling: the feeling that everything just works. It's something that's hard to contrast, because it's something that no other OS really spends much time on getting right. With every iteration of OS X, though, I see a real leap in terms of how good the operating system's become. Leopard beats Tiger in almost every way. Tiger beat Panther similarly.
And it's easy to rib on Mac, to say that it's too glam and too popular. You can pick on Quicktime and say that it's not as good as VLC, or something similar. Doing that ignores the fact that there are things that Mac does that other things simply do not. Take GarageBand, for instance. I think that of all the things I've messed with, GarageBand blows the most people away on first contact. The built-in keyboard, the really comprehensive set of loops... it's not a godsend, but the fact remains that it's there. That, if I wanted to, I could film myself using iSight, compose a soundtrack using GarageBand, and edit it all together using iMovie and iMovieHD/06, is pretty awesome. It gives you a sense of freedom that you don't get using a clunky Dell laptop and using Windows Movie Maker.
Small things. Partly that means philosophy. In Word 08, when you hover over a button it gets larger, and the button ripples. It's slightly distracting, it's ugly, and it's a waste. Microsoft doesn't get the difference between eye candy and functional aesthetic. In Pages, buttons don't do anything when you hover over them, because it's assumed that you know they're buttons. Again: not something it's easy to rave about. But there's this feeling that you're being respected.
Windows fans get mad at Apple users because they're usually too set with what they've got to change. Gamers insult Apple because it doesn't cater much to gamers, which is a fair criticism, but I've found that Boot Camp solves those problems pretty much perfectly. Linux users? That's a tougher crowd, because they believe in a different philosophy. It's true that learning to use a computer that's basically a glorified prompt results in a faster computer. The problem there lies with the steep learning curve. You can't turn on a computer that's like that and expect to know how to use everything. And when you start to use a shell, things slow down. I don't know how fast Leopard is compared to Ubuntu, but it feels a lot faster. Or, not faster. More precise. Much more polished. And Mac is very hackable. Most people choose not to, but if you DO like tinkering, you can tinker.
You can argue that Mac is overpriced. That's a matter of personal taste, but frankly, I'd pay more than I did to get an operating system that's so enjoyable to use. The more you use the Mac, the better it gets. Another small thing: when you have a file open, and there's the little icon next to the file name on the top of the window, the way you can drag that not only to any open folder but into a chat or a mail message or a file upload, that's nice. It saves me a step. If I wanted, I could go even faster with Quicksilver, but I've never installed it. No reason to.
You can argue that people who use the Mac are pretentious. That one gets thrown out a lot even on Hacker News, sadly. Yeah, and people who use Windows are tasteless, and people who use Linux have no design aesthetic. Either way, getting an OS because of stereotypes just doesn't cut it. You get an OS because it's good, period. (Although I DO like the I'm a Mac commercials, it's because I love John Hodgman.)
And I think I must be the sort of person who perfectly fits into the Mac cliche. I'm a college student, and I got my Mac specifically for college. I get called a hipster on occasion, because apparently, liking typography-related t-shirts and The Big Lebowski and disliking Tropic Thunder makes you hip. Most damningly, I'm a writer, and I dabble in poetry. So I fall under the "artsy" umbrella. Never mind that I actually attempt to make money with my writing, or that I dislike most stuff I read (Beckett excluded). Never mind that I'm only an artist in the sense that I try to make art. I've been told that obviously I only got a MacBook is because I want to seem hip and with it.
(Apology at this point, partly because of the length, and partly because this is aimed not only at the OP but at a bunch of much more brutish Mac critics. I don't assume that you're like this bockris, but I feel like I want to complete the thought before you stop. My apologies.)
Anyway: no. I got it because I tested out all the operating systems before I got this one, and because this one was the best. A lot of people who try all 3 settle for the Mac. If you don't, that's okay, but at the same time it means you're going to put up with a lot of crap Apple users don't have to, and some of us get bitchy and remind you about it because some of us are as bad as the stereotype proclaims. I'll also throw in that the Apple Store is designed to really LET you try out the operating system if you're uncertain: it's all in keeping with Apple's policy of being easy for the customer. Apple's consistent.
As a writer, there are a slew of tools designed specifically to make writing as easy as possible. I don't use any of them: I stick to TextEdit and Pages. I like writing, not planning out writing. When I have a bigger plan, I use actual paper. Even for me, though, using the default text editor, Apple's got an edge for me. Command-Control-D over any word on any application opens up the dictionary for that word in-line. If I right click and actually look it up by OPENING the application, I get instant Wikipedia, which is nice for quick research. There's also the system-wide spell-check, for when I like getting anal in iChat. (Good lord, that sounds wrong.) Or how, when I'm writing, I can hit escape partway through a word and get a list of every word that might match. Little conveniences that mean when I'm in the mood to write, I can actually WRITE.
And Apple goes halfway for me: the little gray button that nobody seems to talk about on the upper right, the one that removes the bulk space from most programs, that's wonderful for me. It gets rid of distractions. Or the drawer aesthetic for windows: I don't know if Windows has a variant on this, but the thing that opens up on any side of a window to hold information. I love that. It's such a great distinguisher. Things go both ways, too: on TextEdit, which is the Mac version of Notepad, I can format my fonts, lay out my page, and even edit images, because those are all built in to the core of the system. I prefer Pages because it's more designed for that stuff, but if I NEED it, it's there for me.
As a coder, I get a MUCH bigger assist from software, because of Coda. I'm not a very learned coder. I have a head filled with big ideas, but I don't know how to implement them. A program like Coda goes above and beyond in helping me get my ideas down. When I use it, I get the feeling I did when I first started writing: the thrill of having a blank slate and the tools I need to create something. And I've used Dreamweaver before, I've tested out other ones. They all feel wrong to me. Too bulky, too ugly. Every time I run into a problem coding, Coda seems to be right there to help me over that obstacle. And that's third-party software, too. I've found that most third-party solutions I've found on the Mac are excellent. My newsreader, my e-book creator, my DVD ripper. My Facebook sync tools with iPhoto and Address Book. Developers share the same mind for aesthetic that I do: that feeling of complete ease. And I've found that when I happen across a web site with the same feel, be it blog or 2.0 service, the ones that I gravitate towards are the ones that were made by Mac users. (I originally got hooked on a Mac when I found DaringFireball, started reading it for the quality of the writing and for the layout of the site, and... you know.)
So that's my humble little piece of advice. I don't know you, so feel free not to add me to your list of people recommending things. But my area of expertise per se deals with explaining things that other people aren't so good at explaining, and hopefully I've explained what it is about the Mac that draws people to it. It's the little things. It's things that make you feel good. And hey, I'll be honest, it's because every time Steve Jobs says "Wow," he sounds like a little kid playing with a golly-gee new toy, and because maybe that's not such a bad thing after all.