Product Description

Since its release nearly ten years ago, "The Big Lebowski" has become a cult classic with a worldwide following, having survived the baffled reaction of many mainstream critics. Its fans tend to be fanatical, congregating at 'Lebowski Conventions' in bowling alleys across American and Britain, and even dressing up as characters from the film. Among the funniest films of the last twenty-five years, and one of the high-water marks of 1990s genre recycling and pastiche, "The Big Lebowski" is also littered with playful and subversive references to film history, especially to Raymond Chandler's world of hardboiled detective classics and the world of film noir. "The Big Lebowski" is the rarest kind of film, a comedy whose jokes become funnier with repetition. The same goes for its multitudinous jukebox-like references to other films, many of which open up vistas for intertextual interpretation. Underneath the film's breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed characters, a farcical collection of flakes, losers, and phonies, is a surprisingly humane account of what fools we mortals be. It is one of the oddest buddy films ever made, with extraordinary performances by Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. In this study, "The Big Lebowski" is set into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomised for its witty relationship with the classics which it satirises, and discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or put-on identities that is Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191757 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 123 pages

About the Author
J. M. Tyree is a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. His essays on American literature and culture have appeared in The Nation, The Believer, New England Review, and in Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: Best of McSweeney's Humor Category. Ben Walters is deputy Film Editor at Time Out London. He has published books on Orson Welles and The Office and contributed to several others, written for Sight & Sound and Vertigo magazines and given talks and classes at the National Film Theatre.

Customer Reviews

brilliant!
witty, informative and well-written.
for any fan of the big lebowski (or should i say "fanatic"), this is a must read. i've got to give it up for anyone who could have so much passion for one of the most genius films ever made.

informative if serious
this book was very informative but quite serious, certainly not a laugh-along book. i also reviewed another 'lebowski' book which was hilarious; this book is more like a literary synopsis of the background and undertones in the big lebowski. for more serious fans i suspect...