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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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My favorite film: The Big Lebowski (1998)






Probably it's not the best film by the Coen brothers (Fargo in my opinion is the best one--"Well, that's just like, your opinion man" Dude would say) , but I do not know how many times I have seen this film with absolutely unbelievable list of characters ,regardless each and every time makes me laugh to the tears – I've never watched anything that I love as much as The Big Lebowski.

Jeff Bridges is The Dude, although his real name is Lebowski, which also happens to be the name of a local millionaire, whose wife gets kidnapped, which results in the Dude being indicted into a bluff which may or may not involve German nihilists. The surrounding cast put in fantastic performances, such is the Coen brothers' ability to condense the essence of an actor's unique qualities into a role they were seemingly born to play. Maude Lebowski is a glacial, maniacal artist superbly played by Julianne Moore.







Of all the Coen brothers performances John Goodman has given us, his turn as the frustrated and frustrating Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran who carries his ex-wife's Pomeranian around while telling Donny Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi) to shut it, is arguably his best. The backdrop to this is a tense local bowling championship in which The Dude is being threatened by a paedophile called Jesus (John Turturro).

The Big Lebowski is stone cold hilarious. The aggressive Tuturro as Jesus, all in purple and promising to "Well, that's just like, your opinion", "I need my fu**** "Johnson" .... until the ending/ashes scene.

"The Big Lebowski" is about an attitude, not a story. It's easy to miss that, because the story is so urgently pursued. It involves kidnapping, ransom money, a porno king, a reclusive millionaire, a runaway girl, the Malibu police, a woman who paints while nude and strapped to an overhead harness, and the last act of the disagreement between Vietnam veterans and Flower Power. It has more scenes about bowling than anything else.

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Iconic Characters

The Coen brothers populated the film with some of the most memorable characters in cinema history:

  • Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges): The ultimate pacifist, slacker, and accidental detective. Guided by a strict code of doing as little as possible, his wardrobe consists primarily of bathrobes, jelly sandals, and oversized t-shirts.

  • Walter Sobchak (John Goodman): The Dude's best friend and bowling teammate. Walter is a volatile, gun-toting, Polish-Catholic convert to Judaism who is deeply traumatized by—and obsessed with—the Vietnam War. He acts as the aggressive foil to the Dude’s passivity, frequently escalating minor misunderstandings into life-threatening situations.

  • Theodore Donald "Donny" Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi): The third member of the bowling team. Donny is sweet, naive, and perpetually out of the loop. He is constantly told to "shut the f*** up" by Walter, serving as the comic punching bag of the trio.

  • Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore): The Big Lebowski’s daughter. She is an avant-garde feminist artist who speaks in a clipped, Mid-Atlantic accent and uses the Dude in her own schemes to preserve her family's trust fund.

  • Jeffrey "The Big" Lebowski (David Huddleston): A pompous, wheelchair-bound millionaire who despises slackers like the Dude, despite his own wealth being largely illusory.

  • Jesus Quintana (John Turturro): An eccentric, purple-clad, trash-talking rival bowler with a highly stylized approach to the game.








Cultural Legacy and "Dudeism"

The Big Lebowski is arguably the definitive cult film of the 1990s. Its legacy is sustained by:

  • Incredible Dialogue: The screenplay is highly quotable, with lines like "That rug really tied the room together," "The Dude abides," and "You're out of your element, Donny!" integrated deeply into pop-culture lexicon.

  • Dudeism: Founded in 2005, the Church of the Latter-Day Dude is an official organization with over 450,000 ordained "Dudeist Priests" worldwide. It advocates for a lifestyle inspired by the Dude—fostering peace of mind, taking things easy, and resisting the pressures of modern consumerism.

  • Lebowski Fest: An annual festival celebrating the film, featuring bowling, costume contests, and massive amounts of White Russians.




































































Legacy

Since its original release, The Big Lebowski has become a cult classic. Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002. He first realized that the film had acult following when he attended a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles and witnessed people quoting dialogue from the film to each other. Soon after the article appeared, the programmer for a local midnight film series in Santa Cruz decided to screen The Big Lebowski, and on the first weekend they had to turn away several hundred people. The theater held the film over for six weeks, which had never happened before.
An annual festival, the Lebowski Fest, began in Louisville, Kentucky, United States in 2002 with 150 fans showing up, and has since expanded to several other cities. The Festival's main event each year is a night of unlimited bowling with various contests including costume, trivia, hardest- and farthest-traveled contests. Held over a weekend, events typically include a pre-fest party with bands the night before the bowling event as well as a day-long outdoor party with bands, vendor booths and games. Various celebrities from the film have even attended some of the events, including Jeff Bridges who attended the Los Angeles event. The British equivalent, inspired by Lebowski Fest, is known as The Dude Abides and is held in London.

Dudeism, an online religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of the movie's main character was founded in 2005. Also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude, the organization has ordained over 130,000 "Dudeist Priests" all over the world via its website.










DVD OF THE WEEK: “THE BIG LEBOWSKI”

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And I adore the Dude. Man, the Dude, that’s me! You can even call me El Duderino.” I’m a great admirer of Timberlake as an actor; the underlying import of an identification with Jeff Bridges’s accidental hero—or, rather, a hero before his time—and its connection with the new film are the subject of this clip.



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