After years of reading movie critics fawned essays piling ever more platitudes over “The Big Lebowski”, I finally sat down and watched it last night. I’m not quite sure if I was watching the same movie that I had so studiously avoided reading so much about.
I like quiet movies”L’Homme du Train”, for example, is wonderfulbut when the movie just bumbles along from one scene to the next, with a hapless, ineffectual lead falling from one unlikely story path to another, you start to not care any more.
The joke where John Goodman tells Steve Buscemi to shut up was funny the first couple of times. As it repeated itself in every scene they share, it became insufferable.
Even though the run-on put-down gag was garbage, John Goodman pretty much saved the movie for me. His Vietnam obsessed anger-management loudmouth was brilliant. The rest of the cast were wastedparticularly Sam Elliott.