“‘The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans’ explores the Dude phenomenon”
LA Times reports on a new documentary about a cult cinematic figure:
Eddie Chung, a former philosophy student who is accustomed to pondering life’s deepest mysteries, is still stumped by something that shapes lives by the thousands: Why has “The Big Lebowski” become the most popular and all-consuming cult film since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”?
“I don’t think,” said Chung, a 38-year-old Southland filmmaker, “that’s an answerable question. It’s like asking, ‘Why did Britney Spears become popular?’ “
But after attending a Big Lebowski event that drew 1,000 fans, Chung had an idea to find out:
The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans,” Chung’s documentary on this cinematic subculture, will play at the Laemmle Sunset 5 tonight through Saturday. This comes in the middle of a two-month tour of Lebowski Fests that included two nights in San Diego earlier this week.
As one of the festival founders says in “The Achievers”: “It’s all of my nerdiest dreams come true.”
For some context, The Big Lebowski, a Coen brothers movie released in 1998, earned an very humble $17M at the box office :
The movie is a tangled tale of mistaken identity between Bridges’ the Dude — who lives for white Russian-fueled bowling sessions with his oddball friends — and a powerful man with whom he shares a name (Jeffrey Lebowski) and little else.
Among those confused by the whole thing was Chung, who remembers seeing the film soon after it came out. “I saw the movie in Boise, Idaho,” he recalls. “And I was the only one in the theater.”
The movie has an honorable 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but why the cult phenomenon status? A film critic offers up, I think, the best rationale:
The subculture’s energy surely comes from the film’s initially marginal status in the Coens’ body of work.
“A cult gives its members license to feel superior to the rest of the universe,” film critic David Edelstein wrote on the Lebowski phenomenon, “and so does a cult movie: it confers hipness on those who grok what the mainstream audience can’t.”
What other cult films do you love? Office Space is up there for me. Repo Man. How about you?
Comment Archive