When We Were Young - An 80s And 90s Pop Culture Podcast

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998) A rug that really tied the room together until it got peed on. A hippie burnout who kept burning. A Vietnam vet who drags everyone else into his world of pain. Add to this a case of mistaken identity, the kidnapping of a trophy wife (in the parlance of our times), and an erotic artist seeking a good and thorough man and you have just *a few* of the characters and plot elements of the woolly and disoriented world of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, the cult favorite 1998 film by the legendary writer-director team of Joel and Ethan Coen. The Big Lebowski was on every single level the intentional opposite of its Oscar-winning, box office-hit predecessor FARGO (1996), and audiences and critics at the time (like some of our hosts) didn't abide this strangely hypnotic film. The Coens' vision of Los Angeles is distinctly un-Hollywood, and it's filled with anachronistic characters seemingly unstuck in time from the Wild West, the Summer of Love, and the Vietnam War all thrown into the plot of a 1950's