Fuck it, let’s go bowling

I just watched “The Big Lebowski” again. I was going to watch it last night, but I discovered my VCR was dead. My mom thinks it was killed by some sort of power surge as it has hardly been used. It wasn’t one of our recent storms, but rather died while I was in China. No one had noticed until now.

I’m a big fan of the Cohen Brothers and I was shocked that none of my family but my sister had seen “The Big Lebowski”, a few of them had seen “Fargo” my sister even owns “Intolerable Cruelty” which surprised me. I tried to drum up interest to watch it, but ended up watching it alone. My sister and my uncle were watching it with me, but my uncle had to leave. It has a great cast, including Sam Elliot as the Stranger. My grandma watched a bit of it, she didn’t like all the profanity. And here I thought since there was no sex and violence.

Well very little sex and violence compared to most films. It does have a lot of profanity. I don’t use much myself, my mom or my sister might swear more than me, that is how little I swear. I’ve quoted this film before, and it is quotations I’ve used in my blog and elsewhere that have lead to some of my odder keyword referrals.

This film, like most Cohen Brothers films has a great soundtrack. This one has a couple John Fogerty tunes, Santana, Elvis, Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, and Townes Van Zandt. I missed that the first time I saw the film, but I wasn’t as aware of Townes back in 1998 when this film came out. The very last song before the credits is Townes singing “Dead Flowers” by the Rolling Stones. This is a great song which I learned from Steve Earle who covered it on his live album, “Shut up and die like an aviator”.

I wish I could be more like the Dude. I wish I could just say “Fuck it, let’s go bowling“. But I can’t, I care too much, and I think too much.

Now I may watch “Crumb”, Terry Zwigoff‘s documentry. I saw it when it first came out, probably in the Cinecenta at UVIC. It was definitely during my undergrad days, the film came out in 1995. I was so impressed with this film I rented it for my friends Thor and Owen and I remember watching it in Owen’s parent’s basement. I’ve been thinking a lot about this film and I can’t help feeling I’m turning into Robert Crumb’s older brother.

I got the “Crumb” DVD for Christmas. I got a few DVD’s but a lot of the stuff my sister and mother tried to buy for me is still in Victoria, as they had to order it. Supposedly when they went to HMV the staff member who was helping them was so impressed with the list I’d given them he wanted to meet me. The other two DVD’s I got were sets “Animaniacs Season One” and “American Gothic: The Complete Series”. Both of these were recently released and I think I may have signed online petitions for them a few years back.

Hopefully I can become more like the Dude, or even the guy from “High Fidelity” and less like Robert Crumb’s older brother. I even had to look up one of the Chinese idioms I picked up to make a comment in the Ugly Chinese Canadian blog. David Wong’s blog is gone and one of my characters got corrupted but I used to be a Chinese language student so found the phrase in my notes.

生米煮成熟饭

From the film:

“Is that some kind of Eastern thing?”

“Far from it.”

If you have a favourite quotation or advice you can leave it below. I’m editing old blog posts trying to make them better.

This entry was originaly posted on December 26th, 2006, it was last edited on April 24th, 2024 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Chinese, Cinema, The Big Lebowski.