The Big Lebowski.

The 2011 draft is safely in my rearview mirror; you can read my team-by-team recaps for day two, separated into the American League and the National League. I also wrote a recap of day one on Monday covering ten teams who did well or made me scratch my head.

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I finally rectified a major hole in my movie-viewing history by seeing The Big Lebowski. (It’s also the first movie I’ve watched on the new iPad, and, well, f-yeah-movies-on-the-iPad and all that.) So how exactly do you write about a movie that 90% of your audience – conservatively speaking – has already seen, many of them more than once? I’m guessing I’ll say nothing that hasn’t been written before about the film, so please forgive any unoriginal thoughts that slip in here.

There’s no real reason that I never watched the film; I liked Fargo despite its brutality, and might be one of the few people on earth who liked The Hudsucker Proxy (too saccharine for Coen brothers fans?). I like quirky comedies and dark comedies and films with great characters. I just never got around to this one when I was watching movies more regularly in the early 2000s, then my daughter was born and I ended up in a job that often has me watching baseball games at night rather than films or TV, and now I look up and realize many of my readers/followers have been speaking a dialect I didn’t understand. At least I finally get the title of Matthew Leach’s blog (which, by the way, got the biggest laugh out of me of any line in the film).

My favorite aspect of The Big Lebowski was its connection to the hard-boiled detective stories I love, even though The Dude isn’t actually a detective by trade. He’s intricately involved in the crime, which itself involves at least one con (I don’t want to ruin it for the four of you who haven’t seen the film), and ends up threatened by multiple elements, a standard of Philip Marlowe novels. The motives of everyone else involved are generally unclear. There’s a lot of drinking, although the Dude’s drink of choice seemed a little more soft- than hard-boiled, and a lot of petty violence like whacks on the head. He spends a good chunk of the story suspecting the wrong people. The familiar story arc made the movie much more enjoyable for me and I could concentrate on the witty dialogue*, from “obviously, you’re not a golfer” to “he fixes the cable” to “thank you, Donny” to “I’m just gonna go find a cash machine.” And John Turturro … well, now this makes a little more sense, too**.

* Did anyone else think Tara Reid’s one significant line was delivered a little too, um, naturally?

** I was convinced that Turturro’s character would somehow figure more prominently in the main plot. The fact that he is pure comic relief turned out to be even better.

About the only criticism I could offer is that there was no question how the scene with the new red car was going to end. Maybe that’s the point – you’re supposed to cringe and laugh simultaneously as you watch the metaphorical trains collide – but for a movie with so much obvious attention to detail, like The Dude’s obsession with making sure the half-and-half is fresh, the car seemed a little like a cheap laugh. It’s not like we didn’t already know Walter had a temper to match his exceptionally bad judgment.

That’s sort of like saying that Troy Tulowitzki should steal more bases, though. Julianne Moore was phenomenal. The nihilists (and the nod to Kraftwerk) were hilarious in their mannerisms and their incompetence, and I loved the cameos by Flea and Aimee Mann. (Pretty good German accent from her, by the way.) I can see why it’s such a cult hit and hang my head in shame for not watching it sooner. Anyway, tell me what else I missed about this film’s greatness while I figure out what to watch on my next flight.