4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY REVIEW:
Universal;
Comedy;
$19.98 UHD BD, $59.98 UHD BD Gift Set;
Rated ‘R’ for pervasive strong language, drug content, sexuality and brief violence.
Stars Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, Sam Elliott, Peter Stormare, Tara Reid.
Throw on a bathrobe, grab some White Russians and get ready to immerse yourself in the off-kilter farce that is The Big Lebowski with a fun gift set containing the film in both glorious 1080p Blu-ray and now 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.
Wait, you think Lebowski is too much of an insubstantial follow-up for the Coen Brothers following the accolades heaped upon them in 1996 for Fargo? Yeah, well, that’s just like, your opinion man.
What we have here, man, is a Coen classic out of ’98 loosely based on Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Pretty far out, right?
Although this is more like an accidental detective story, with The Dude (Jeff Bridges) drawn into a fake kidnapping scheme and doing everything he can to get back to his normal routine blazing up, hitting the bowling alley and immersing himself in the serenity of the lanes. It doesn’t help that his blowhard bestie Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) is hell bent on attacking everything in sight.
So The Dude stumbles through the plot (and life) like a Christ-figure for the modern slacker, sinning for the rest of us and not really giving a crap. Except he cares about his rug, which really ties the room together. And maybe his car, which is pretty thoroughly trashed during the movie.
Is there a deeper meaning to all this? Have the Coens crafted a parable for our two-party system, drawing a line between Walter’s aggressive style and The Dude’s laid-back diplomacy, with their meek pal Donny (Steve Buscemi) serving as the everyman caught in the middle? Is it just a bowling-is-life metaphor, a game of strikes and gutters, ups and downs?
Does it matter?
Maybe there isn’t much of a point beyond embracing the film’s infectious let-it-ride attitude, eminently quotable dialogue, soulful soundtrack and a population of characters who exist in their own little universe all kind of colliding with each other in one big stream-of-consciousness hotbox for the audience to inhale.
As for the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, the gift set comes in a miniature bowling-ball bag with a nifty miniature bowling-ball pencil holder (the holes in the ball being for the pencils, obviously). Also cool is a glasses polishing cloth styled after The Dude’s rug. The disc case itself comes in a knitted “cozy” based on The Dude’s iconic sweater, which is a nice touch if a bit impractical (the disc case is the same as the standalone 4K Blu-ray combo pack).
The 4K disc contains no bonus materials, which are all on the regular Blu-ray included with the combo pack. That standard Blu-ray is a repackaging of the same disc that was first released in 2011, which itself was a high-def version of the old 10th anniversary DVD. As such, it carries over most of the old extras, such as the tongue-in-cheek intro from a fake film preservationist, a few making-of retrospectives, a video about Jeff Bridges’ on-set photography, and a profile of the annual Lebowski Fest confab.
The Blu-ray also includes an in-movie scorecard for the various Dudeisms and curse words spouted throughout the film; pop-up information for the music as it plays during the movie; and a tame picture-in-picture mode with footage that looks like it was taken from the 10th anniversary interviews. While it would be cool for all these to play out at the same time, they’re on separate tracks so you can only pick one at a time.
You can also play the film with a trivia mode and play against a friend in shouting out the next line of dialogue during certain scenes, though the choice points don’t seem to come up as often as you’d expect.
Not that it matters, since this isn’t really a movie that ever embraced expectations, right? And that, at its core, is what makes The Big Lebowski so special. The Dude abides in any format.
The Coen brothers crime-comedy, starring Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart, True Grit), John Goodman (10 Cloverfield Lane, Argo), Julianne Moore (The Hours, Still Alice), Steve Buscemi (Fargo, Ghost World), Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master, Capote) and John Turturro (Barton Fink, Fading Gigolo), will be released in a set that includes a collectible bag, bowling ball pencil holder, polishing cloth and sweater packaging.
Bonus features include “The Dude’s Life,” in which Bridges, Goodman, Moore, Buscemi and Turturro take a look back at their performances and how their delivery of the Coen brothers’ dialog became classic movie lines; “The Dude Abides: The Big Lebowski Ten Years Later,” a conversation with the cast about the film’s decade-long reign as a cult classic; “Making of The Big Lebowski”; “The Lebowski Fest: An Achiever’s Story,” an in-depth look at the annual Lebowski Fest, a celebration of The Dude and his world, attended by thousands each year; “Flying Carpets and Bowling Pin Dreams: The Dream Sequences of The Dude,” a look at some of the Dude’s trippiest fantasies so fans can learn for the first time how these scenes were created; an interactive map of the locations of The Big Lebowski, then and now; “Jeff Bridges Photo Book,” in which Bridges presents a portfolio of shots taken on the set of The Big Lebowski; and a photo gallery.