Lebowski?

[Nick the DSM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13cES7MMd8

This guy?

I'm a learner of Old English as well, been trying at least.

[cryerelizabeth]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13cES7MMd8

This guy?

I'm a learner of Old English as well, been trying at least.

My English Lit class watched that video when we read Beowulf, cool stuff.

and along the lines of The Big Lebowski, I absolutely love that movie because he reminds me of my dad lol.

This a picture I drew comparing the two ;)


THE DUDE ABIDES!!!!

[Kinetikat]

Re: the Beowulf thing...
I heard JRR Tolkien used to begin his course on Anglo-Saxon in exactly this way - possibly without accompanying himself on the harp - but by gathering the students informally and then reciting the thing as it was originally intended to be performed.

Hwaet!

again...

Wow. Not to mention... wow.

Eloquent in the face of awesomeness, that's me!

[Alan H]

Re: the Beowulf thing...
I heard JRR Tolkien used to begin his course on Anglo-Saxon in exactly this way - possibly without accompanying himself on the harp - but by gathering the students informally and then reciting the thing as it was originally intended to be performed.

Hwaet!

again...

Wow. Not to mention... wow.

Eloquent in the face of awesomeness, that's me!

Tolkiens Beowulf translation was kind of considered the defacto "best" one by a fair number of scholars until Seamus Heaney did his.

About 6-7 years ago, Seamus Heaney was in town. I got a ticket for the lecture/show whatever. He answered a few questions and then sat down on the stage and from memory recited about 50 lines from Beowulf.

--->INSTANT transportation to the Dark Ages, in some tiny hamlet, 30 miles through dark forest, on a narrow trail to the next village. The news, such as it was, was indiscernable from legend, and came to you through the words of the occasional travelling bard, who came along with the guy who also bought and sold "things"...metal work, leather, cloth.

These were brave men, because everybody knows that there are monsters in the forest, and they eat people...and while the Christ God may be powerful, we're all just not quite sure that the Frost Giants are not going to show up at the end of a long winter, again.

Amazing men, both of them...Tolkien and Heaney.

[Alan H]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13cES7MMd8

This guy?

I'm a learner of Old English as well, been trying at least.

That guy.... It was pretty incredible.

Many people would be bored out of their skulls. In fact, the girl sitting one seat away from me conked out, fast asleep in the first ten minutes while her boyfriend "hung in there". Me? I was riveted... In this world of action-packed video games and 3-D movies, the power of words and voice is sometimes not valued as much as it was, say, 1,200 years ago.

I happen to be rather fond of words and voices. OK, so color me crazy, I can live with it!

[Alan H]

I am loving the thread-drift in this thread!!

[Nick the DSM]

That guy.... It was pretty incredible.

Many people would be bored out of their skulls. In fact, the girl sitting one seat away from me conked out, fast asleep in the first ten minutes while her boyfriend "hung in there". Me? I was riveted... In this world of action-packed video games and 3-D movies, the power of words and voice is sometimes not valued as much as it was, say, 1,200 years ago.

I happen to be rather fond of words and voices. OK, so color me crazy, I can live with it!

I'm crazy with you then.

Learning to read it has been exciting. It is challenging however coming from a Spanish and Modern English background.

One of the other students' boyfriend has the guy on actual DVD, hopefully we'll be able to watch it sometime.

I wish I had traded places with that guy, I would have been locked in.

[MacLowlife]

OK,so a guy, a dude if you will, is bothered in his daily slackerhood by a couple of pretentious goons ( Thus always to deadbeats, Lebowski) who threaten him with a member of the stoat- weasel family and then, ahem, micturate on his rug- the one that really ties the room together, or at least did.
He does some investigation and learns that another guy, completely unlike himself but also named Lebowski, is married to a very young hot chick named Bunny who has disappeared. She owes somebody money, thus the bladder draining visit to the Dude.

Somewhere in there, the Dude's landlord invites him to a sad but moving modern dance performance.

By the way, the Dude steals a rug from the other Lebowski, to make up for the one he lost.

The Dude is a league bowler, along with some odd guys, including Jimmy Dale Gilmore, a real life pacifist who plays a pacifist bowler named Smokey. You have already heard a little about Walter, the John Goodman character. He has converted to Judaism and as they say, there is no zealot like a convert.
Walter helps the Dude with a ransom drop for the missing Bunny, who may have been kidnapped by Nihilists, including Aimee Mann, famous for being in a band called Till Tuesday in real life. There is some business about a toe.
The Dude's car gets stolen and he discovers the thief's homework ( yes, as in the dog ate mine) in the recovered car. He loses his Creedence Clearwater Revival tape in the theft.

The Dude and Walter go to visit a man in an iron lung and destroy a Chevrolet Corvette more or less because they mistake who owns it. There is a very funny "dubbing" inside joke here: when the movie was bleeped and dubbed ( i.e., bowdlerized) for TV, John Goodman said a line that was completely unrelated to the original obscene line, making the scene particularly funny for those who had seen the original.

The dude visits a pornographer and watches a video that seems to star the missing Bunny and one of the nihilists, appearing as a cable man named Karl Hungus. Eventually, he also visits Maude Lebowski, who wants him (or maybe uses him ) to extend the family line. Maude is played by Julianne Moore at the peak of her powers. There are fantasy-dream sequences.

Smokey, the Jimmy Dale Gilmore character, dies and more hilarity ensues. Several other Cohen Brothers stalwarts appear memorably, including Mr Turturro, (mentioned above) who utters a hilarious but scary line that ends "...click click click." Walter has already explained that Jesus/ Turturro is a sex offender and had to go door to door in his neighborhood telling people.

And then Sam Elliott, sipping a sarsaparilla at the bowling alley snack bar, dressed as a cowboy for no apparent good reason, and wrapping things up, utters his own trademark line about the dude, out there, takin 'er easy for all of us sinners.

And much of this is disordered, but I doubt the proper order would really help.

I am reminded of Act V scene 5 of Shakespeare's Scottish play, for some reason, maybe just to get us back on topic.

[MacLowlife]

I just thought I'd bump this thread. Did someone already mention that the Cohen brothers have remade the Alec Guinness gen THE LADY KILLERS and that they borrowed the name of Oh Brother Where Art Thou from Preston Sturgess but the actual plot from Homer ? The blind guy, not the doughnut eater...