Movies

The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans Losers

by Nick
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First off, let me say I love The Big Lebowski.  I have attended local Lebowski events and had a blast at them.  It’s one of those movies that you watch the first time and you’re just confused.  You get some of the obvious jokes, but you’re mostly left going wtf was that?  Pretty soon you’ll end up watching it again, and then you really start catching the little things.  All of the tiny details in the dialog and in the background and you find yourself cracking up through out the whole thing.  It’s easily one of my favorite movies.

For this reason I knew I had to rent The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans when I heard about it.

First I’ll get in to ways that it was good:  It burnt an hour and 10 minutes up of my borring night.

Next let’s get to ways that it was lame:  There is no menu system.  You put the disc in and the movie starts playing.  Seriously, I can make better DVD’s on my computer with free software.  The movie was also not widescreen, parts of it are letter-boxed, parts of it are full screen (4:3).  It’s like they couldn’t pick a format.  Not a good start already.
They thoroughly interviewed the guy who played Saddam and the guy who played the Corvette owner.  The check out girl (on screen for 4 seconds), and her twin sister are in there too.  Oh yeah, and Liam (not a single speaking part).  Wow, great, you got people that were on screen for a combined total of less then a minute.  REALLY?  You couldn’t get any of the actual actors in the movie that had real parts??  Well, they DID talk to Jeff Bridges… what looked like outside a night club at 3am for 30 seconds.  What was weird though was Jeff Bridges was at a Lebowski event, and they have footge of him there.  But they couldn’t sit him down for a real interview?  Pretty crappy.The rest of the people they talked to were some borring shmucks who had nothing insightful or really original to say AT ALL.  Seriously, some of their descriptions for people they interviewed: “Internet Enthusiast”, “Forum Member”, “Original Forum Member”, “Bewildered observer”, “Costume Enthusiast”.  Pretty lame.  No.  REALLY lame.
I had something else written here about the people they interviewed from the forums and stuff, but I decided it was too mean, even for me.  So I’ll leave this part with this:  They should have found different people to interview.
At the end they even have a part of one of the guy’s they interviewed (The inspiration for Walter in the movie) making fun of the interviewers being completely unorganized and not knowing what to say.  Good job, you put your own failing as a documentary maker in your documentary.

Maybe I am missing the point here?  The Big Lebowski is a movie about losers.  Maybe the documentary was supposed to be done by losers and be about losers?  If that was the point, then I guess I missed it.  Or did I, since I’m mentioning it now?  If that was the point, I wouldn’t have Netflix’ed this had I known so.  Honestly I should’ve paid more attention to the mediocre reviews it got on Netflix.  They were pretty right.  It’s a shitty documentary.

Needless to say I was hoping for a lot more from this film, like some behind the scenes stuff about the movie and it’s story.  Actually there was a nice bit about the stolen car story, where it originated and stuff, so that was nice I suppose, but it’s about the only behind-the-scene story they go in to.  I was hoping for a lot more, not just a bunch of randomly thrown together interviews from “forum members” who no one cares about or wants to really watch.

If you haven’ seen this yet, don’t waste your time unless you are that bored.  Sorry fellow Lebowski fans, it’s just not good.

Fucking amateurs.