Despite Tara Reid’s insistence otherwise, it doesn’t look like we will ever see a Big Lebowski sequel (which is a good thing.) But that doesn’t mean that I don’t secretly yearn for just a little more Lebowski in my life. Just a smattering, just a nibble, just a taste of something new from his dudeness, is something that my heart has been aching for in silence. Well, it looks like this short film/super-long advertisement from Kahlúa has gotten as close as possible without actually owing the Coen brothers any money. It features Jeff Bridges playing a character probably closer to himself than “the dude,” drinking a White Russian, in a bar, and is aptly-titled The White Russian. This was brought to my attention by the good folks over at CinemaBlend who seemed to love it:
The new micro-movie, titled The White Russian, was commissioned by the folks at Kahlúa and features Bridges recounting a tale wherein a younger version of himself finds a buried briefcase in the Mexican desert. Soon, he’s run afoul of some local gangsters, who are hot on his tail, only to be saved by a Russian cosmonaut who falls from the sky at the most opportune of moments. Bridges, looking very Dude, turns up in the second half – and if you love The Big Lebowski even half as much as I do, that moment’s going to give you all kinds of amazing feelings to sort through.
Directed by Ivan Zacharias, The White Russian could have easily been produced by a Jackie Treehorn looking to break free from the shackles of making movies likeLogjammin’, but it’s instead just a clever advertisement to get you to buy Kahlúa’s tasty liqueur. It’s all just an extended metaphor for mixing things, but the inclusion of Jeff Bridges makes it so much cooler than it would have been otherwise.
While I also found the short to be pretty entertaining, there is a part of me that worries about the fact that one day all of our favorite movie characters will be in sh*tty commercials for bullsh*t products. I don’t want to sound like an angsty middle-schooler or anything (although, I am currently wearing a tee-shirt that states “skateboarding is not a crime”), but I hate seeing things like Agent Smith doing a commercial for GE, or Snoopy being the spokestoon for MetLife, or the Marx Brothers doing a commercial shampoo (ok, I had to dig for that one). It just makes my heart grow a little bit colder and my childhood seem more and more like a distant memory when I see my favorite movie characters stripped of context and thrown haphazardly into an ad where they are clearly out of their element (that was quite intentional). But, at least in this case, a 4-minute short does have at least a little bit more artistic integrity since it can’t ever air in full on TV. And also, that’s not actually “the dude” which means that we can all breath a sigh of relief as the Coen brothers have not sold out… yet.
