What made 1996’s Fargo such a brilliant film was that screenwriting brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen created a film that angered and annoyed some moviegoers and still made many more laugh, cringe and speak in a Minnesota north woods dialect for weeks (yah). To be able to shove their filmmaking hands inside of audiences and pull out fistful after fistful of emotion makes the Coens arguably the best original writing/directing tandem today.

The arguable part of that last statement rests in the evident fact that the Coens make really weird movies. Do Raising Arizona, Blood Simple or Barton Fink ring any bells? But what made the aforementioned movies succeed in their devout weirdness was the Coens’ ability to weave a substantial moral in between all the wacky characters, lip-wriggling humor and Joel’s unique manipulation of the camera.

The duo’s latest effort The Big Lebowski continues the Coens’ abstract attack at filmmaking with another kidnapping ploy gone awry similar to the one in Fargo.

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A semi-narrator known as the Stranger (Sam Elliott) precedes the story with a Southwestern style lowdown of pretty much what we’re in for. He introduces our hero pot-smoking, beer-bellied, bowling fanatic Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), who prefers to be known as the Dude who gets thrown into the ploy when two dim-witted thugs break into his apartment thinking they’re threatening a Pasadena millionaire with the same name.

After roughing up the Dude and crudely soiling his favorite rug, the thugs finally realize the Dude and Lebowski share nothing but the same first and last names.

The Dude’s bowling teammate and militaristically high-strung Vietnam veteran Walter (John Goodman) convinces the Dude to seek retribution for the stained rug. So the Dude makes his first mistake by paying a visit to the rich Lebowski in hope of receiving a new rug or some quick dough for the mistaken identity incident.

The Dude slyly makes off with an expensive, new rug after irritating the elder Lebowski, but shortly finds himself as the ransom delivery man when Lebowski’s young wife gets kidnapped.

With the help of Walter, the Dude manages to botch the money exchange, and everyone from the rich Lebowski to a group of German porn star degenerates want the million dollar ransom the Dude managed to lose shortly after the bumbled delivery.

Lebowski’s estranged, artist daughter Maude (Julianne Moore) couldn’t care about the money, but seeks out the Dude because of the sentimentality of the rug he took. Everyone wants a piece of the Dude, but the Dude just wants a clean rug and to bowl, which he amazingly always finds time to do.

And that makes more laughs for us because some of the funniest scenes revolve around Walter, the Dude and the slow- minded Donny (Steve Buscemi) just talking at the bowling alley.

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Characters make The Big Lebowski, as do the people who play them. Bridges turns the Dude into someone we want to care for even if vodka and coffee liquor, driving around and a lazy, easy life are all the Dude cares about. When one of Lebowski’s larger employees roughs up the Dude with drink in hand all he can say is, Careful! There’s a beverage here. Bridges never lets the Dude get boring to watch, even though he’s in basically every frame of the film.

The Brothers Coen created a surplus of crazy characters, storytellers and dream sequences that kept laugh after laugh coming, making it the funniest of their movies to date.

I’m probably nit-picking, but I wanted to see a little more of the violence this team has the capacity to add with such shrewd craft work. The story also begins to repeat itself when the Dude finds himself in similar situations brought on by different characters.

written by Joel and Ethan Coen

Directed by Joel Coen