This film starts with an image of a tumbleweed rolling across parched desert dirt as the Sons of the Pioneers sing Tumbling Tumbleweeds. As the weed reaches the top of a hill, we know it’s going to be looking down on Los Angeles and not some Monument Valley mesa, but it doesn’t matter. What we don’t expect is the weed to roll all the way to the sea. Sam Elliot’s laconic cowboy voice fills us in on what we need to know to get started and it’s soon evident that the tumbleweed is actually Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), rolling through life aimlessly and sometimes passing through interesting landscapes.

Suddenly, two thugs break into the Dude’s apartment, jam his head into the toilet repeatedly while asking about "the money". When it’s apparent that they have the wrong Jeffrey Lebowski, one of them pisses on his rug and they leave. Walter encourages the Dude to visit the other Lebowski, a wheel-chair bound millionaire philanthropist with attitude, to get a replacement rug.

From there, the Dude stumbles through situations and meets people including the Big Lebowski’s daughter, Maud who makes one of the great entrances of movie history, a group of German nihilists who used to be a new-wave band called Autobahn, Jackie Treehorn the well known pornographer, played wonderfully by Ben Gazzara and the Stranger (Sam Elliot) who takes an inexplicable liking to the Dude, so much so that he becomes the narrator of the movie.

I’m sure that there are people in the world who don’t enjoy Coen Brothers movies. Someone should start a charity to help in the rehabilitation of these poor souls. This film is funny, quirky, unpredictable and has the best dream sequences you’ll ever see in a motion picture. Jeff Bridges is perfect as the Dude, Julianne Moore’s Maud, who has a faux-British drawl and tells Dude that her art is vaginal is delightful, Goodman’s Walter with his amber tinted sunglasses, hunting vest and utter certainty about every stray thought that enters his head, is a great comic creation.

The Coen Brothers play with the medium of film and have a great love of eccentricity. They know the detective genre perfectly and pull a great stunt by replacing Phillip Marlowe with a hazy, lazy dope-smoker and giving him a lumpy, crazy offsider with poor impulse control.

This is the movie that everyone’s going to be talking about over café latte for the next couple of months. See it.