Ten years later, the Coen brothers would be winning Academy Awards. But in 1998, they made a movie that still shows up at midnight screenings, and has a solid place in the heart of a certain kind of movie fan.

It's loosely based on the idea of dropping a '70s stoner-throwback into a Raymond Chandler novel; let's call it hippie noir. It's also a long overdue ode to bowling.

The accidental private eye is Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), known simply as "the Dude," who gets dragged into the story when two thugs break into his house and, in a key plot point, one pees on his rug. It's all a case of mistaken identity; they're looking for another Jeff Lebowski, a millionaire whose wife owes somebody a lot of money.

Next day at the alley, the Dude is rolling with his bowling buddies Donny (Steve Buscemi) and Walter (John Goodman). Goodman turns in an amazing performance as a Vietnam vet (and don't you forget it) turned security professional, the kind of guy who pulls a gun over a foot fault. I mean, it was a league game.

When the Dude decides to ask Lebowski to pay for the rug ("It really tied the room together"), he ends up entangled in a complicated web when Lebowski's nymphomaniac trophy wife Bunny (played by a pre-gross Tara Reid) is kidnapped. Like a Chandler novel, the plot is a dizzying mess. The Dude bounces between interested parties, until the story of who exactly stole what and why is kind of lost in the fuss.

There's Lebowski, who hires the Dude to deliver the ransom money; there's his daughter Maude, who says that Bunny was a porn star and that Lebowski's actually broke; there's a trio of German nihilists, one of them Bunny's costar in Logjammin' (who is also in an industrial band called Autobahn); there's porn king Jackie Treehorn; there's the high-school kid who may have stolen the Dude's car. And there's a severed toe. All the while, the Dude and Walter are gearing up for the bowling league championships.

There's a whole host of great parts, a lot of them from the Coens' usual suspects. John Turturro is hilarious as Jesus Quintana, a hair-netted bowler gunning for the Dude, and Steve Buscemi is the clueless Donny (a small part, but he does stretch his record of getting whacked in a Coen brothers' movie to five). Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lebowski's greasy assistant, and Julianne Moore is Maude, the naked feminist artist. There's also some amazing cinematography, from the loving shots of bowling balls rolling down the lanes to a spectacularly bizarre dream sequence (think a Busby Berkeley dance number about bowling).

In the end, nothing much happened; one German nihilist lost a toe, another an ear, and a good guy died of a heart attack. Despite all the noir settings and elaborate plot, there's no murder, no extortion, no kidnapping. All the different schemes were fakes, with the exception of Lebowski's embezzlement of a million dollars. And he got away with it.

It's purposely aimless, purposely plotless, like the Dude's life, just floating along from one thing to the next, with no big resolution, no grand finale.

At the end, a cowboy named the Stranger (Sam Elliott), who's the narrator throughout, shows up at the alley and asks the Dude how he feels about it all. His Zen answer, "The Dude abides," has become the motto of the movie. We close on the Stranger saying, "I don't know about you, but I take comfort in that. It's good knowing he's out there, the Dude, takin' 'er easy for all us sinners."

They call The Big Lebowski a cult movie, and it has the cult to back it up. Since 2002, Lebowski Fest has celebrated the movie with bands, costume contests, and, of course, unlimited bowling. This year you can hit Lebowski Fest in San Francisco on September 5 and 6 and meet Jeff Dowd -- the real-life inspiration for the Dude -- and in New York City on November 15 and 16.

If you like anything the Coen brothers have done, see this tomorrow. Their dramas may be dark, but their comedies are even darker. And it really is comforting knowing that somewhere out there, someone's making twisted movies about bowling, porn stars, and severed toes. The Coen brothers abide.

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