• Once again, Coen-world in-jokes abound. Jon Polito appears briefly as a P.I. trailing the protagonist in a VW Bug (Blood Simple), and commends the latter for “playing one side against the other, in bed with everyone” (Miller’s Crossing). Walter’s constant demand to their other bowling partner (Steve Buscemi) that he “Shut the fuck up, Donnie,” is only secondarily intended for its perceived recipient; primarily, it’s a reference back to Buscemi’s logorrheic character in Fargo. The ransom note sent to the big Lebowski, demanding $1 million (Fargo) for the return of his trophy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), is on stationary from the Hotel Earl (Barton Fink). Moreover, Bunny is really a girl named Fawn Knutson from Moorhead, Minnesota—a sister city lying directly across the Red River from Fargo, North Dakota. If that weren’t enough, Peter Stormare, playing one of the nihilists, finally gets the pancakes he’d been pining for.

• But the movie's most convoluted inside joke doesn’t relate to Coen brothers oeuvre at all. When the Dude first meets Bunny, she asks him to blow on her nail-polished toes, a near-certain reference to the legendary “you know how to whistle, don’t you” double-entendre that a 19-year-old Lauren Bacall had delivered to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. The next film in which the two (now a couple) starred together was Howard Hawks’s adaptation of, yes, The Big Sleep. I refuse to believe that this is a coincidence. (It’s true that Bacall’s character in that film tracks more closely with Maude, the Julianne Moore character in The Big Lebowski, than with Bunny, but still … ) It’s worth noting here that Hawks’s straightforward Chandler adaptation served far less as a model for Lebowski than did Robert Altman’s offbeat 1973 variation on The Long Goodbye. The latter, in which Elliott Gould played a semi-comical, half-hearted Philip Marlowe, lies almost exactly at the midpoint between Chandler and the Coens’ satirical reinvention. (It also offered the second, uncredited, onscreen appearance of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played a nameless hood.)

• One “joke” that was not deliberate is the date of the 69-cent check that the Dude writes out to pay for half and half (a crucial ingredient of his signature White Russians) at the beginning of the movie: September 11, 1991, exactly 10 years before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Rendering the coincidence creepier still is the movie’s Gulf War backdrop and the fact that immediately after writing the check, the Dude glances up at a television in the grocery store on which George H. W. Bush is promising that Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait “will not stand.” Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.

• So here’s where I confess that, as much as I like The Big Lebowski, it doesn’t quite make it into my very top tier of Coen brothers movies. [Ed. note: Wait! Don’t stop reading!] This is primarily because that top tier is really, really hard to get into, given how much I love a handful of Coens movies. But it’s also the case that, hilarious though it is, the movie is a little loose for my taste. Yes, this is true to Chandler, but I always thought he let himself off a bit easy as a writer with his whole narrative dichotomy: There’s no reason one can’t aim to write to write both excellent plots and excellent scenes. Where The Big Lebowski is concerned, almost all the pieces—Jackie Treehorn, Brandt, the nihilists(!)—fit nicely for me in their discursive, Chandlerian way. But there are two exceptions: Julianne Moore’s Maude Lebowski is so arch and mannered that she seems to have wandered in from another film altogether (maybe a David Lynch?), particularly in the scene that concludes with her and a friend played by David Thewlis tittering maniacally. And as much as I love Sam Elliott, his cowboy narrator, The Stranger, doesn’t make a lick of sense, and throws me completely out of the movie. Sure, he’s not really supposed to make sense—as Ethan Coen once said, “Sam would actually ask us, ‘What am I doing in this movie?’ We didn’t know either.” But when it comes to my very favorite Coens movies, it’s a game of inches, and these are enough to keep Lebowski from quite crossing the goal line.