It's not laugh-out-loud funny, at least not entirely, but it's an interesting case of a very cerebral comedy which is not at all pretentious about it. I thought "good not great" when i first watched it, but liked it enough to get it on DVD and watched it a second time, then a third. There's a lot going on under the hood and you get to see, like other Coen Brothers' works, that it's quite a complex beast.

I was a fan of their work back from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? however (yes, i know Big Lebowski came first, but i've been watching Oh Brother for about a decade and only saw Lebowski last summer), so i like the way they put their more subdued style together.

Only part that really drags is the Gutterballs sequence.

Fight scene at the end is great, though.

It seems only one other person did not enjoy the movie....

...there is no logic to this world.

The dude is awesome.

I enjoy the Big Lebowski very much, and I also see a lot of people who don't like it. Typically the people who don't like it view it the same way you did, just at the surface. If you take no enjoyment from the quirkiness of the characters and just see the movie for the jokes expecting a knee slapper then I can see why people would be unimpressed.

To me it's almost impossible to understand how people can not love this movie. It is virtually perfect in everything it does. People will of course point out the acting which is absolutely fantastic, the rich cast of oddball characters or the deadpan and super dry dark humor. To me though, where the movie really excels is in how the structure of the movie perfectly mimics the story of the dude. Stuff like the constant use of dead ends and lack of payoff makes the story itself seem as bewildered and haphazard as the Dude himself. Some people might see this as 'problems with pacing' or whatever someone said above, but the fact is that the Cohen brothers have put that 'structureless structure' in place on purpose, and it's amazing to be able to keep the movie together while it's basically free flowing. It's a perfect fit to the stumbling of the waaaaaay over his head hero of the movie.

Never watched it.

Jeff Bridges and Coen brothers...it rarely gets better than that.

I am tempted to ask the negative question, what is it that makes you think this movie is as shallow as a summer blockbuster comedy? It's almost incomprehensible to me that anyone who even remotely cares about movies would make that comparison, so an explanation would be grand.

I can relate with your points. First time I saw the movie, I got pretty lost on the story because I was trying to see why people liked this movie. In the end, I was even more confused because they didn't achieve anything and there was no story. But after some thought, I came to the conclusion that the movie wasn't bad. It had more substance than the crappiest movies in existence (Bio-Dome, Freddy Got Fingered, Movie 43). Maybe I need to watch it a second time and not look for things that makes it good... just enjoy it.

What's smart dialogue to you? The big bang theory? Smart dialogue isn't the intelligence of what they're saying, it's how clever the dialogue is. 

Another Rat Race fan? Wild.