The everybody-loves-Jeff Bridges home base is, of course, The Big Lebowski. For the two of you who haven’t seen it, Bridges’s Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a. the Dude, is a bowler stoner. He has a big heart, no job, and an omnipresent White Russian. He is hapless and well-intentioned, much like Bridges would be without his wife, daughters, sidemen, and manager. “The Coen brothers told me they were writing a script for me,” recalls Bridges. “I thought, ‘That’s cool.’ Then I read the script and I was like, ‘Have you been following me around to parties?’ It’s a lot like a younger version of me.” I vowed to be the first magazine writer not to write about Bridges’s Dude-like qualities. Such a cliché, I thought. And then you meet him and he is, well, the goddamned Dude in all his fuzzy-headed, non sequitur goodness. If anything, Bridges’s cinematic Dude understates things. — from Stephen Rodrick’s Secrets of a Contented Man