In today's episode of Critique-o-polis, Jay and Louisa discuss the 1987 cult classic Raising Arizona. Nicolas Cage plays a conflicted HI McDonnaugh torn between his primal criminal nature and the desire to be a loving, stable husband to Holly Hunter's Ed(wina), is police booking photographer, having met during HI's repeated bouts of recidivism within the Arizona penal system.
This frenetic romp through Arizona during the Reagan era is a story of the struggle of a poor couple desperately trying to begin a family while in the shadow of their wealthy peers who appear to have "more than they can handle." HI and Ed in all their wisdom, conceive a plan to liberate a wealthy couple's child from a group of quintuplets in an effort to circumvent the recent news that they are infertile. Lunacy and poetic justice (and verbiage) bring this tale to life with a wild cast of characters including John Goodman and William Forsythe and Randall "Tex" Cobb.
This sophomore endeavor by Joel and Ethan Coen is the follow up to their first film, "Blood Simple." Originally panned by Roger Ebert for having what he described as a "forced and mannered style" which he found to be an uneasy mixture of realism and over the top cartoonish-ness which left him "baffled." Well, the joke was on old Roger because this went onto become a commercial success and a cult classic. Roger should have taken a page out of Richard Corliss' book (of TIME magazine fame), who said, the film was "exuberantly original."
