Word: coen
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...this girl for an Oscar?" But Hunter, 29 and 5 ft. 2 in., is no late entry in the prima donna sweepstakes. She is a hardscrabble sprite from Conyers, Ga., a dues payer from off-Broadway (Beth Henley's The Miss Firecracker Contest) and off-Hollywood (Joel and Ethan Coen's Raising Arizona) whose only eccentricity, says Joel Coen, "is how easy she is to work with." She has built a boutique gallery of daft characters: nymphets and star children who swagger like cowgirls. And now she stars in the most coveted role in the year's smartest entertainment. When...
...laughs in this movie, and there are many, stem from its broad, broad comedic style combined with some of the most irreverent camera work since the Coen brothers' farcical Raising Arizona. DeVito has enough smarts to realize that the unlikely plot machinations of Momma call for unconventional visual tricks and he also has enough imagination to pull them off. The camera swoops and pans at dramatic moments and will pull right up to an actor's face for a gag line. When Donner collapses on the floor after a particularly exhausting encounter with Momma, the camera spirals slowly upwards...
...very improbable, stupid stuff, but it is also what physical farce is made of. The Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin used to play these sorts of raucous gags, and these days people like the Coen Brothers (Raising Arizona) are among its most skillful practitioners. Blake Edwards may have lost his touch recently, but this is the man who exposed Mary Poppins' (wife Julie Andrews') breasts in the clever Hollywood expose S.O.B., and it is also the man who exposed everything you ever wanted to know about Bo Derek in 10. In addition, he is the genius behind the Pink Panther...
...REAL delight in the film, though, is what the Coen's don't include: the bits and pieces of plots and suggestions of plots that appear at the fringes of the frame: the strange prisoner who claims to eat sand, the Mad Biker's bronzed baby shoes, and an unexplained tattoo coincidence...
...Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, must have been watching movies since the womb. Their first film, the independently made hit Blood Simple, was a brilliant parody of film noir and the best example of that genre made since the death of James Cain. Raising Arizonais a different sort of film altogether, a hyperkinetic comedy with a budget. But it still betrays a rabid obsession with movies, from its constant toying with technical effects to the incessant Gremlins--style stream of references to others movies. Some are obvious, while others are maddeningly oblique and occasionally the film degenerates into a mass...