Word: minnesotan
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...battle could be the last hurrah for the spit-and-polish Araskog, 65, a lanky 6-ft. 2-in. Minnesotan of Swedish stock who still towers over the company he has led since 1979. During that time, he has sought to transform himself from a poster boy for overpaid executives to a self-styled champion of shareholder rights. Yet Araskog, who served the National Security Agency as an interrogator of Soviet defectors in the '50s, can't seem to help treating everyone from Hilton CEO Stephen Bollenbach to ITT shareholders as if they might really be agents of a subversive...
...worried that Paradise Road, a wrenching tale of a women's prisoner of war camp, might cross it. But McDormand's character is so nonsappy she's almost surly. "It was really gratifying to me that after 15 years of work they thought, 'If she can do a Minnesotan police chief, she can do a German Jew,'" says McDormand of the difference between this role and her Oscar-nominated performance in Fargo. Right now life is nothing like a prison camp. "I'm picking out shoes and dresses for all these award things," she says. "Still, it's better than...
...YEARS BACK, HOWARD MOHR of A Prairie Home Companion wrote a book called How to Talk Minnesotan. Was it funny? Hey, you betcha. So are the twistings of that frosty, flabbergastingly flat accent as heard on the Minnesota-based Mystery Science Theater 3000. Two other gifted natives, the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, have apparently never got over the giggle value of their regional dialect. Fargo, their derisive new true-crime comedy, could be subtitled How to Laugh at People Who Talk Minnesotan...
...this a Mystery Violence Theater. After some superb mannerist films, the Coens are back in the deadpan realist territory of Blood Simple, but without the cinematic elan. Fargo is all attitude and low aptitude. Its function is to italicize the Coens' giddy contempt toward people who talk and think Minnesotan. Which is, y'know, kind of a bad deal...
MOVIES . . . FARGO: After some superb mannerist films, filmakers Joel and Ethan Coen have returned to deadpan realist territory in their new film their native Minnesota. But the derisive new true-crime comedy should really be subtitled 'How to Laugh at People Who Talk Minnesotan,' says TIME's Richard Corliss. The film -- which has not much at all to do with Fargo, North Dakota -- is about the difficulty real folks have pulling off crimes that always go smoothly in fiction. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) needs a lot of cash, so he hires two thugs (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare...