Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Harmonia (A) on February 19, 2008 at 22:17:11

In Reply to: RE: Fargo was practically a comedy like Raising Arizona posted by Jazz Inmate on February 19, 2008 at 17:10:44

I would've called it "irony", surely a Coen trademark, evident to some degree or other in all their movies. But Fargo is quite serious about the tragedy of its characters...in a Coen sort of way.

Fargo is quite different in tone from the operatic Millers Crossing, which is different again from the suspense of Blood Simple or the theatricality of Barton Fink. Raising Arizona is one of the most forthrightly comic, if you gotta have comic Cohens. Arizona is gleefully over the top, as is The Big Lebowsky, and to a lesser degree, Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

I don't think I'd agree NCFOM is the first serious Coen film. But I do think NCFOM, by taking much of its tone from the source novel,is by far their least self-consious effort, their most straightforward movie. Of course it is also imbued with the Coen's unbsique sensibility. But it does seem to me like a different, more restrained, tauter direction from their previous work.

I probably don't like it as much sa you but I like it better than Tin does ;-)