Raising Arizona (1987)
Directed by Joel Coen
When a childless couple—an ex-con and an ex-cop—take one of a wealthy family’s quintuplets to raise as their own, their lives grow more complicated than anticipated.
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What critics compared Raising Arizona to
The best part of the film is the series' first foray into New York City, a jaw-dropping sequence in which seemingly every car in midtown Manhattan is hacked and taken over, forming a herd-like line that reminded me of the dogs chasing Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona.
En esta ocasión esa trama es filtrada a través de un sentido del humor que se ha visto en pantalla en las mejores comedias de los hermanos Coen (“Raising Arizona”, “Fargo”, “Oh Brother Where Art Thou?”) Como cineasta Soderbergh es demasiado metódico y obsesivo para dejar que los elementos más ridículos de su película empujen a sus personajes hacia la caricatura.
The characters' Southern drawl recalls some of the Coen brothers' funniest films ( Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou? , etc.), and their criminal cleverness is reminiscent of some of Quentin Tarantino's work.
Soderbergh seems to be aiming for the kind of knockabout kookiness of the Coen Brothers’ best films (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski), but Logan Lucky is closer to the sneering attitude that slips into the worst of their work (Burn After Reading; O Brother, Where Art Thou?).
And the deadpan Driver stands out in the cast, sort of a cracker caricature of Nicolas Cage’s hero in “Raising Arizona.”
The sequence recalls John Goodman, William Forsythe, and Nicolas Cage trashing a trailer in Raising Arizona.
Part of the pacing problem may be the extended finale of mayhem that mixes elements of the Roadrunner cartoons and Russ Myers’ bloody excess, with a touch of Coen Brothers chaos of RAISING ARIZONA.
His performance as Vernon is understated, yet it feels like a character that could potentially appear in a sequel to Raising Arizona.
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It's a bit of mind-boggling mayhem that recalls the Nicolas Cage/Randall "Tex" Cobb mismatch in "Raising Arizona" and the legendary James Gandolfini/Patricia Arquette throwdown in "True Romance."
And you could call Qualley’s Jamie a Coen archetype who goes all the way back to the Holly Hunter character in “Raising Arizona” — the Southern chatterbox, spewing her ironically literate folk wisdom. (“Raising Arizona” was the first of many movies in which the Coens built characters around the joke “Look! This drawling hick is actually smart!”)
While the film has echoes of past Coen Brothers films, especially Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Burn After Reading, it also feels fresh.
Qualley’s performance — the syrup-thick hillbilly accent wrapped around Byzantine dialogue — can’t help but recall “Raising Arizona,” the Coen brothers’ brilliant 1987 film. This, as Jamie might say, ain’t that (though she would use a lot more words to say it).
Stitch the pair together, and you’d probably end up with the kind of farcical melancholy that’s become the Coen trademark, delivered in various doses across the likes of Raising Arizona, A Serious Man, and Burn After Reading.
…it works hard to serve up lashings of black humor, in the tradition of older Coen Brothers movies like Raising Arizona, but you can hear the wheels whirring behind every joke.
A tangy palate-cleanser after the Academy Award-winning “No Country for Old Men,” Ethan and Joel Coen’s “Burn After Reading” is a throwback to such Coen-sian comic gems as “Raising Arizona,” “The Big Lebowski” and “Fargo.”
Funnymen maverick filmmaker brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen ("Raising Arizona"/"Fargo"/"The Big Lebowski") follow their Academy Award-winning No Country For Old Men with this goofy fluff spy comedy that revolves around a missing CIA memoir.
There are elements of several decent Coen Brothers movies in the new Coen Brothers movie "Burn After Reading" (or "Br>>lure Après Lecture" to Coen a phase), what with Frances McDormand's ditzy Linda Litzke (memoirs of pregnant Police Chief Marge Gunderson in "Fargo") and her relationship with her Hardbodies Fitness Center co-worker Chad Feldheimer (reminiscent of that between H.I. and Ed McDunnough in "Raising Arizona") not to mention a few lackluster ones--bureaucratic boardroom bunglings at the Federal level mirror their "'Hudsucker'" shenanigans rubbing corporeal shoulders with George Clooney's ever-present trademark smirk (shades of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "'Cruelty" of the intolerable kind).
She’s as obsessed with redemption through surgery as Holly Hunter was obsessed with redemption through a baby—anybody’s baby—in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona.”
Such types would have fit in easily among the broad caricatures and grotesques that populated such Coens comedies as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski (to say nothing of weaker efforts such as Intolerable Cruelty and their atrocious remake of The Ladykillers ).
The Coens are at their best when they're creative -- when their creativity trumps their self-indulgence: Raising Arizona (1987), Fargo (1996), Barton Fink (1991), No Country for Old Men (2007).
The closest they had come were the modern stories "No Country for Old Men" and "Raising Arizona" because they had settings in the Western United States and "The Big Lebowski" because it had Sam Elliot in a featured role.
“True Grit” isn’t as out-there as “The Big Lebowski,” as goofy as “Raising Arizona,” as bleak as “No Country For Old Men,” or as twisted as “Fargo,” but it crackles, like a good campfire, with colorful Coen flourishes all the same.
Yes, the Coens have engaged in remakes before (“The Ladykillers,” and, arguably, “Miller’s Crossing,” a version of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key”), and they’ve made a number of noirish films that feel like they could have been dressed as westerns without much alteration (including “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”).
Thus, they followed their auspicious debut, the Texas-set neo-noir Blood Simple (1984), with the antic, cartoonish comedy of Raising Arizona (1987), which was then followed by the elegant gangster drama Miller’s Crossing (1990).
If their " Raising Arizona " showed the boys to be inheritors of Tex Avery, the finale of "True Grit" shows them as inheritors of F.W. Murnau as well.
That gamut is growing into a serious catalog with “Burn After Reading,” 2007 best-picture Oscar winner “No Country for Old Men,” “The Ladykillers,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo” and “Raising Arizona” now under their yamakas over the course of two decades.
I like the Coens best when they’re delivering either full-on demented comedy (“Raising Arizona,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Big Lebowski”) or when, as in “No Country for Old Men,” they work hard to establish the humanity of their characters.
For perhaps the first time in a Coen film outside No Country we are asked to authentically empathise with a realistic character in a realistic setting, and yet he and the landscape around him suffer the same lampooning slings and sardonic tone as the characters of Raising Arizona (1987), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1995) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).
The sort of critic who was capable of carrying that dramatically poor misreading intact from Raising Arizona into Fargo and The Big Lebowski and so on is going to have a field day with A Serious Man, which apparently serves as just so much more fuel for that particular fire.
Hart begins on a note similar to the Coen Bros. classic Raising Arizona (1987) with the usurped child, and then becomes a story of women on the periphery, where personal meaning seems defined by motherhood more than anything else.
Remember the rollicking tone of “Raising Arizona” (1987), another kid-kidnapping saga?
The scene in which he presents this living offering to his wife, with the assurance that "it's all worked out," might trigger a viewer's Raising Arizona expectations (or fears).
The movie also is rich with simultaneously playful and serious nods to what I presume to be Anderson cinematic touchstones, including “ A Clockwork Orange ,” “Psycho,” “The Knack (And How To Get It),” and, not as improbably as you might think, “ Raising Arizona .”
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The odd-couple flick “Hot Pursuit” casts Reese Witherspoon in the timeless role of uptight, butch female cop — she’s the love child of Sandra Bullock’s “Miss Congeniality” and Holly Hunter’s Ed in “Raising Arizona.”
The drawl and cop uniform make you think about Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona.
The movies that really inspired this are “True Romance,” “Thelma & Louise,” “New Jack City,” “Raising Arizona,” some “¡Three Amigos!”
Like the baby in Raising Arizona, Keanu the kitten stirs up everyone's emotions without having any of its own.