Raising Arizona

I Suppose Evan and I have a new tradition now of watching Coen brothers movies on our birthdays seeing as we watched The Big Lebowski for mine and now Raising Arizona for his. Like The Big Lebowski, I had never seen Raising Arizona prior to our viewing. In addition, both films generated a kind of humorous bewilderment for me, and I can't quite figure out if that's a good thing or not. Both movies had some laughs, but as a review I recently read said about the Coens' films, these laughs usually come at the expense of a whole group of people they find intolerable, not just the character they represent, so sometimes it's not very clear whether the jokes are actually all that funny after all or rather just somewhat tongue-in-cheek stabs at these people.

Still, I would have to say I liked Raising Arizona much more than The Big Lebowski, largely due to having a more reasonable plot and more relatable characters (relatively-speaking). I was also a bit surprised that this film didn't have that random twist of unpredictable violence that I've come to expect from the Coen brothers' work, but this was only their second film, so maybe that hadn't quite sunk in yet.

So, overall, having seen six fairly different Coen brothers' films now, I'm not quite sure how I feel about their work: while my favorite is certainly No Country for Old Men, and Burn After Reading was nice, these recently-seen older films leave me a good bit colder, despite some genuine humor and the obviously unique style.