204) Raising Arizona (1987)
When a childless couple of an ex-con and an ex-cop decide to help themselves to one of another family’s quintuplets, their lives get more complicated than they anticipated.
6/10 – Never even heard of this film before until someone mentioned it to me. It was on Netflix and looked like something light hearted, with Nicholas Cage and by the Coen Brothers, so naturally I was intrigued. Reading up on it afterwards, it’s been widely regarded as one of the funniest films of recent times, receiving full marks from the likes of Empire and many well respected film critics. I really don’t think it was that good. The word ‘hilarious’ gets banded about so much (see Louis CK‘s take on it), but this film really wasn’t as hilarious as people made it out to be.
Sure, it was off-beat and wacky, there were some slapstick moments, but I just didn’t connect with it as much as I thought I would. Give it points for originality, the general weird tone for the film, the individual performances (In particular Nicholas Cage) and for the standard Coen brothers style which at the time was something quite new and refreshing, but overall it dropped well short of being hilarious…
