Official Zhuk Rating:
8.9/10 bananas
Finally had a chance to see a movie i have been putting away for over ten years. Glad i never really heard anyone discuss it. Although now after seeing it that is all that i want to do - talk and learn more about it. It is best described as a 'modern Shakespearean play on film'. Hard to even call it 'modern' because it has so many similarities to Shakespeare's dramas. It should be studied in the future as we study William's plays in this age.
The music was put together to an almost perfection in all the scenes and even within few scenes. For example when the two thugs are pulled over by the state trooper and he asks them
what they have in the back seat - we are able to hear it playing right at that moment. This movie's score kept me in suspense at the right times and added such great atmosphere to it all.
Also the visual camera work was a thing of beauty during few far away still shots. It is a filmmaking device that i have never thought nor noticed before i was able to view many films at this years VIFF.
Came across few little details on which a whole essay can be written. First one being at first a very random character by the name of Mike Yaganita. This post below by "Redisca" (in Russian meaning - radish [a root vegetable]) explains it perfectly and give more ideas about the movie:
 by Redisca (Thu Oct 8 2009 21:06:06) |
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The purpose of the whole Mike Yanagita subplot is to show how sociopathic and manipulative people can fool us by appealing to naive sentimentality. Mike tells Marge that he married a girl he loved, but that his wife got leukemia and eventually died after a long and awful ordeal. Americans LOOVE stories like that. The idea of a young person slowly and horribly dying from cancer, while their significant other is suffering at his or her side has an almost pornographic appeal in this society. I mean it's the bread-and-butter of the whole Chicken Soup for the Soul series. It's a Lifetime Television classic, and a perennial subject in glossy magazines. Remember -- almost every Coen bros. film delves into one aspect or another of the American popular mythology and ethos. In Blood Simple, it was the belief that illicit sex inevitably triggers a cascade of violence. In Raising Arizona, it was the obsession with having children as an absolute prerequisite to marital happiness. And in Fargo, it's the sentimentality of wholesomeness. From a purely intellectual point of view, Mike's story should immediately have made Marge suspicious precisely BECAUSE it is so cookie-cutter -- but like most Americans, she simply can't resist what she sees as an ordinary man's heroism in the face of everyday life.
This story is relevant because once Marge learns that Mike lied to her and attempted to manipulate her, she rethinks her assessment of the disarmingly shy and soft-spoken Jerry Lundegaard. (And you can see her thinking
really hard while she's eating her fast-food burger.) The goofy-looking William H. Macy was perfectly cast in Lundegaard's role, and he performed it just right. So right, in fact, that most viewers remain fooled, believing Jerry to be just a hard-working guy who tries to provide for his family, though he is not above making "an error of judgment" (as if organizing a violent kidnapping of one's wife for ransom happens by inadvertence), refusing to see Jerry for what he really is: a greedy, murderous monster so devoid of any sense of right and wrong, he is perfectly willing to steamroll over as many people as it takes -- including his own wife and son -- to get his paws on a few Benjamins. This is because we too cannot resist what the surface of Jerry's life offers us: a suburban home, a seemingly normal family, mild manners, a funny-looking cookie jar in the kitchen, the wife's picture on the
desk in his office. Marge initially falls for Jerry's soft-spoken ordinariness, but after experiencing Mike's manipulation first-hand, she'll now call on common sense and her own obvious intelligence to discover not what it is that Jerry shows the world, but whatever he is trying to hide.
