But let’s run with sentimental. I don’t think that sentiment and irony are necessarily exclusive. I just think they’re two ingredients to a film/whatever. Another good example that we’ve talked about at length is Rushmore: heavy on both genuine sentiment and irony. You know Max is a doofus and you are detached enough that you can see all his flaws, but you just love him anyway. And to continue the comparison, Anderson’s later films also over time have started to go heavier on the irony and lighter on the emotion.

We love us some Raising Arizona. And Frances McDormand is flippin’ H.I.-sterical.

“Hi’s dream at the end of the movie never fails to reduce this viewer to pools of salty tears, partly because I wish his dream to come true and partly because I’ve seen that Hi’s dreams do, in fact, have a tendency to come true.”

You can read the rest of the article here:
http://toddalcott.livejournal.com/147454.html#cutid1

He recently did a write up on Blood Simple and judging by his past posts we can probably expect a series of Coen Brother film analyses.

Raising Arizona on the other hand is easily their most sentimental work. Despite the bumpkinish characterizations we can laugh at the characters of H.I. and Ed while still identifying with them as human beings who have hopes and dreams and are deserving of dignity. Which is a long way of saying that it chokes me up too.