Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

22 May 2006

Hudsucker

I rented a movie based on the recommendation of a boy. It's called The Hudsucker Proxy and it's a mid-nineties Coen Brother's movie with Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman. And it's hilarious. I loved this movie. It's clever, has its own voice and I laughed out loud several times.

I don't feel like writing anymore; I feel like sleeping.

*Addition from this morning.

I was thinking... Hudsucker came out the same year as Forrest Gump (a movie I dislike very much, my dislike made worse by its nabbing of the Best Picture Oscar that year). The movies are kind of similar in their main character, hardly similar at all in any other way, really, but both have a central character who is (mostly) an imbecile. Except that the Coens allow room for the development of character. Hudsucker's Norville Barnes could easily be a character you hate—you do hate him some of the time—even though he's the hero and you're, you know, mostly going to really like him. Ditto my feelings about Paul Newman's Sid character: he's the villain, but I never hate him, not at all. Good and evil are ever-present forces in Hudsucker, even having a midnight clock-showdown, but they never make the story into a mish-mash of feel good nonsense the way Zemeckis makes Gump into this steaming pile of sentiment on the kitchen floor of a cold world.

Chalk one more up for the Coen Brothers and their brilliance.

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