Here's the thing: Nicolas Cage is, as you and I both well know, awesome. He's also Nicolas Cage. A friend of mine once mused that if a film casts Nicolas Cage for a role, and the role is not a Nicolas Cage role, and the film suffers for it, the fault lies not with Cage, but with the producer/director who decided to try to change Nicolas Cage into something else.
Raising Arizona is not one of those movies, and the Coen brothers are not that type of filmmaker.
As a possibly-slightly-Asperger-suffering ne'er-do-well, Cage is a perfect H.I. McDunnough:
who married the police mugshot photographer (Ed - short for Edwina):
who he got to know over the course of his several incarcerations, and who later discovered she was unable to have kids. They learn through local news sources that local rich couple Nathan Arizona and his wife Florence have had quintuplets, and then decide that the right course of action is to even out the average distribution of children and take one of them.
Anyway, as is the case in most Coen brothers films, tremendously excellent writing ensues, along with healthy dollops of hilarious adventure, and everything works out in the end, in its own way.
(and perhaps most importantly, it has John Goodman in it)
I love this movie. I've seen it a couple of times now, and it just keeps being awesome, all the way through.
Cage is perfect, and the movie even features the very first patented Nic Cage Crazy Face moment!
If you haven't seen it yet, see it soon. Or now.
Actually, yeah, go see it now.
***end transmission***
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