Father Malone's Weekly Guest Spot - Raising Arizona (1986) - A Year in Horror with Paul Waller

But you know what the most fights in the world is. It's fair every year. It's Cage fright, the absolute delight that is a year in Horror's Nicholas Cage filmography show. This is where I hemorrhage uninformed opinions about whatever Nicholas Cage film that a guest wants to chat with me about. Simple.

Its easy as that. And it's interesting to see how many of these big hitters are being picked. No one seems to be going further, shall we say that iffy pile. So I'm thinking thinking to myself that maybe I'm going to find the four worst rated Cage films and then do them myself in one episode, just to get a just to get a just to shovel that snow away. But for now, holy smokes, please welcome to the show fatherm Malone, already a somewhat regular guest and now cementing his status as a bony fidy American institution.

Oh boy, as you can see from the title and the thumb, now that you've clicked on to get to this very chat, you know that we're talking about Raising Arizona. That's the film we chose. The nineteen eighty seven Cohen Brothers movie, And here is a synopsis. When a childless couple, an ex con and an ex cop decide to help themselves to one of another family's quintuplets, their lives become more complicated than they anticipated. And here's the cast.

Honestly, this is an actual cast. We've got Nicholas Cage as Herbert. We've got Holy Hunter Aidwena. We've got Sorry Ed. We've got Trey Wilson as Nathan Arizonia Senior.

We've got George Goodman as Gail Snots. We've got William Forsyth in this thing. We've got Sam McMurray as Glenn. We've got Francis McDermot as Dot. We've got Randall text cobbin.

Here. This is myself and father Malone at the beginning of August twenty twenty five. We are digging deep into our thoughts on raising Arizona. My name is Acha McDonough toll me h, don't forget us. Profile tart of the right.

Name is like you. Short, Bodina tard of the right. You're a flower, you are. And you better do Okay, then. Where's that what you do?

We got as family here Arizona, which was abduct anything to see into the kidnapped. Yeah, watch your flood, give me a baby for. Health raising Arizona. We are welcoming Father alone to the show that is currently only on Patreon. Yeah, so so far this is me going through Nicholas Cages sort of like complete filmography.

Where are you so far? Obviously racing Arizona, but are you going chronologically? No, it's just I'm letting people pick what they want and there's this mid period when nobody is really interested in So what I've started doing is I've reached out to some of the actors in these things, for instance, Stolen you know, a film like that, or Pay the Ghost, you know, these sort of things that are like those ones that he did for the cash to pay off debts or whatever. So Tyrannosaurus Rex skulls are expensive. They are.

Yeah. So I've got a top five and I'm going to ask you, as a final question when we get there, what is your least favorite? So if you didn't know, I was going to ask that, have a thing about that while we're talking here. But my top five Nicholas Cage films so far that I've seen doing this, we have Pig, we have long Legs, we have Moonstruck. Oh my BlimE me, we have Mandy, and we have my very favorite A first watch for me, ten out of ten out of the bat Wild at Heart.

Oh my god. Right, yeah, you can't have can't have a Nicholas Cage list without that movie. You've only just seen that. Oh man, that movie ruled my world when it came out. I yeah that changed.

Let's call that movie formative for my feelings about what romance is supposed to be. Uh and has one of the most horrific that's true, Why have and as one of the most horrific scenes I've ever seen, which is Sherylyn Fenn as the result of a car crash. She's she's a victim staggering around just uh in you know, just in content. Well, I'm forgetting the word she's. It's really scary.

I saw her at a convention once and she was sitting by herself. I could have walked up and I would not force my feet in her direction. She is, you would have just buckled and yeah, it's it would have been pathetic. Sherilyn Fenn As As far as I'm concerned, my generation's Betty Page. In some ways I like her more than Betty Page.

Hello. Hello, I'm going to ask you before we go any further, Nicholas Cage, where would you say if you had to think about I've never seen faces Off, I'm never seen that corn Air one. You know, there's tons I haven't saying, which is why I'm doing this. But like if I was to say to you, look, you can only have one Nicholas Cage film, what film would that be? Oh?

Okay, can we put a side raising Arizona? Yeah, we can put that one aside. In that case, my favorite Nicholas Cage film, my favorite Nicholas Cage performance is in right around this time period Peggy Sue got married with Kathleen turned her. It's a time travel movie where she travels back to the sixties when she was in high school and sort of has to re examine whether she would have made the same choices in her life given what she knows now. And he plays her husband, Charlie, And this is one of his first roles, one of his first starring roles, certainly his first big studio back to films, and he chose to give Charlie this nasally Oh, hello, the kind of voice for the entire movie, and apparently Kathleen Turner was livid that he was doing it, but he had a secret weapon in that it was directed by Uncle Francis Ford Coppola, who thought it was an interesting choice.

And I agree. It's a great character and a really underrated movie. That movie came out the same year as Back to the Future. It's all the same themes. It's just really subtle and not sort of whiz bang.

Okay. I was going to ask you that the film so clearly is it goes back in time in high school and stuff. I came, yeah, vague memories of that, Like there were so many, like I can't believe I've not seen this. I remember one where he was an alcoholic. Leaving Las Vegas.

Won an Academy Award for that. And that's it everyone was raging about. That's when I started getting into Empire magazine over here, and it would be like, oh right, okay, So I was discovering film and things like that, and that was a big part of it. Oh interesting, But then you've chosen a film I had nervous seen raising Arizona from eighty seven. Where does this fit in with your history with Cage, like, was this a formative part of it or did this come later?

No, this was formative. I did see this movie in the theater when it came out. I was fourteen, and by then I was already a fan of Nicholas Cage because not only did I recognize him for the brief part he has as one of Jeff Spacoli's stoner buddies in Fast Times in Richmond High, but he is the star of potentially my favorite romantic film of all time, which is Valley Girl, where he's the he's the Romeo character in that. So when he showed up in Like, it kind of sealed the deal for me to go see this movie because it was that guy from Valley Girl. So yeah, I mean this, Yeah, I knew, I knew him.

I was already interested in him, and he did not disappoint area though. So nowadays, whenever there's a film that's got him in it, I will make a beeline to see it. And I only noticed I was doing that with this film that come out I think it was two years ago, called Sympathy for the Devil or something like that. And it doesn't matter if I like the film or not. I just want to see him in another film.

Do you have that with him? A lot of people like this guy's marmite for him or veggimite or whatever you yeast product you want to say to America. But yeah, is that how you feel about him? I don't. I don't necessarily run to see what he's done, just because of the sheer volume of it and the wildly shifting scale of quality.

But yes, having said that, if I pull up a streaming service and there's a Nicholas Cage movie and it looks halfway interesting, then yeah, I'll click it. I'll watch it. Definitely. He's never not going to be interesting. He's never not going to deliver his part of the bargain, which is to give the best performance he can.

He's always going to think, look, sometimes his choices are terrible. We'll get to you know what. I'll save it for the end, the worst Nicholas case. Yes, Okay, I got like, it's such a weird question to ask as a final question, what's the worst? I love it?

That's perfect, Okay, Well, I mean it's kind of a haesiography here. I mean, I'm not going to have anything bad to say about this field. Well, all right, let's talk about this one in general. Then with raising Arizona mentioned it is like very high up there for you, like why, like, in general, what is it about this film that is better than others? It's a Cohen Brothers movie, first of all, and early Cohen Brothers.

This is when Barry Sonnenfeld, who would eventually go on to do The Adams Family and a clutch of other sort of common men in Black, the men in Black movies, he directed all of those. He's their director of photography here, and he would be through Miller's crossing. I think, And now this isn't necessarily nostalgia, but I do remember at age fourteen feeling like as much as the film school generation, the film brats, which is Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, John Millius, Martin Scorsese, Brian to Palmer, those guys were like the fresh new thing in Hollywood, right, But not to me. Those guys were already old as far as I was concerned, and a lot of their film making techniques were already no longer innovative.

Let's say, so, to see a movie like Evil Dead hit the scene, and then a movie like Blood Simple come out and then on the heels of that this where it it breaks more conventions than anything that previous generation could have. And so to me it felt it felt not only new and kind of just interesting on a cinematic level, but it felt kind of like a revolution. It kind of felt like filmmakers who had figured out more so than the film brat generation, because people like Spielberg and those guys like Lucas, like, they thought their movies were really, really fast, and they were comparatively if you look at the editing of Jaws compared to it happened one night. You know, clearly I get it. But they didn't think we could handle more.

And the Coen Brothers did. They knew we were more sophisticated than that, and that they could make a living cartoon and if handled well, we would completely accept And I don't think anyone else was doing that at the time. I certainly had never seen anything like Racing Arizona it came out. There had been look, there had been screwball comedies in the thirties and forties, where you know and sort of three stooges like Slapstick, where it is kind of a living cartoon. The problem with those are when you do living cartoons with people and like you hit them with an anvil, it looks like you just fucking killed them.

And somehow the Coen Brothers can make a living cartoon where the consequences seem weightless and natural. So that's everything that appealed to me in this film, not to mention just the themes of the movie in general. It's so fucking sweet. There's a lot of potential baby danger in this film, and you always feel like you're inside. I completely get what you mean.

Yeah, I don't know a lot about the Cohens. Okay, I know Fargo, I know O Brother Where art thou? And this is my third film from them? That's it? Where should I go?

Oh my god, you're so you've not seen Miller's Crossing. Nope, Paul Waller, pack your bags and head straight to Miller's Crossing. My friend. It's it's a thirties gangster movie that sort of closes the book on thirties gangster movies. It's operatic and beautiful, all the grittiness that you could want, with all of the sort of poetry in it, and Albert Finney putting in a fucking heartbreaking performance as a sort of a washed up sort of mob head.

You know, it's yeah, go there, go there, please. Now I'm now I'm now lost thinking about Miller's Crossing. That's how much I love that movie that. I've obviously, I've heard a lot of the back catalog, and I do know that when we saw our brother Wear Up Now, we enjoyed it so much we watched it the next day as well. So it's one of those that was like, oh, okay, you know there was something.

It's just maybe because they're not horror, I've never gone back, you know, I think of that. You know, they're making solo movies these days. They're each Joel and Ethan are each making their own features, and they haven't done anything together for a while. Rumor has it that the next one, which just got sort of postponed just a little bit, is a horror movie. They're actually going to make their horror film, which they have been fucking teasing for fucking thirty five or so years now, and thank god they're finally doing it.

You know, I'm game. But you know also that I've now ticked all these in my watch list as well, because Raising Arizona is another one that you're like, okay, yeah, there's Fargo, which I just thought, you know, this is a faultless film, Like I enjoyed it from beginning to end. It's just ridiculous. And then I brother wear up now exactly the same sight. Oh my god, it's so enjoyable.

Little slices of perfection. I can't I when their movies work. They work perfectly. I force me to find a fault. I will because that's how I am.

But have they done a bad one? Have they done like one that's universally like, oh, that's bad. I don't think they've done anyone that you could just point to and say, this is terrible. But at the very worst, it's been interesting. They have a film called Intolerable Cruelty that I'm not sort of as invested in as their other movies necessarily, But I won't tell you it's bad.

I won't say don't watch it. Sounds sounds great, that's a good title. Yeah, it's about divorce lawyers. Oh oh okay, well you said, but we're going to do this film. I'm like, here's another one.

I found a DVD copy, so yeah, I haven't got the best version of But at the same time, thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. There are a couple of sequences in here where I actually laughed and it's so hard to make me laugh. Two individual sequences actually that did. So. I want to talk first of all about the casting, which is something that I found interesting because of Holly Hunah.

Like it's someone that I forget how much I enjoyed whenever I see them. She's just so strange to me. She's so weird that she really is. She's really like an anomaly, right, Like there's something so powerful in that tiny frame. She's like at at the same time steally and adorable.

That's and the voice talk about understanding the brief right like, oh this this is a cartoon. I will be a cartoon by the end of this movie. She might as well have been drawn onto the frame. The whole romance of it, the way it begins, it sort of does set you up knowing exactly what tone this film is going to be because it is so ridiculous and it happens so fast, and yet we talked about recently, we talked about Frankenstein, where there was fast editing to explore time. That really didn't work here when we've got that I was in jail again.

She's taken another photo of him again, because that's her job in the police department. It really works, like the way it's all edited together. It's so you've mentioned, like the pacing of it, and like they trust us to accept it. It instantly gets you into the flow of the film. I was instantly accepting of the way this was going to go.

And I didn't know how I was going to be with this film. Honestly, I thought I might not like it just from the synopsis. So, yeah, I've seen this movie one hundred times. And the opening eleven minutes of this movie could be its own movie. It could be its own short fot that you could run the end credits, which they do.

I mean they run the opening credits there, and I'd be totally satisfied having learned a slice of life, and I would wonder what happened when they went off to kidnap that child. It is so is before the title card, right, it is. Eleven minutes and then it says raising Arizona and the yodeling begins, and it is so every time I see the movie, I feel energized at that moment and not only because it's an uplifting moment where we're like, we're so with these with this couple. Now, we love these people so much that they're going off to kidnap kidnap a baby, and we're fucking on board with it. It's eleven minutes of straight narration and the most tightly an economic paste prologue for a film of all time.

It is every time I watch it, it is just incredible. And you know what, I went back and read the script last night actually, and it is it. It's all there. It's everything is in there. It's sort of insane, like shot for shot.

I mean, the Collens are very They're known for being almost hitchcock like in how meticulous they are for storyboards, Like they know they know that, you know, you spend a whole lot less money before you get to the set if you've designed everything, so there isn't like a lot of improv with the camera necessarily, Like they're there to get the shots that make up the script that they wrote, so you know that every time they For instance, here's something that I marvel at every time I watched the movie. In the opening sequence, Hi Hi McDonough played by Nicholas Cage goes to jail three times. When he first arrives in the prison, at the end of the hallway that they're marching him down, there's an inmate mapping.

The second time, the inmate is now halfway down. The third time he's right there. So that this little weird little progressions in time that they that they've considered, and that it's there if you want it, and it's not if you don't. This is ultimately like a wacky fucking comedy, but it is the most considered wacky comedy of all time. Do you think the narration?

I think it must have pained them because it's so hard to get narration right and it works. But at certain points you're like, oh, do we need narration? Are they? Are they thinking we're stupid? But then when the titles come in, you're like, oh, okay, so it's going to be just that and it isn't just that.

But I feel like, oh, that actually really worked. But during it I was like, well, no, I know what's going on here? Why are we getting that? I always worry with nerition always. What I love about the narration here because I agree with you narration nine times out of ten fucking chuck it out at the script stage, like, don't show me a door and have a character tell me there's a door there over voiceover, what are you fucking crazy?

Right? But what they've done here is when when Hi is just speaking regularly to other characters, he's really not the most articulative guys, see sort of stumbling and halting. But in his head he's a Shakespearean character, and is his language is so flowery and wonderful and singular. I've said this before. You know, Tarantino gets all the fucking praise for the master of dialogue, and I say every single time, fuck you go watch the Coen Brothers movies because they dance in every genre and then will tailor all that dialogue to that genre and fucking perfect it.

So having this sort of you know, overly florid, flowery dialogue coming out of this three time felon who you know can barely hold his life together, is it's just magic to me? Right eleven minutes in, I would say the film sort begins at this point, although like, if you don't have that first eleven minutes, what the hell? Like it's close to perfect that that set up as you say, like, I'm totally invested in their relationship. He puts the wedding ring on her finger while he's being fingerprinted, this cop and of this felon for that's the setup, by the way, a cop and a felon fall in love because she's booking him and he's invested in her life and she's like the only guy who's ever really seen her for her I love it well.

As I said, she's an odd egg. We'll get to that a little bit. And I love that she's called ed like brilliant. Okay, So I want to mention John Goodman as well, just because I think he's got the best looking scene in the film when he actually comes does a share shank bit where he comes out of the pros. They emerge with the birth scene of Galeen Ever emerging like mythical creatures out of the earth.

It's epic. I love it, ah very good. There's a whole lot of birth in this movie. There's a whole lot of mirroring. There's a whole lot of thought.

I want to get your thoughts on the editing of this because comedies, which this is because it made me laugh, I find them mainly not working because of the editing. The editor. The editing is wrong. If I can see something a mile away, I don't want to. I'm not gonna laugh at it because I'm already I get it.

This struck me as almost flippant in its confidence, like it just knows it's got you from because of that intro, the way it's set you up. It's so so confident in this film that like you're going to sit with it and go wherever it goes, because the synopsis is ludicrous. And the set pieces, which is what they are, like they could be Monty Python sketches at certain points, like they're just so I can see now you've said it about also the storyboarding. You can just see those storyboards like it's so incredible. Okay, So I want to talk about the kidnapping.

That the kidnapping scene, which is so meticulously done, edited so well, like I don't know how they got those babies to do what they did, And it must have been painful, painful to try and to try and work with so many children at once. I'm sure it was painful in that this must be the only time in their careers maybe where their storyboards didn't matter because babies don't take direction, like I imagine, this is their most compromised sequence of their entire filmography, and it's hilarious and it accomplishes what you mentioned earlier, the scene these babies are jumping out of cribs and falling and there's so much peril going on, and I never ever worried about them. It's that the open those eleven minutes of hey, gang, you're this is heartfelt, but you are watching a cartoon, really pay off here because this could go real bad, real quick.

But the subject matter here of them kidnapping a baby to raises their own, it's really fucked when you think about dog. Yeah, and it never feels this movie never feels dark. It's about a felon who steals a baby and a fucking bounty hunter coming to kill him and his best friends or escape felons who are trying to involve him in crimes. This shouldn't work as a lighthearted romp. The thing is that they've got so many babies.

Oh they're not going to miss one, you know, so fine, But then we also get the sort of joke that's built within it that like they don't know which baby they took and then the actual family whose baby is They go, I think it was Nathan Junior. Everyone thinks it was Nathan Junior. We're just calling him Junior now. Unbelievable, so witty, and again so fast because you haven't got time to think about what's just happened, because you're so already invested in this couple. How are they going to raise this child?

But thank goodness they've got Cage because like, I know what a mess he's going to be in this film, and he is. He just can't hold anything together and it's a very entertaining way. And he's not the funny guy I find in this film. I'm not laughing with him or at him or whatever. Like everything that's happening around him, that's what's funny.

I find him playing it quite straight. Yeah, I mean, he high is the kind of straight man character. Nevertheless, I think it is a very very funny performance. There are some moments where he just reacts to things that make me laugh every time I see the film. You know, it's my understanding that the Cohens weren't exactly stoked with their working relationship with Nicholas Cage, which is why thirty five years later, he has not reappeared in any of their films, But none of that matters because it's one of my favorite performances of his, and to your point, carrying the movie and letting everyone else be funny around him, but somehow managing to eke out laughs all the time.

The other time I thought he was like funny was in looks that he was given, and it was mainly around like the dinner when the other family come. I think it's in this in the Oh my God. In the cast list it was called the Foreman like his fool. Yeah, yes, his Foreman's family when they come to have dinner and everything. And but the looks when he looks at the other children, he's the only one that realizes how mad this whole situation is, and that's when he's given his time to shine.

But again, I find it quite controlled performance. This is Nicholas Cage after all, you know, it's quite It's just like, oh, hang on, life isn't what I expected it to be, and it could get a lot worse here. I'm going to go back to crime maybe you. Know, Yeah, this is Nicholas Cage about to chip one of his teeth because he thinks that's appropriate for a role where he's about to eat a cockroache, you know, in Vampire's Kiss the next year. So so he's given two flights of let's say, overly dramatic choices here, so you can imagine the Caran brothers had to fucking sit on him, both of them.

Took two of them to get him down to this. I've just remember because I've skipped past it. Well wish I hadn't. There's a Holly Hunter scene where they've kidnapped, this finally successful kidnapping, and they're in the car going back and she just burst out crying. She just so happy.

She loves him so much. My first moment of laughter in this film, and as I say, I rarely laugh at the film. The only thing that gets me laughed in is that the last stream on the left of all things on YouTube with the last podcast guys, this got me, man, It tiggled me. And I love it because nothing does, nothing gets to me, nothing gets that funny bone and just that reaction, like I love it when this is why young Frankenstein can't do it. It doesn't get me like that sort of sense of humor.

Wherever this does she just came out of nowhere and blurted that out. It was brilliant. I loved it. Yeah, it's it's what's funny is you'll see I think basically every character will be reduced to infancy at one point or another in this movie. I think everybody crap has, you know, and this is her moment for it, And what a choice to make.

She's so joyful in her tears. Yeah, she's yeah that. I don't know if hollyhand around this time, man was is fucking there's nothing like this to this day, there's nothing like her. I understand she's gonna be running Starfily Academy soon. What they fucking They've announced this a new series, Starfleet Academy, and she's the head of Starfleet Academy, Holly Hunter.

I'm down, sign me up for it. I enroll me immediately in all the classes for Holly Hunter's Starfleet Academy. Yes, okay, Actually I thought of another bit of laughter, and it's her again. We'll get to it in a bit. When I said that I was doing this film, fellow podcast friend lo no, he said, you wait until you gets to the huggy scene.

So like, okay, waiting for the huggy scene. He gets the huggies, and then there is the most looney tunes, like you've said, like cartoonish scene works from beginning to end. In this again storyboard, you can exactly see what's going on. And this is the moment I think that your turn out of ten no notes perfect like this makes me intrigued with them as directors and like, right, okay, where am I going to go next? Which is why I asked you because if you can get something like this so spot on, so thrilling, it was actually thrilling to watch beginning to end that whole set piece.

Is this the moment that you gravitate to as someone that's seen this so many times? Oh? Yeah, it's you know. I mentioned that those first eleven minutes could be a short film. This could also be a short film.

This is a series, as you said, of cent pieces that happened to lock together magnificently, but taken on their own, they could. They're wildly entertaining and you would not need context for the sequence starts with them pulling up to a convenience store and he's gonna he robs the convenience store. She takes off, He's left on his own and is chased by everyone, including packs of dogs. And it is this, this sequence makes me laugh over and over. Boy, you got a panty on your head?

How they can they can imbue characters for one second with one line with I don't know it. I've watched entire movies Paul, with two characters who are supposed to be like romantically linked, and I've gotten nothing from either of them, whether it's the performance or written on the page. And somehow this old man who unfortunately picks up high and mid pursuit like is hilarious to me. And I know who that guy was, you know, Like. It's the escalation, the art of the escalation here as things go from oh no to that's worse?

Oh god, what are you gonna do? Oh that's even worse? Like how are you going to get out of this? All? He's got out of it, he's got back into it.

You know, it's just so cleverly done. Again, wasn't expecting it. And I was a bit worried at this point because we're nowhere near the end, and yet I feel like this could be the peak of a film, because how were you gonna do something more batshit than that, and I don't think they do. But I don't think it gets worse either. I think it sort of coasts on like we've got you up here, and let's just see how this film is going to play out from here on, and that's I think that's what happened.

The only thing that distracted me after this point was that voice over when it returned. I wasn't so keen on it at that point, but that's it. Everything else is great. Well, you know, the voiceover is now mainly whenever High is dreaming, so we're now getting, we're getting. We're basically a dream journal, so I don't necessarily have a problem with that.

I do want to mention one thing about the Huggies sequence, and that another major component of why this movie works as well as it does, and I don't think would work half as well if this weren't there, which is Carter Burwell's score. Carter Burwell has scored almost all of the Coen Brothers movies. I think he's the most underrated composer working today. I think he got If he has any sort of notoriety, it's because he did those Twilight movies, which I'm not holding that against him because everything else he does is always interesting and fun, and this apparently is so far out of his wheelhouse to score. He did for this that the Cohens almost didn't ask him to do it, and it's one of my favorite scores of his.

Nobody uses yodeling and banjo's for wacky comedies, but here they are, and in this sequence, in particular, just his. The way he's orchestrated the score is you're hearing the sort of banjo regular, sort of orchestrated score for most of the scene, but when High runs into the grocery store, it turns to musak and his aunt is playing through the speakers of the grocery store. It's the same theme and has suddenly been transformed. And he does it a couple of times like that, and it just it knocks my socks off every time he does that, that he thought to do it, and then, like upon further reading, like Carter burr Well did feel a bit adrift because sort of Southwestern American music ain't his thing.

But like for the fight sequence between Gale and High in the trailer, that sequence is entirely scored by He hired a group of musicians who only play household instruments, so it's not even traditional music musical, you know, to make that scene domestic sounding while still somehow rhythmic. I don't know, he's a he Carter Burro. Well, everybody, I will have to revisit that. I didn't notice that, and I love stuff like that when that happens. Yeah, I'm just really glad it wasn't like a ziny school, you know, with that wow sort of things going on, and because it could have been like this film could easily accommodate that, and it would become like the worst cases, like for me, like films like Scary Movie or something like that, when it tries to it tries too hard.

Mickey Mouse said, you know that don't dn't is walking down the fair hallway. Dun't dun't, dun't dun't dun't. Yeah. Can you imagine how bad the initial baby kidnapping scene would have been with all that sort of stuff going on? Would not you know, the studio would have immediately done that if they'd gotten their paws on this film.

Yeah. Second second big laugh here for me was at the end of that Huggy scene when he gets in the car and she slugs him, and I just so good, so good. Yeah, we've got a child. Now everything's changed. First of all that line reading and then when she punches him, his wiley coyote, slow mocean reaction is so perfect.

This take it back. He is good, he's good, he's funny, damn it. And you know, let me just say that, like they accomplished something here that I really fucking love, which few American movies can. And I think this movie got sort of criticized for its wildly shifting tones. People couldn't grab hold of it.

And this is what I was talking about, Like reviewers of this sort of baby boom generation couldn't get their myths in this film because it shifts as wildly as it does, because it is heartfelt and it is wacky, and it is dangerous and it is all of these things, and they trust you that you can go with them on that. And some people wouldn't down to the fact that if there's an antagonist in this movie, it is Leonard Small's, the lone biker of the Apocalypse, who appears out of nowhere, shows up as a bounty hunter who is now going to steal the baby and sell it on the black market and now has to they have to deal with them, which seems like the most convention sort of studio thing they could have done in this movie.

And yet who is this guy? Because what I've come up with and I think is born out, is this is the manifestation of all of High's worst instincts, right, because ultimately, what this movie is about is about second chances for characters. It's about Hi's redemption and his redemption through family and the lengths he'll go to sort of protect the family. And Leonard Small's is the ultimate because he dispenses with each of the sort of aspects of himself as the movie goes on. So Gale and Eville are just just a sort of bumbling, sort of the recidivious, sort of petty thief aspect of his life, and he won't even he kicks them out, you know.

And then when the swinging couple come over, then that's when he stands up to them too like. And so finally, here here's the final thing that's going to tear the family apart. It's going to take the baby away entirely and give it to who knows, God knows what, and he has to sort of rise to that occasion that you can't convince me that Leonard Smallson doesn't come from High's own personality and it's manifested in this movie and turned into a real character who goes and talks to other characters and investigates and scenes that don't involve our man. So we can't do that bullshit trope of who was all in High's mind the entire time? This guy ain't in High's mind.

He's there, but I think he's from High's imagination. He's manifested him. Like, did that Smalls guy? Did he mean anything to you? I'd never heard of him before, but learning like, oh god, he's like a huge boxer and kickboxer and black belt and karate and all this stuff I learned afterwards.

I like, did you know him already? Were you like? Ah, here he. Comes Randall techs Cob. I had seen him in a bunch of movies.

He always showed up in b movies. Is a tough guy, and I knew of his reputation as the man who had never been knocked out. I believe that was that that that was his his thing, and he seems like he was a pain in the ass and he seems like he was trouble and I know for a fact like that, Uh, when they made this, he he was trouble on the set for the Coens, and then they had to do reshoots. And when they contacted to to bring him in, he he charged them double his salary and they need and he knew and he said, apparently his manager said to them, you need him, so you're gonna pay him double now, and they did his end. Like is a very early body exploding like that on a screen like that?

We've seen a lot since, But like I was going, like, what has that been that before? And I was I couldn't find anything where it was like that before, Like a whole body exploding like that. No, I certainly hadn't seen. Uh, They're probably there had to have been in the past. But this is this is my first, certainly in a light romantic comedy.

This is my first human being exploding on screen via a grenade. Do you know what I want to I want to point out to you, Paul, that that one of my favorite parallels in the movie is during the baby heist sequence, one of the one of the children, I think it's Nathan Junior, actually has crawled underneath the crib and has crawled forward all the way into the camera and you can see High reaching underneath the crib and slowly drags the baby away from the frame. In this sequence, when High and Leonard Small's are fighting, at one point, Hi tries to get away from him by climbing under the car, and it's the same shot High climbing into the frame and Leonard Small's dragging him away. So it like I was saying, all these twin things and all these baby things just like keep getting reinforced and reinforced.

Yeah, I love that baby saying. That was immaculately put together. I loved like getting the baby I view as well. It's not something that you often see and it was cleverly done as well. With every motion that they made, the camera jerked.

Yeah, it's great. Have you ever left anything on top of a car and then driven off? Oh my god, so many things, all the things. A baby, No, not a baby. I have left a car seat up there though, so it's it for passers by.

It was the same effect, but there was no baby in there. I have I have, I've heard a funk and gone what was that? And then gotten home and gone, oh, I think that was my cell phone. Yeah, classic, So that's it. Yeah, I've lost two phones.

What are we doing? Why are we putting things on the fucking roof of a car? You think you learned? You know, as soon as they put a baby on the roof of a car, you know that's not going to go down. Well, I've seen the rest of this film already, like that's a bad idea, and yet they still do it, you.

Know, And let me just say once again that that just that, like the treatment of the babies here right now, there was a lot of baby movies out at the time, right but it was coming from the baby boomer generation here in America, so we were getting things like well baby Boom with Diane Keaton, or Three Men and a Baby, you know, these sort of gentle takes on parenthood and oh my, isn't life changed now that we have children? A hahaha, And here are the Coen Brothers going, No, it's going to be chaos. It's going to be a fucking cartoon and it's going to be fucking bikers and and prison breaks. So this will lead me into a question that I'm quite interesting. I've only had a first watch.

You've watched it multiple times. So I'm going to ask you when you're like, for instance, you were going to reach off the shelf for it, closing your eyes and you think, right, okay, I'm going to watch this film tonight, where does your mind go? What is the scene that stands out for you? Almost every scene stands out to me. Oh, you know what, Actually this is a scene.

I don't think people mention now that often, but the scene before Game and High fight over the baby in the trailer where Holly Hunter and Ed and Hi come in and she tells them that they have to go right. There's a moment where Gail and Evil are sitting on the couch and Evil is asleep and Gail is watching TV and there's some yodling program on the television and John Goodman does this thing where he realizes that he's watching this thing and he doesn't know what it is and he's confused by it. It's such a beautiful moment because we've all done that been like just sort of vacantly staring at something and going what is this? And it really sums up the movie at that moment, like, wait, what is happening here?

Yeah? I also if I had like criminal friends that I'd done time with, I wouldn't be like going ah, like just just because they said, oh, like you're you're you're under the cush now, like you know, you control boy a woman and he just so easily came to that. I'm so disappointed in Nicholas Cage at that point, like, come on, man, you've made a packed and you're you're ruining it. Damn it. He's working through it, man, he's gonna he's gonna get to that dream.

Is there something? And I'm sure there's a many things, but is there something before I ask you that Worst Cage movie? Is there something that we need to mention that we haven't already about this film? You know? Uh?

That scene I mentioned is probably my favorite scene, just because I don't know why. It just makes me cackle every time I watch it. Just just yodeling and a decrepit looking trailer and John Goodman zoked out like that. That image is pretty potent. But at the end of the opening prologue, that the when the when the title finally comes up and the yodeling really kicks in and the title is it's it's a black screen, but you can see the images.

Like Stranger Things would eventually do this with their titles, where you can see the next image through the through the letters, and they've done that here and the image that they're showing through it is an Arizona sunset. And something about the way the title is moving and the uplift of that music and after everything we've just seen, and I'm just so pumped up. That's rare in a movie to get me that elated to excited. I'm going to make a weird comparison right now. Martin Scarsese's filmed The Last Temptation of Christ.

Okay, Easter Sunday, No, it's Palm Sunday, and Jesus is returning to the city after having fled because he wrecked the temple. And all the money lenders, right, but now he's coming with a force of people there, and everyone is worried that there are going to be soldiers waiting for them and it's going to be trouble. And a character walks up to Jesus and says like, will there be soldiers? And Jesus just puts his arm around him, and Peter Gabriel's score at that point fucking sores, and I feel more than human at that point. You know, there's just like a touch of the divine, and that's a little more evident when you're talking about Jesus.

But to have it in this nineteen eighty seven fucking romantic comedy so early in the picture, it still makes me think, my god, what promise these filmmakers have and what the power of cinema actually can be. This is one of the movies that makes me love movies, and that moment in particular does it for me. It's an incredible title called Sequence in absolutely, incredible, absolute. I love it. I took photo of it and sent it to a few different people.

You send it to me, Yeah, And I had the same fucking feeling when I saw it, and I wrote to you, and I was like, I'm so fucking envious of you because you're seeing this movie for the first time. We spoke just break before fall Bit. We spoke about Mary Shirley's Frankenstein before this title card of that one is a sort of cheap knockoff of a Superman thing where Frankenstein comes right out of the screen then goes up and its sort of cruel. It looks so bad it looks so amateur and weak and just knocked off in a few minutes. It looks awful.

And then you watch something like this where there's so much thought, is so elegant, it's pops and as you said, it can completely get you in a mood total confidence in these filmmakers. It's a world of difference. Man, that's mad. And you know, can I just say that this isn't the movie that they intended to make after Blood Simple. They had already written a script and then we're told this is too a budget restrictive, you can't make this movie.

So then they wrote this sort of hastily to get another movie made. That's fucking crazy, first of all. Second of all, the other movie was Hudsucker Proxy, which they co wrote with Sam Raimi, which they would eventually make. In fact, when when Hi is working his dead end factory job and mm at Walash is this fucking jerk who won't stop talking next to him about finding dead bodies in the road. If you notice, they work for Hudsucker Industries, So the Cohens are already doing shared universes way before we could l Hudsucker Proxy.

Oh yes, if you yeah, that's their attempt at actually doing a nineteen thirty screwball comedy and that movie. I yeah, I don't know, man, your mileage may vary. Some people don't like that movie. I love that movie just on a technical level alone. They had basically an entire miniature nineteen thirties New York made all the buildings so that they could shoot, which they you don't need to do that, but they did it, and it's so impressive and beautiful.

It's, you know, it's one of the last great sort of city scape models in films. I sometimes try to think, like, who my favorite sort of working filmmaker is, in my mind automatically goes to David Fincher, just because he's so I mean, he's just a he's a fucking he's a film animal, you know, Like, I don't know that you can get better than that guy in a way. But he can't write these movies. He couldn't do it these two. Maybe it's maybe it's the having a partner, you know, who thinks exactly like you do that puts them over the top.

But I really think the Coen Brothers are the at least the best American filmmakers of you know, since the seventies since that sort of film brat generation. I will let you know as I work my way through. Yeah, that would be interesting. Okay, so these are good films. I'm now going to ask you the question.

The worst in your opinion, Nicolas Cage film that you have seen so far? Ghost Rider? Wow? The spirit not the spirit of Vengeines. That's a little closer to the spirit of the of the book.

I love Johnny Blaze. I love ghost Rider. I'm a big Marvel horror comic book guy. He's a big, big character for me, very excited to see him portrayed on screen. Was not in any way excited to what we got as a character.

Johnny Blaze addicted to jelly beans that he drinks out of a fucking Martini glass. You know he's from Hell, right, everybody? You know? Right? You know this is you know, he works for the devil?

Could this be scary? Please? Look, I don't know that that it's his worst movie. There are probably worse. There are probably some that he was doing for the paycheck after you know, he had to sell his island or whatever.

But that's the most disappointing movie to me because at first thought, putting Nicholas Cage in any comic book movie makes sense in any role. So I was really stoked, and I was not ultimately in any way impressed or there's really nothing in that movie. I like, I saw it at the cinema. I can't really remember it now, which is probably quite telling, but good for you. It's one that he went for, like he BAEd for that movie, right, he actually was like, not, I want to be I want to be this guy.

Yeah. Absolutely, but he's done that a lot. I mean, look, Nicholas Cage took his He's Nicholas Coppola. His name is Nick Cage because of Luke Cage, the Marvel comic book character. So yeah, he's been dying.

Obviously. He was almost Superman there for a while. You know, he's now going to be Noir spider Man in the television series, so he's he's doing it. And he was in what kick Ass, basically doing an impression of Adam West's Batman from the sixties for Big Daddy in that film. I mean, this is a comic book nerd.

He's down to play, So you know, I couldn't imagine him saying no to anything at that point, and given that so many projects had fallen through, particularly Superman. To say one of his chill his child is named kylel that that I think, you know, yeah, and you know, and I love the Cage obviously I have. Oh, by the way, here's my one Nicholas Cage story. Boston had a has a film festival every year, and as a youth in high school and stuff, I would go. So I actually got to see the world premiere of Vampire's Kiss with Nicholas Cage, and Nicholas Cage sat in front of me and you know, got up and gave a little speech or whatever, and then sat down sitting directly in front of me.

And the cologne he was wearing was so strong that at a certain point I had to get up and leave the theater and wash my eyes out in the sink in the restroom and then come back. So so take that Ghostwriter. That was a terrible movie, and you did a terrible job with that character. I am. I'm shocked at that.

Like, there were so many ones that I can't even remember the title and I've just read it. In fact, i'm looking at it and I've already forgotten the title. You know, there was so many in his filmography, it's ridiculous. The one so far, the worst one I've seen. I've still go before out of ten, so it can't be that bad.

Called Between Worlds, where he's yeah, exactly, I've never heard of it. It's where he's like he's got a dead wife and child and they sort of come back, and I think his wife, I remember this correctly, his wife was like being a bit of a trickster trying to come back and not being very good. So it sounds all right, it sounds good for ten. That's the problem. I think.

You know, every project he takes, Yeah, he's taken it for the money, but I guarantee you there was a nugget of something in there that sounded good. Yea, obviously that sounds good. In fact, if you read the summaries of all of his movies, it's like, oh, it's as you said, like, you know, why not, I'll give it a shot. Father Alone. Thank you very much for coming on and doing this chat.

Have a good day you too, man. What can we go to some family here? All right? Folks? That was one impressive film, right, one impressive guest as well in Father Alone.

Thank you very much to Father alone. Now, I don't claim to know much about movies, but I'm doing a year in horror to learn something every time I put one of these episodes out because I'm passionate about them. But I do know that when something pops, when it stands out and Raising Arizona is top tier of that sort of thing. Well, I know when a film is going to be with me forever. I know when a film is a good or great or outstanding.

So will the next one be great? Will it be good? Will it be outstanding? Will it be just stunning? I don't know yet.

It's Nicholas Cage, so I mean it's going to be one of those, right, It's going to be one of those. Even when they're bad, they're great. So until next time, don't swear it. H