Here it is, the one I have been waiting for!! Raising Arizona was one of my childhood favorites. I had no idea what was going on when I used to watch it as a kid, but I really loved the awesome lone biker of the apocalypse:
Seeing it again as an adult was amazing, because each joke landed and I still got all of the nostalgic joy from remembering it as a kid. My cousin Alex and I used to say this quote all of the time and I had totally forgotten that it was from this movie:
“Sometimes I get the menstrual cramps real hard.”
John Goodman’s character was always my favorite. The scene I remembered loving the most as a kid was his jailbreak out of the mud:
And then we get even more John Goodman screaming in this scene when he and William Forsythe forget the baby at the gas station, this is a must watch:
Right before watching this movie I had sat in 2 hours of brutal Seattle traffic, and had I remembered this scene in the movie, John Goodman’s reaction is exactly what I would have been doing in the car on Mercer. From now on, if someone is describing to me something that they ate at a restaurant, or telling me the life story of their family friend that I am never going to meet, I will be replaying the Goodman-Forsythe scream off in my head, as it perfectly describes how I feel in those moments.
And now for the main event, Cage. I feel like we are finally seeing his full range of acting skills. Going straight from his crazy gumby character in Peggy Sue to this white trash convenience store robber in Raising Arizona, I’m beginning to think we are entering the Cage “McConaissance” I was talking about in my post about The Boy in Blue. This was some of his best acting yet, and I don’t believe anyone else could have played this role better than him. I would also like to give a nod to Holly Hunter, also born to play this character:
“I love him so much!!!!!” – (That’s how I’m feeling about Cage after watching this movie)
He didn’t have any stellar flip outs, which I am starting to be a little bit more picky about since seeing his flip out in Birdy. That shit was legit. It is from now on classified as a Cage Flip out if I have trouble understanding what he’s saying, or if it weirds me out.
After watching Raising Arizona I jumped straight into Moonstruck, this is the double feature night of my dreams!!