Christmas and Fargo? Yauhh, You Betcha!

“We’ve been waiting here an hour. He’s peed three times already.” – Carl Shuwalter

So this Christmas break I took a trip to see the mother with girlfriend and daughter in tow. I had purchased a new Blu-Ray player for mom so that she can continue to realize her obsession with Denzel Washington in high-res goodness while keeping up with the latest technology trend. When I picked up the player, I thought it would be a good idea to get her a movie to go with it, that way she could see the difference in the quality. Skipping over the obvious visual eye-candy like Hulk and Iron Man (not her cup of tea), my girlfriend suggested Fargo and being that I had never seen it, I knew it was a win all around. My  impression of Fargo before watching it was that it would be a strange movie (being that everyone swears by it), I knew it would have a lot of snow (hell they have snow globes dedicated to it)  and I knew that somebody would die – due to that picture of Marge kneeled over the body you see here. After seeing the movie, I am now part of the concert who swears by it and would urge you to pick it up if you haven’t already.

Fargo is an UGLY movie
Fargo Blu-Ray redefines ugly, I wasn’t sure that there would be a movie to top the ugliness of the people in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but this movie has got to have the ugliest cast assembled in one place. And if the ugly faces and the bad teeth don’t get you, the god-awful accents will. The dialogue consists of an overuse of the word “ya” – pronounced “yauhh” and liberal use of “you betcha” through nasally grating voices. The landscape is so snowy and white that the film could have been shot in front of a blank wall and it would still have worked for me. The shots of people scraping ice from windshields and plowing their driveways made me absolutely miserable and as foreign as life appears in the small world of Fargo, I felt as if I was right there throughout the entire movie. Fargo has ugly actors playing ugly people in a whole lot of snow.

My mother, unaccustomed to HD quality in movies, seeing this for the first time on Blu-Ray could not get past William H. Macy’s open pores and facial nose bump being so overpowering in his close-ups. His big blue eyes were frightening and his teeth were, shall we say less than perfect. Seeing a movie like this after witnessing the trend of perfectly white teeth and smooth faces on the big screen was a lot to take it for us. HD you evil, revealing monster you. In stark contrast the most loveable and entertaining character in the movie – Officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) was our only break from the onslaught of ugly that was on the screen. Marge was a sweet old lady with a hidden inner fire wrapped up into a loving wife, hard-working police officer and pretty lady (in comparison to everyone else). Even though my chiming on the ugly factor may seem overly negative to you, it really isn’t meant to be, it made the movie seem even realer, and the bizarre story had a whole lot of “what the hell?” coming from it’s viewers. We absolutely loved it, and for myself I think that the amount of praise that has been given to this Coen brother installment is well deserved.

After seeing Fargo, the after-effects are still around even today – 4 days after Christmas. I find myself quoting one of Carl Shuwalter’s (Steve Buscemi) hookers – “Pay the bills now”, and wracking my brain trying to figure out the motivation behind weirdo Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). I place Fargo on the list of “strange movies” that everyone should see, like Requiem for a Dream, A Clockwork Orange and Pulp Fiction. Although it was strange that we chose this as our Christmas movie this year, I am very pleased to have seen it. Go out and rent/purchase Fargo if you get a chance, it is a definite must-see.