zaremskya-23761 This film is pretty annoying. It sells itself as zany and out-there but pushes itself in your face with obnoxious characters too much and just ends up being ridiculous. I felt uncomfortable the whole time I was watching it.Why is it like this? Possibly because the C Bros are trying to recreate a "classic" look to their film and end up just making a goofy picture. Granted, the premise of the film is to make Tim Robbins seem like an idiot, so when he does act like an idiot, its expected, but the other characters are just as annoying, so it ends up not working out.So, not recommended for the auteur, but if you're a Cohen fan you might be interested in seeing everything they've done.

NateWatchesCoolMovies My first ever viewing of the Coen Brother's The Hudsucker Proxy tonight left me enchanted. It's such a raucous explosion of absurd and hyperactive characters in surreal, cartoonish synergy I couldn't take my eyes away the entire time. Such is always the case with Coen fare, and I should have expected to be wowed, but every time I see a new film of their's I'm flabbergasted like its the first time discovering their work. Such is their magic; they're a once in a universe creative force that you either get, or you don't. If you aren't already cursed (or blessed, depending on how you look at it) with a really bizarre, abstract sense of humour, then chances are you just won't tune in to their wavelength and be as tickled as hardcore fans. They just have such a wall to wall comedic gold within every screenplay they tackle, a willingness to sit down with the weird, exaggerated side of life and find the uproarious elements in the most mundane of exchanges. Here we see them take on bustling late 50's New York, particularly the cutthroat corporate arena. This is also another chance to display their trademark attention to gorgeous production design and urges to poke fun at the cultural idiosyncrasies of whichever time period they are dwelling on, adding all the more personality to the piece. The ancient Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning, making compelling work of a silent, puzzling cameo) CEO of mammoth Hudsucker Industries, has hurled himself through the boardroom window, plummeting forty four stories to the pavement below, leaving the throne vacant and prompting his vulture shareholders to circle the monarchy. Second in command Sydney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman, eagle eyed, growling evil in every frame), sets his mind to hiring an utter imbecile to run the shares into the ground, in order to prevent the stocks from going public, a ditch effort of spectacular greed. Enter Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a naive small town boy, shunted up from the mailroom straight into Mussburger's awaiting paws, and from there into the CEO's seat. Things look well for the scheme, until Barnes, an opportunistic golden boy, unwittingly invents the newest thing, the... well I won't spoil it for you. When the J. Jonah Jameson of 1950's New York (a rabid John Mahoney, always at the top of his game in Coen land) sends his top reporter, Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to snoop out the company's new 'idea man' CEO, things get wild and weird in true Coen fashion. Leigh is an actress of uncanny ability. In this film, everything is cardboard cutout, cartoonish and emotionally detached, the characters mere cogs in the hyper- real story as opposed to feeling, human people. Leigh most of all is a blustery, shameless stereotype of the mile a minute speech patterned gal that everyone's image of the 50's is like, and in a film full of pseudo real characters, she's the craziest. What amazes me is that even through that sheen of period gloss and chortling melodrama, she's still able to be the only performer to convey any emotion through her work! And emotion she shows, giving poignant little moments that the film hardly has time to acknowledge, but are there for the viewer's discovery all the same! Talk about a paradox. Such is Leigh's unequalled talent though, which I've been preaching for years, and which looks like will get a fresh track to run on with Quentin Tarantino's upcoming The Hateful Eight, and the much anticipated new Twin Peaks season. Just a consummate actress and a delight to behold in anything. This film is one of the most 'Coen' Coen Brothers flicks I've ever seen, and I'm surprised it took me so long to give it a watch. It's got deliberately over the top, quirky people, relentless social and class satire, zany screwball elements and overall, intangible charm that only they can bring us. I've always thought that the energy you get in a Coen Brothers film is so insane and unique that it's equal to those moments on the night before Christmas, a minute before 12am on New Year's Eve, or when the entire neighbourhood wakes up and trundles outside to see why there's ten ambulances down the block, maybe the final seconds of hesitation before taking a risky lakeside cliff jump; there's a palpable dose of giddy adrenaline and undefinable, primal strangeness to anything they produce, a lightning in a bottle, one in a million quality that I've only ever felt with one other filmmaker, David Lynch. Suffice to say, never a dull moment in Coen land. There's an epic supporting cast including Mike Starr, Peter Gallagher, Bruce Campbell (Sam Raimi is a co writer, bless his heart;)), Jon Polito, Bill Cobbs, Joe Grifasi, Noble Willingham, Anna Nicole Smith, John Goodman, Richard Schiff and Steve Buscemi. Fanatics and film lovers alike owe it to themselves to take a trip to this utterly nutty, deliriously stylish, endlessly funny province of Coen land, a place where you never quite know what you're going to get, never quite know what you've just watched when the credits roll, but always know you've had a good, funny bone and brain stimulating time at the movies.

glean7 In terms of the situation where the female newspaper reporter gets close to the man she thinks is an imbecile only to eventually discover he is not the moron he's depicted to be in the papers. And like in HP, the female reporter in Mr. Deeds claims to be from a small town like him. Amy Archer in HP pretends to be from the same town as Norville. Winona Rider's character pretends to be from a different small town similar to Longfellow Deeds. Like in HP, Mr. Deeds falls in love the female reporter, despite the fact that she lied to him about her identity and did him wrong. The difference era wise was that HP was set in the 50's whereas Mr. Deeds (2002) was set in present day.

dy158 It is two weeks before the New Year of 1959. Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) has arrived in New York City looking for a job after his graduation from college in Muncie, Indiana. With no working experience, he found himself working at the mailroom of the Hudsucker Industries. On the same day, the company's founder and president Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) unexpectedly committed suicide by jumping off from the top-floor window despite the company had been doing well financially.Back at the mailroom, there is the arrival of the 'Blue Letter' which Barnes had been assigned to hand it personally to Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman), a member of the board of directors. When Barnes did eventually meet Mussburger, he would forget about the letter he was supposed to deliver and began talking about the new invention he had for the company. Mussburger would eventually decide to let Barnes become the replacement for Hudsucker, acting as the proxy where the company's stock would deflate at the appointment of an inexperienced and incompetent president.Across town, Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist for the Manhattan Argus had successfully gone undercover working as a personal secretary for Barnes, pretending to be another desperate graduate from Muncie. In actual fact, she was assigned to do a profile of Barnes. Along the way, she would come to see how Barnes had been transformed as a person after his idea of the hula hoop take off across the country, going against what Mussburger and the board had thought the invention would depress the company stock.This can be seen as a film of about reversal of fortunes, of how Barnes went from the mailroom clerk to the company president and how he nearly went back to how it all started for him before being saved by an unlikely source. It is what would happen towards the ending which brings one full circle of what happened at the beginning of the film.Overall, it is a fairly enjoyable film, if one likes to root for the underdog which in this case is Barnes with the exception of what happened when the hula hoop invention changed his fortune.