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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Fargo (1996)



 
American Classic-Fargo Coen Brothers'1996 is daring brutal, dark comedy 
It's daring black comedy by one of the most consistently inventive moviemaking teams of the last few decade, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.
“Fargo” (1996) was directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, co-written by the brothers, and set in the American upper Midwest where they grew up. It begins with the information that it is “based on a true story."
Fargo’s narrative follows a pathetic failure of a man, car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy),  desperate, wretched and incompetent car salesman and hapless husband, who is pathetically in debt.

In an attempt to wriggle his way out of tone of debt, Jerry hires two lumbering ex-cons, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare),  to kidnap his wife.
He’ll then secure the ransom money from his wealthy father-in-law (Harve Presnell), pay off the goons and get out of debt.




The following morning, local police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) wakes up with a triple homicide on her hands. Well into her second trimester, she pulls on her mukluks, drives to the crime scene and makes a first-class assessment of what transpired. It’s not anythinglike the typical goings-on in Paul Bunyan country.



 The Coens had working scripts for both Fargo and The Big Lebowski before they even shot The Hudsucker Proxy, so when the latter tanked they were well positioned to move on quickly. Fargo had been written with Frances McDormand in mind and for The Big Lebowski they wanted Jeff Bridges.


Fargo  achieves nothing short of cinematic perfection. It never steps wrong, never misses a beat in its precise characterizations, remarkable performances by Frances McDormand and William H. Macy and the visual style that emphasizes the almost spiritual vastness of the bleak Upper Midwestern setting. Because it values small, carefully observed character based details over the mechanics of the plot it’s a rich, endlessly rewarding experience. It’s the most complete film the Coens have ever made, nothing short of a movie for the ages.



Its critical and box-office success also came with seven Academy Awards nominations, including Best Supporting Actor (William H. Macy), Best Cinematography  Best Director (Joel Coen), Best Film Editing (alias Roderick Jaynes, actually the Coens), and Best Picture (Ethan Coen). The film's two well-deserved Oscars were for Best Original Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best Actress (Frances McDormand, Joel Coen's real-life wife).



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