After watching the movie  Raising Arizona questions about morality, humor, and content were brought up.  I think I’ll try and write this blog as if it were my rough draft…..a very rough draft.

My topic to write about is not the tone of the film, but how the actions of the characters create the tone of the film.  The plot of the film is very simplistic.  A convict and his wife steal a baby, find that they cannot raise the baby responsibly, feel guilty about taking him, then give the baby back to his rightful home.  I took this movie as very character based instead of plot based because we learn a great deal about the characters and how they portray themselves throughout the film. 

One obvious example that the characters portray is what I’d like to call “serious sarcasm.”  Nathan Arizona, Sr. uses the press conference to promote his business and didn’t even know which baby was kidnapped, “Nathan, Jr., I think.”  If this were to happen in a real life scenario a parent would be hysterical and know exactly which baby was missing and it sure wouldn’t make you laugh while watching it.  Another example would be how the movie used the robbery scenes as humorous scenes in the film.  In most films with robbery scenes, you would hear screams and feel a sense of anxiousness coming from the victims.  In Raising Arizona, however, the victims calmly did as they were told as if this kind of event happens all the time. 

Another point you could look at would be how the music is used to portray a character.  The music used for H.I. consists of banjos. I imagine an old southern man sitting on his porch and playing the banjo calmly as he is watching H.I. being chased down by the police after stealing diapers.  However, when the Bounty Hunter, Leonard Smalls arrives in the scene the music changes to dark, operatic music.  It makes him seem very comical because he looks like something straight out of some western movie and he is now a charcter in a movie about stealing a baby.

There are several other examples, but I’ll save those for my paper tomorrow because trying to get all my thoughts to sound correct in a blog just isn’t going to happen.