a review of 冰血暴

Watched this one in preparation for watching both the first season of the Fargo TV series (which just appeared on Hulu a couple of weeks back) and the 2014 film Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (which dramatizes the urban legend of a Japanese woman who took Fargo's "true story" preamble seriously and died trying to find the buried money in North Dakota), both of which I'll get around to sometime in the next few weeks. The last time I saw the movie was sometime in the late '90s for a genre film class (such was its pedigree even then), and was pleased to find that it still holds up as one of the Coens' masterpieces. I was surprised to notice that the film is only a trim 97 minutes, because for some reason I'd remembered it being a much shaggier dog of a story. There's plenty of seemingly odd narrative digressions, but upon further consideration everything (even the infamous Mike Yanagita scene) builds towards expressing the main plot and themes of the film: How it is to be a moral person in a morally-ambiguous world.