Joel Coen
1994
111 minutes
This is a Coen brothers film that has been on your list for a long time but you've never successfully made it through. It's a bit of a fictional history of the hula hoop--you know, for kids...
You've never been very good at hula hooping. The last time you tried was at the Charles Street Promenade in Baltimore. The entire street was shut down from the 300 block all the way to North Avenue. You had just shared some kvass with a few of the bar staff at Brewers Art and you had a couple of Beazlys inside you. A DJ was spinning records on the corner and people were milling about and relaxing at tables in the street. The guy who puts out the hula hoops at the Farmers Market had a bunch of hula hoops out on the street, which were being tried out by adults. You gave one a quick spin--no pun intended--but it plummeted directly down to your feet after about seven rotations. The man suggested a smaller hoop next time. So you put it away and sat down to observe, trying to figure out the physics and kinesiology involved.
Eventually you got the nerve to try again. As soon as you slipped a smaller hoop over your head, there was a ruckus on the corner and the music suddenly stopped. A fight had broken out in the intersection and people were screaming at each other. A man had torn a woman's wig off and was punching her in the face in the middle of the side street, blocking through traffic. There was a cacophony of horns as the cars stopped in the street angrily protested the delay. The wigless woman, annoyed by the honking, ran over to one of the cars and slammed her fist into the window. The driver exited the car and grabbed the woman, wrestling her to the ground and starting to kick her as the crowd gathered around, attempting to rescue her from this second self-imposed peril. The crowd peeled the angry motorist off the woman, and soon afterwards sirens were heard. You gave up on the idea of trying to hula-hoop and decided to head elsewhere.
To paraphrase a different writer (source now forgotten), Baltimore sometimes reminds you of that alcoholic uncle everyone has who lives at their grandmother's house. Sometimes if he's in a good mood he'll come down and tell amusing stories and he will be the funniest, weirdest man you've ever met. At other times he'll come storming down the stairs in a drunken rage, screaming obscenities at your grandmother and scaring all the children. And then much of the time he'll simply lay there snoring and disheveled on grandma's couch, a shell of his former self.
Time to choose something different: