political philsophy

Cool quiz that I ganked from rozk. The best thing? You can click to have it automatically post to your lj.

( well can't say I'm suprised by the results )

No Country For Old Men...film review

Just saw the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men - which has been for quite a while now and I've admittedly drug my feet seeing it, since I knew from reading numerous reviews that it was not an upbeat movie - yet an oddly humorous one, for those of us who have an absurd or black sense of humor like the Coen Brothers.

I've seen quite a few of the Coen Brothers films, O Brother Where Art Thou, Blood Simple, Fargo, Raising Arizona, parts of Miller's Crossing,Barton Fink and Big Lebowski (three films I've never been able to watch all the way through for some reason or other, Big Lebowski is Wales favorite movie, I find it unwatchable. We don't talk about it. While I adore Blood Simple and she found it too violent and scary (this from a woman who loves gross out zombie movies such as 28 days, but what-ever.)) My favorite films of the Coens were Blood Simple, Fargo and Raising Arizona. The others have put me to sleep. Since No Country For Old Men is remarkably similar in tone to Blood Simple and Fargo - it's not surprising that I loved it. In my opinion it is the best thing they've done.

The audience was dead silent at the end of the film, sort of shell-shocked. Stumbling out of the theater with little conversation. There was no music over the ending credits - like there usually is. Just dead silence. So it was a remarkably quiet theater as people got up and left.

There's a great piece of dialogue that haunts me from it, all the more so because it addresses something raised in a Buffy comic I'd read earlier and have been thinking about off and on in my brain.
( cut for vague spoilers but no real plot spoilers )

No Country unlike many films is visual and literary - it is a film shock-full of words. We have to listen to the words. The visuals complement the words, showing a harsh, unrelenting landscape, with dark foreboding skies, and windswept desert, rocky, and bare of life. Filmed in the borderland between El Paso and Juarvez - it is a hard country, rocky, tough and breeds tough people. This is the land that haunts many a modern Western novel - the land that Larry McMurty wrote about in books such as Horseman Pass By (Hud) or Lonesome Dove, or that Cormac McCarthy writes about. Not the land we see in the more romantic westerns of Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey. It's the land that is featured in the darker westerns - of Sam Peckinpah. Tough men. No happy endings. No endings at all. Just the continuous crawl.

I'd read before seeing No Country, in the New Yorker - that the film drug in places, that it was slow, so put off seeing it. It's not slow. I was riveted throughout, tense, on the edge of my seat, which was bloody uncomfortable - but unlike Sweeny Todd (a film I enjoyed by the way) - I never noticed it - I was that embroiled in the action.

I can see why it has won so many awards. It is perhaps amongst the best films I've seen. I left the theater in awe, blown away, and changed by what I'd seen. Haunted by the words and the images. Flipping them over in my head. Thinking about it.

I can't see any flaws in the film. It's tight. The performances are tight and well-drawn. I fell into the film. My attention rarely wandered. And I can still vividly remember it over an hour or more later.

It is a violent film. The humor is best described as gallows humor. Or as Tommy Lee Jones character confides at one point to his associate, who has just laughed at something he read from a newspaper - "It's okay, you can laugh. I laughed too. Sometimes it's all you can do..is laugh." But unlike the violence we see on tv or action flicks, the violence has a point, it reveals the pain of it, the consequences. It does not romanticize violence.

If you haven't seen it? I recommend it. Well worth the ten bucks I spent tonight. Yes, my small art theater is now charging ten bucks for films instead of 9. I remember when I thought five was too high.

A Beautiful Sunset - Review of Buffy S8, Issue 11

Was thinking tonight while watching Torchwood - after having read two completely opposite responses to the same episode (one person on my flist adored it, and one thought it was horribly written), that maybe people respond to that which speaks to them? That hits a nerve? Or echoes an experience? Or in some way, sometimes an indescrible one, touches upon a or relates to deeply personal experience, value, belief or emotion? Be it a person, place, piece of artwork, tv show, song, pair of shoes, food, book or film - we will either embrace, reject or be merely ambivalent? I'm not even sure we always know why we've reacted to it in this manner. And in some cases, cover the reaction with all sorts of objective criticisms or accolades of the work or person. I don't know. It's just a theory.

Speaking for myself, I know that this often true. Issue 11 of Buffy S8, much like issue 10 before it, and if I were really honest, most of the tv series did, spoke to me on an emotional and deeply personal level. And I think that when we view art - whether it be a painting, a song, a clay pot, a comic book or a tv show - our emotional response to that piece of art, our ability to identify with the feelings the artist appears to be conveying whether they realize it or not - has a lot to do with how we embrace it.

Review and Personal Analysis of A Beautiful Sunset - Issue 11 of BTVS S8

Whedon's comics are not filled with action - he is deliberately building up to the action over a long period of time. They are not episodic short stories, as I first suspected, but rather chapters in a lenghthy novel. Each episode linking to the next. Revealing a bit more of the characters, plots and themes. And since the novel is titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the focus is on her - in somewhat the same way that the focus is on say Lymond in Dorothy Dunnett's The Chronicles of Lymond. We get other points of view, and are often in points of view that are commenting on the heroine - but not necessarily in a complimentary way - reminding me a great deal of Dunnet's Lymond novels. (Whedon plots his novels and creates characterizations that are suprisingly similar to Dunnett's which explains why there was a fan discussion group that focused on Dunnett and Buffy.) At any rate, I would not be the least bit surprised if the slow build is frustrating a few comic book fans who are used to the more episodic and action packed super-hero comics. While losing the tv fans, who miss the romantic entanglements and screen chemistry of the actors - unused to this format, not to mention the extraordinarly long wait between issues. (Not as bad by the way as the wait between X-Men issues - Whedon may be many things, but a fast writer is not amongst them. I've waited up to six months between X-men issues.) As far as the art goes, it is getting better with each issue. This issue, Jeanty actually managed to put the recognizable dent in Buffy's nose. And I could tell the women apart. While I prefer Cliff Richards, Jeanty did a good job with this issue. Best so far.

Anywho..there is a speech in the middle of the issue, which by itself isn't all that meaningful or fantastic, but if you read it within the context of the whole series and well, if you have experienced something similar on some level (most of us have, I suspect - those who haven't are incredibly lucky) - it will speak to you much as it did me. Differently most likely, but it will. And if you are anything like me, you may feel a little less lonely when you read it. A little less like a freak.
( cut for plot spoilers )