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No Country For Old Men...film review
Feb. 9th, 2008 08:37 pmJust 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.
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.
