No Country For Old Men

(Movie Review)

In order to try and make my movie viewing more of an interactive activity (and less of a passive mind-numbing one) I've decided to review everything I watch on this blog. And, because I can be pretty rigid about something once I've put my mind to something, for over a year and a half I've managed to review absolutely every movie I've seen during that time.

...Doesn't necessary mean I have something intelligent to say about every movie I watch though.

I always feel intimidated reviewing a Coen brothers movie, because I know film school students and art house movie buffs all over the country are going to be writing (or have already written) their own reviews, and a low brow philistine like myself doesn't have anything intelligent to add to the discussion.

Well, here are my thoughts anyway. Just your average low brow video rental customer’s view from his couch:

*Because I’m so out of touch these days (a by-product of living out in the Japanese countryside) I knew nothing about this movie before I rented it. Which is probably the best way to approach a Coen brother’s movie. From the moment I pressed the play button, I knew nothing about what the plot would be, or what would happen, and just watched everything unfold before me from a starting point of nothing. It was a lot of fun to see where the movie would take me.

*The first couple Coen brothers movies I saw I had a hard time sitting through, because I was very impatient for the story to just get moving. Once I came to accept the fact that the pacing of a Coen brothers film was different, and that the story was just going to meander along on its own time, I started to enjoy their movies a lot more. It’s all a matter of being in the right mind set. You just need to relax and let the movie go where it’s going to go.

* Like a lot of Coen brothers films, this film has an unpredictable feeling. You don’t know who is going to die and who is going to survive. Anyone of the cast feels like they might be vulnerable. Which really adds to the suspense of the whole thing.
The exception to this is the main bad guy, who unfortunately has a bit of “The Terminator” aura around him. He gets in numerous gun fights, gets shot up several times, and yet is always unkillable.
What’s more, the whole plot is structured in such a way that everything revolves around this bad guy, so you know he’s not going to bite it anytime until maybe the end of the film.
….Of course it’s always a lot easier to point out the problem than it is to solve it. I don’t know how you could fix this other than to completely re-write the movie and make a different one. But I think the invulnerableness of the bad guy still took away from the film a bit.

* The movie is set in the Southwest. It’s one of those movies that does a good job of making you feel the sand in between your teeth. You can hear the sand crunch when a character walks. You can practically feel the hot sun. And it has a great cast of cowboy type figures with leathery faces.
Because of the slow pacing of the movie, you get sucked into the setting and you feel like you’re hanging out with these characters; trading Vietnam War stories and wearing cowboy hats as you have another cup of coffee in the diner.
It’s not the world I grew up in for sure, but the movie did a great job of making me feel like I was in the middle of it.

*I think the movie takes place in 1980, if I got the clues right. (At one point a character makes a reference to a 1958 coin as being 22 years old. There’s also a lot of Vietnam Veterans who are middle aged, but not quite old-old yet). The movie never broadcasts the time setting in white letters at the bottom of the screen like another movie might, but makes you work a bit to figure it out. Which I guess is all part of the fun with a movie like this.
--Still, I couldn't help but wonder if there was a reason it was set in 1980. Was there anything about the story line which would have been different if it was set in the present day? Did anyone catch anything?

*The camera is very selective in what it shows and what it doesn't show. Some deaths you see in all their gruesome glory, others are simply implied, and a few you’re left wondering about. Did he kill her, did he not kill her, what actually happened at the end?
This is another one of those films that avoids the typical Hollywood ending, with all the threads neatly tied up. There were a few things I was still wondering about as the film ended.
(Call me a philistine, but I think I might actually prefer the neatly wrapped up Hollywood ending. But it was still an entertaining film.)

Link of the Day
Help Stop a New Atomic Reactor in Michigan

No Country For Old Men: Movie Review (Scripted)