Monday, March 10, 2008

Better late than never

There's a movie I've been planning to go see since it came out. I'm not sure when it came out (December? Oh. IMDB says November. Pfft.), but it's coming to DVD this week.

I finally got out to see it. No Country for Old Men was worth it. Sparse and violent, the movie was good. There was no soundtrack, so there were periods of dead silence punctuated only by, say, the ticking of a clock, as in the pauses in the last scene, a monologue. The characters, which were well written to begin with, were cast and acted well (especially Chigurh, the ultimate villain *shudder*). Cormac McCarthy's been described as a humorless writer, but his brand of humor is bleaker, more like gallows humor, and it came through in the movie. The ending was deliciously ambiguous ("That's it?" a couple other moviegoers asked each other as the credits started to roll).

I'm not pretentious enough to say how many stars or thumbs up it deserves, but I enjoyed it. Now I just need to go back and finish reading the book.

...Post is late again. Oh bother.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

saw no country for old men the other day, it's pleasantly unconventional...

dumbfounding form a moral angle, but that can be a good thing.

Scrivener said...

I loved it. Loved it.

Except I had gone to see it the evening after I had just found out two more friends of mine had been diagnosed with cancer, and my mother-in-law too on the day before (though hers turned out to be minor). My best friend had been diagnosed only a few months earlier, too. The movie's brutal portrayal of just how inexplicable and random death and violence are, and of our attempts to manage and circumvent them through narrative, had me really freaking out about half an hour after coming out of the theater. I think it was the first time I felt, in a real deep sense, the fear that I might die--mainly, that I might die and leave my daughters here, entirely in the hands of my almost-ex.

I'm not sure I've ever had such an overwhelming personal response to any other film ever. (Obviously, it was more than just the film going on with me, but I think it's what sort of coalesced some of those fears and brought them before me.)