No Myths For You
By Steve
So, I started my Saturday morning with a lovely, 11:20AM showing of No Country For Old Men, which is as bleak a movie as you may see this year. It’s about mythology, or at least how bullshit most mythology really is. It’s about romancing a past that doesn’t exist. It’s about fate, or at least its cousin dumb luck. It’s a movie about a guy who finds money, but it’s really just about a bunch of shit that happens. It’s about random violence, and horrible, horrible planned violence.
And it has Javier Bardem giving the year’s most chilling performance. And Tommy Lee Jones giving a profoundly sad one. And Josh Brolin giving a surprisingly subtle and fantastic one. And Kelly Macdonald doing an amazing job hiding her Scottish accent behind a thick Texas drawl, and breaking your heart in the process.
I’ve read the book (by Cormac McCarthy), and it’s a pretty faithful adaptation by those lovable pranksters the Coen brothers. But it’s by far their most straightforward movie in years. It’s not clever, it’s not snarky. It has black humor, and it looks gorgeous. It moves slowly, lingering over every pool of blood. And it has almost no music, just a lot of ambient sounds, like someone unscrewing a lightbulb. It’s full of tension, but has little action.
So, go see it, friend-o.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
And it has almost no music, just a lot of ambient sounds, like the sound of someone unscrewing a lightbulb.
That’s my favorite kind of background.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
you watched this at 11:20 am?! you’ve got guts of steel, friend-o.