No Country for Old Men: The Poll

No Country for Old Men: The Poll

****
15
47%
*** 1/2
9
28%
***
6
19%
** 1/2
1
3%
**
1
3%
* 1/2
0
No votes
*
0
No votes
1/2 *
0
No votes
0
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 32

Mister Tee
Tenured Laureate
Posts: 8637
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 2:57 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Post by Mister Tee »

I'm in dws' corner. I love Miller's Crossing, but have otherwise been unthrilled with the Coens' oeuvre -- apart from Frances McDormand, never got the hoopla over Fargo, and shake my head when I hear people call The Big Lebowski "a classic".

But digging up and highlighting two certifiably negative reviews of a movie when there are dozen of enthusiastic ones make it seem you're serving an agenda rather than objective truth.
dws1982
Emeritus
Posts: 3791
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 9:28 pm
Location: AL
Contact:

Post by dws1982 »

OscarGuy wrote:Oh yes. 3.5 stars is a rave! The next thing you'll tell me is that B+ is the best grade anyone could get.
Given that the guys at Slant Magazine are notorious hardasses when it comes to grading, yes, three-and-a-half stars are a rave for them.

I'm not sure why you have such a vendetta against this. I'm no Coen Brothers fan--other than Miller's Crossing and maybe Barton Fink, I've never cared for any Coen Brothers films--but I just don't understand what you have against this.
User avatar
OscarGuy
Site Admin
Posts: 13668
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 12:22 am
Location: Springfield, MO
Contact:

Post by OscarGuy »

Here's the other:

Hollywood Reporter
Ray Bennett

Bottom Line: Intensely thrilling crime chase overcomes plot lapses but turns limp at the end.

CANNES -- Joel and Ethan Coen's In Competition film is titled "No Country for Old Men," but it's set in an unforgiving 1980s West Texas landscape that appears to be populated with nothing but old men. Lawmen, mostly, like Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell, pining for the old days when outlaws weren't relentless killing machines like the one who has come to menace his hardscrabble community.

The film attains an extraordinary level of tension as a fiercely dedicated drug runner named Anton Chigurh, brilliantly played by Javier Bardem, pursues a man who has stumbled upon and taken his money. The Coens' typically superior filmmaking sustains the electrifying mood for most of the picture, but they are undone by being too faithful to the source novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Plot holes, cracker-barrel philosophizing and setting a major climactic scene offscreen serve to undo all their fine work. The entire premise of the film is to pitch three men onto a path that will lead to a final reckoning, but it just peters out. Audiences will flock to see a mainstream Coen Bros. film with such a colorful villain, but word-of-mouth about its fizzled conclusion may do damage at the boxoffice.

There is a lot of carnage in "Old Men," and some of it has already taken place when Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes across the scene of what is obviously a big-time drug deal gone bad. Bodies litter the ground between shot-out vehicles, there's a truckload of neatly packed dope and a satchel containing millions of dollars. One man remains alive and asks for water. Absurdly, for a seasoned hunter on that arid terrain, Moss doesn't have any. He takes the money back to the trailer he shares with a devoted young wife played convincingly by Kelly MacDonald, but in the middle of the night he is stricken with guilt. Not about taking the money but about leaving a dying man with no water. So goes in the dark to the isolated killing scene where he knows there's a vast quantity of drugs.

Inevitably, men with guns who have a proprietary interest in the contraband make their presence felt and Moss is fast on the run. Leading the chase is Chigurh, a man of perhaps East European extraction, who carries a tank of compressed air attached to the kind of bolt gun used to slaughter cattle. It sounds like something Carl Hiaasen would come up with, but Bardem plays the drug runner with such humorless conviction that his weapon of choice becomes truly threatening. Chiguhr, however, joins the list of implacable murderers such as Hannibal Lecter and the Terminator whose encounters with terrified innocent people are played for laughs. Chiguhr mostly just slays anyone he encounters but now and then he lets the toss of a coin decide someone's fate.

Sheriff Bell is on the case, looking to prevent the madman from killing too many people, especially Moss, but instead of being the Tommy Lee who always gets his man, this officer of the law is an ineffectual old windbag. Woody Harrelson has a brief and redundant role as a mistakenly cocky bounty hunter.

Brolin is terrific as the likable country boy who sees his shot at the main chance and grabs it, although mid-way through the film when he has survived long enough to reach Mexico, he inexplicably doesn't stay there. His vet is tough and resourceful, though, and the film cries out for a resolution that, if not a happy one, would at least be satisfying. But McCarthy and the Coens would rather offer macho posturing about lost ideals than get down to business.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
User avatar
OscarGuy
Site Admin
Posts: 13668
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 12:22 am
Location: Springfield, MO
Contact:

Post by OscarGuy »

Oh yes. 3.5 stars is a rave! The next thing you'll tell me is that B+ is the best grade anyone could get.

But, in the interest of proving the raves WON'T all be pouring in, here is the first of two reviews that do not rave about the film.

This one from Andrew Sarris is a combination review, but he doesn't really like either film...but he gave Before the Devil a Fresh Rating on RT while he gave No Country a rotten one.

Just Shoot Me! Nihilism Crashes Lumet and Coen Bros.
'Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead' and 'No Country for Old Men' are well suited to our depressing times. But still!

by Andrew Sarris
Two of the darkest death-driven films of the 45th New York Film Festival are both American works directed by filmmakers who, though no strangers to noirish projects in the past, have attained new heights, or is it depths, of malignancy and morbidity, which, I suppose, is fitting for the increasingly dismal and depressing times in which we live. And I am not saying this simply because I am too rapidly approaching my 79th year on this reportedly endangered planet.

Anyway, the two films in question are Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, from a screenplay by Kelly Masterson, and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. If I prefer the former to the latter, it is because it is ultimately less nihilistic in tone and spirit, and nihilism has never been my strong suit in the cinema, though I imagine younger cultists of a certain type can never get enough of it.

By contrast, Mr. Lumet and Ms. Masterson, with their intricate narrative structure, have fashioned a veritable Greek tragedy with overpoweringly Oedipal overtones. This they have accomplished with an unusually early staging of a terribly botched robbery of a small Westchester jewelry store, which in an ordinary caper movie would constitute the narrative’s suspenseful climax, and then flashing back to the genesis of this crime. So, obviously, Mr. Lumet and company are after bigger game, and after almost two hours of time-juggling, they bag it.

The story centers on two brothers, the elder and more manipulative one played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the younger and more vulnerable one played by Ethan Hawke. The elder brother is married to an attractive woman played by Marisa Tomei, but after a steamy session in the sack, followed by a deflatingly postcoital wifely remark, and a dispiriting session at the office, it becomes apparent that Mr. Hoffman’s character is living well beyond his means, and since his firm is facing an imminent audit by the Internal Revenue Service, he begins desperately looking for some quick cash to forestall his arrest for embezzlement. In the venture he has devised, he enlists the help of his down-and-out younger brother. Needy as he is, the younger sibling is shocked to discover that the older brother is planning to rob the family’s small jewelry store, owned and operated by their parents, played by Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris. The older brother is all breezy reassurance as he insists that it should be a cinch for the younger brother to execute the robbery with a fake gun and a hooded mask to conceal his identity. And why is the elder brother choosing not to become involved in the action? As he patiently explains to his would-be patsy, he is too well known in the neighborhood to be seen there. It becomes apparent from the elder’s practiced manner that he has been conning his brother all their lives.

In his turn, the younger brother cannot bear to brandish even a fake gun at his own mother, and so he solicits a hardened felon of his acquaintance to perform the heist for some of the advance money his older brother has given him to clinch the deal. Unfortunately, the felon doesn’t believe in fake guns, with the result that he and the unexpectedly feisty mother of the two brothers succeed only in killing each other as the younger brother flees in panic from the bloody scene.

The widowed father is bereft at first, but eventually becomes determined to find the killer’s accomplice in the getaway car that was seen speeding away from the jewelry store. To cover his and his brother’s tracks, the Hoffman character has to kill again and again. Inexorably, father and son are drawn into a final, fatal confrontation. The 83-year-old Mr. Lumet, who has handled such immortals as Brando and Magnani in his career, expertly extracts individually charismatic performances from Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Hawke, Mr. Finney, Ms. Harris and Ms. Tomei. Even so, I preferred his 2006 Find Me Guilty, which made my 10-best list that year. It was even less nihilistic.

As for the nihilism on display in No Country for Old Men, the collaboration between the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy was a marriage made in heaven or, more likely, hell. Mr. McCarthy has reportedly praised the movie for remaining faithful to the book, and well he might, if only for all the casting coups, starting off with Javier Bardem’s uncannily apt incarnation of evil as Anton Chigurn, a subhuman killing machine with a touch of whimsy in his expression and in his soothing funeral director’s voice. When the Coen Brothers appeared on the stage of Frederic P. Rose Hall in the Time Warner Center with the members of their cast, they introduced Mr. Bardem as their own Lee Van Cleef, a generally villainous character actor in the Sergio Leone Western cycle. But whereas Mr. Van Cleef’s bad guys always came to a bad end in the final draws of the Leone movies, Mr. Bardem’s Chigurn chugs through Texas like an unchecked force of nature. That is one of the reasons I prefer Leone’s oeuvre to that of the Coen brothers and Mr. McCarthy, despite their aforementioned casting coups with Mr. Bardem, and almost as impressively with Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell; Josh Brolin as Moss, Chigurn’s ill-fated main adversary; Woody Harrelson as the unflappable mob troubleshooter, Carson Wells, who also runs afoul of Chigurn; and Kelly Macdonald as Moss’ tormented wife, the only significant female presence in an overwhelmingly masculine epic with its lavishly detailed explorations of male survival skills.

Mr. McCarthy has won just about every literary honor while being likened to Ernest Hemingway for his minimalist style, and to Samuel Beckett for his volcanic bleakness of outlook on matters of life and death. I happened to find No Country for Old Men an absorbing read, but it left me all empty inside. I must confess that I couldn’t get very far into Blood Meridian, another of his books that was recommended to me. So, I suppose, I have chosen to live out my life without getting involved with Mr. McCarthy’s literary outlook.

Still, I suspect that his clouded vision of existence is somewhat too grim and dark for even the most noirish movie genre. He makes Elmore Leonard look like a barrel of laughs, and Faulkner a beacon of hope. Nonetheless, some of the pithiest exchanges in the movie were taken almost verbatim from the book. I may be clearly in the minority on this movie. It will almost certainly be number one on my list of movies that other people liked and I didn’t. I will not describe the narrative in any great detail both because I would be perceived as spoiling the “fun” of discovering the many surprises for yourself, and because I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility. Yet, I’m not sorry I saw it over a running time of 122 minutes, just about the length of time I’d like to spend on a quick in-and-out visit to hell.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
Sabin
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10747
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 12:52 am
Contact:

Post by Sabin »

I'm just going to get the ball rolling on rave reviews because they're going to keep pouring in until the end of the year.

***1/2/**** from Nick Schager.

Joel and Ethan Coen bring a touch of levity to their faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's relentlessly bleak 2003 novel No Country for Old Men, though it's the type of nervous humor born from relieving immense tension. The Coens' first film since their leaden remake of The Ladykillers is an exceptional return to their Blood Simple roots, offering up a crime saga in which money is almost as irresistible as bad choices are inevitable. Their cynical streak finds its perfect complement in McCarthy's gloomy tale of Biblical-scale chaos in 1980 Texas, and yet the Coens nonetheless locate the black comedy hidden within the acclaimed author's terse, punctuation-sparse prose. Brusque exchanges and austere violence are the story's stock-in-trade, with both elements so downbeat and harsh that they occasionally veer close to absurdity, thereby providing the filmmaking siblings with opportunities to wryly alleviate the oppressive despair and viciousness that hovers over the proceedings in the same way that the enormous Western landscape and its weighty silence hang over its human inhabitants. As Tommy Lee Jones's sheriff Ed Tom Bell says in reference to a particularly grim anecdote, "I laugh sometimes. 'Bout the only thing you can do."

Hunting out on the expansive plains, Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a gruesome scene: vehicles abandoned, heavily armed men dead (aside from a solitary survivor begging for agua), a pickup truck flatbed full of heroin, and—a little ways off, next to another stiff—a suitcase full of $2 million in cash. Moss discovers this mess by following a trail of blood spied on the dry, cracked earth, a perceptiveness that immediately marks him as a man attuned to the land's rugged ferociousness, and thus makes his subsequent decision to take the cash and run a consciously foolish one. Moss realizes hard men will soon come for what's theirs but absconds with the money anyway. Overstepping his boundaries at great risk, he's something of a noir protagonist, albeit minus the romanticism, since the Coens—diligently following McCarthy's lead—depict his momentous choice as the unwise but natural act of someone bred in a lunatic world. Unlike Ed Tom, whose old-school values are ill equipped to confront the mayhem of the modern era, and very much like his pursuer, the psychopathic Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem)—who, later, will also ascertain knowledge from blood on the ground—Moss does what he does because he's the product of a fundamentally out-of-whack environment.

This generational gap is intrinsic to No Country, which laments with confused, terrified resignation the dawn of a new, more insane age—or, as one cop puts it, "the dismal tide." Ed Tom is the story's nominal good-guy detective, attempting to figure out the who, what, where, when, and why of Moss's disappearance and the carnage wrought by Chigurh, but he's really just a street sweeper, left to clean up the mess left in these two younger men's wakes. The Coens' concise, efficient script proficiently captures McCarthy's melancholic view of old-young disparities, whether it be Ed Tom's utilization of horses to scour the desolate desert for clues, or his bafflement at the callous disregard for the dead (and propriety) shown by a guy transporting corpses to the morgue. Meanwhile, their economical, decidedly un-flashy direction (mimicking McCarthy's writing, and aided by longtime collaborator Roger Deakins's beautifully severe cinematography) repeatedly conveys narrative undercurrents in entrancingly subtle ways, such that the plethora of animal carcasses, instances of man-versus-beast violence, and Ed Tom's yarn about a slaughterhouse mishap coalesce into a chilling portrait of anarchic interspecies warfare.

At the center of this maelstrom is the cattle stun gun-wielding Chigurh, a madman with a Prince Valiant bowl-cut and an expression both bemused and remorseless. His methodical comportment, like that exhibited by Moss when hiding his stolen loot in a motel room air duct, makes him seem innately in harmony with his surroundings. And yet the crazed glint in his eyes simultaneously casts him as an alien, an intruder recently arrived from Hades to tender unholy blessings (as during a lethal carjacking) and confession (to a gas station owner). Bardem plays Chigurh like the calmest lunatic known to heaven or hell, and he's never more frightening than when uttering, in his bizarro bass voice, the faux term-of-endearment "friend-o" to prospective prey. Chigurh's stillness is emblematic of the Coens' use of surface tranquility to conceal latent brutality, as well as an external reflection of his fatalism. The villain's habit of granting victims a chance at amnesty via a coin flip turns out to be the sole exception to his governing belief that he's incapable of affecting ongoing events, all of which he implies are byproducts of everything that's come before. It's a pessimism shared by the film, which makes clear (spoiler alert!) the unavoidability and inconsequentiality of Llewelyn and wife Carla Jean's (Kelly Macdonald) deaths—just two more drops of blood for the thirsty Texas earth—by keeping their murders off-screen.

"You're not cut out for this," a drug kingpin's hired hand (Woody Harrelson) tells Llewelyn, and though that's technically true, the increasingly bullet-riddled Llewelyn remains better suited for his situation than his elders, such as a senior citizen who picks him up on the side of the road and—revealing an amusing lack of perspective—tells him, "Hitchhiking is dangerous." Thanks to its dour depiction of unreasonable, unstoppable evil, the film courts topical terrorism-related allegorical interpretations, even as it strives for Old Testament classicism. The Coens don't shy away from McCarthy's epically dark aspirations but their touch is a tad drier, affording their superb cast's performances room to breathe, and allowing the action's bursts of maliciousness to resound with greater impact. An even more forceful impression, however, is left by the mournful epilogue, in which Jones's weary, admittedly "outmatched" sheriff resigns in defeat to a universe he no longer comprehends. His recurring attempts to understand the modern condition through the filter of old tall tales are ultimately, pitifully futile. Yet if this failure represents an admission that the past, despite having begat the here and now, holds no keys to understanding the present, it also demands the creation of contemporary fictions to help make sense of the new world madness. With the masterful No Country, the Coens and McCarthy give us one.
"How's the despair?"
Post Reply

Return to “2000 - 2007”