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No Country for Old Men-The Coen Brothers film


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I just came back from seeing it. I had a great time watching it and seeing the story develop. Some people seemed a little disappointed (it was really packed for a 1:40 showing) but maybe they have never read any Cormac McCarthy!

Seriously, the actors, direction, and landscape seemed perfect.

Has anyone had a chance to see this?

I think it is currently in limited release for a week or two.

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I just came back from seeing it. I had a great time watching it and seeing the story develop. Some people seemed a little disappointed (it was really packed for a 1:40 showing) but maybe they have never read any Cormac McCarthy!

Seriously, the actors, direction, and landscape seemed perfect.

Has anyone had a chance to see this?

I think it is currently in limited release for a week or two.

My wife is a big Coen Brothers fan, I'll ask her if she knows anything about the movie.

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Just asked. She knows nothing about it. <_<

Not that much of a fan then.

This has been discussed for months in the film media.

Great reviews. Check out http://www.rottentomatoes.com

Village Voice says it may be the best Coen brothers film ever.

Not playing here yet. Opens soon.

Filmed in the area I live in.

Cormac McCarthy lives here too - although is pretty reclusive.

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I've been looking forward to this one more than any other movie all year. Unfortunately, its not playing at any theaters near here yet. I'll report back when I see it.

I guess it depends on your definition of "here." It's at Landmark's Century Centre in Chicago and the CineArts6 in Evanston.

I probably will skip it. I do see that the Music Box (just down the street from me) is doing Blade Runner the Final Cut this weekend, and I may try to get to that.

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Been getting great reviews, but sounds too violent for my taste.

... and I really like the Coens.

I gather you didn't much care for "Blood Simple", "Miller's Crossing", "Fargo", "The Man Who Wasn't There" either. They all have their fair share of violence but are in varying degrees, wonderful Coen Brothers films.

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Been getting great reviews, but sounds too violent for my taste.

... and I really like the Coens.

I gather you didn't much care for "Blood Simple", "Miller's Crossing", "Fargo", "The Man Who Wasn't There" either. They all have their fair share of violence but are in varying degrees, wonderful Coen Brothers films.

Haven't seen Blood Simple since it came out.

I didn't think that The Man Who Wasn't There was all that violent, plus it was in B&W and somewhat "cartoon-y".

As for Miller's Crossing, I've never seen the entire film so I can't comment.

I did have trouble with some of the violence in Fargo.

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Just asked. She knows nothing about it. <_<

Not that much of a fan then.

This has been discussed for months in the film media.

Great reviews. Check out http://www.rottentomatoes.com

Village Voice says it may be the best Coen brothers film ever.

Not playing here yet. Opens soon.

Filmed in the area I live in.

Cormac McCarthy lives here too - although is pretty reclusive.

Yeah, it turns that she's not as huge of a fan as I thoght. She actually only liked Fargo but added that she thought that "O' Brother Where Art Thou?" was total crap and the soundtrack was just a bad" :rfr

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Badlands

Coen Brothers transcend themselves with No Country for Old Men

by Scott Foundas

November 6th, 2007 12:53 PM

"Hold still"—it's what the hunters say to the hunted in the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men.

The first time we hear it, it's the out-of-work Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) whispering optimistically to the antelope he spies through his rifle sight while perched on the crest of a West Texas ridge. A bit later, it's the steely assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) instructing the terrified motorist to whose skull he has just placed the lethal end of a pressurized cattle gun. Already by that point, not very far into the film, we know that one stands in Chigurh's way at one's usually immediate peril. In an early scene, we've seen this tall, saucer-eyed man with the Cousin Itt haircut and indeterminate accent escape from police custody by drawing a naive deputy sheriff into a choke-hold pas de deux that turns the precinct's linoleum floor into an abstract frieze of scuff marks and sinew.

"Hold still" is also something that the Coen Brothers seem to be saying to the audience throughout No Country for Old Men, which is the most measured, classical film of their 23-year career, and maybe the best. Coming on the heels of the shrill, mannered Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, you'd scarcely have thought them capable of it. There are echoes of earlier Coen films here—in the Texas setting (Blood Simple) and the idea of simple, small-town folk caught up in criminal business (Fargo). But unlike the loquacious eccentrics that the Coens have placed at the center of most of their movies, the characters in No Country for Old Men are stoic, solitary figures who feel most at home in desolate landscapes, alone but for their fellow predators. And we become one with them, seeing and (especially) hearing things as they do—subtle anomalies in the atmosphere and terrain, like the faint jangling of keys in an abandoned vehicle in a desert clearing where bad men have recently been engaging in bad business. It is to this grisly scene—a drug deal gone awry—that Chigurh journeys in search of a briefcase piled high with cash (two million in 1980 dollars). But Moss has been there first, and he left just enough of a scent for Chigurh to track.

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is, for most of its running time, a cleverly triangulated cat-and-mouse pursuit in which Chigurh stays a few short paces behind Moss, while the sheriff, Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), closes in on them both. And if Chigurh is the movie's phantom bogeyman, then Bell is its moral compass, albeit one with its needle pointing straight to hell. A onetime believer in the forces of law and order, he has been worn down by what he sees on his beat and reads in the newspapers and has the look of a man searching for salvation in a godless world. Whether the good old days Bell pines for—the one where evil had a more easily recognizable face—ever existed is another matter entirely, one No Country for Old Men doesn't endeavor to resolve.

The mechanics of No Country for Old Men recall those of a vintage film noir—as gripping and mordantly funny a treatise on the corrosive power of greed as The Killing and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were before it. In terms of filmmaking and storytelling craft, it is a work destined to be studied in film schools for generations to come, from the threatening beauty of cinematographer Roger Deakins's O'Keeffe-like images to what is surely the most pulse-raising scene of motel-room suspense since Marion Crane took her fateful shower. There isn't a moment here that feels false, less than fully considered, or outside of the Coens' control. (Nor does the movie ever feel studied and inert in the way movies so carefully planned and executed sometimes can.) Then there is Bardem, whose Chigurh is so fully realized psychologically and physically that his every gesture bristles with creepy fascination, whether he's baiting an unsuspecting gas-station attendant into a life-or-death coin toss or merely sidestepping the encroaching puddle of blood he's created on a hotel-room floor.

It's easy to imagine how the Coens, whose Achilles' heel has always been their predilection for smug irony and easy caricature, might have turned McCarthy's taciturn Texans into simplistic western-mythos archetypes: the amoral criminal, the righteous peacekeeper, and the naive but basically good-hearted rube in over his head. Instead, they've made a film of great, enveloping gravitas, in which words like "hero" and "villain" carry ever less weight the deeper we follow the characters into their desperate journeys. Like McCarthy, the Coens are markedly less interested in who (if anyone) gets away with the loot than in the primal forces that urge the characters forward. "They slaughter cattle a lot different these days," sighs a weary Bell late in the film. But slaughter them they still do, and in the end, everyone in No Country for Old Men is both hunter and hunted, members of some endangered species trying to forestall their extinction. Even Anton Chigurh, it turns out, bleeds when wounded.

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i saw it last night but i was having stomach problems and was twisting and turning in my seat as i tried to hold in farts and my stomach was knotting into painful cramps and i anticpated getting out of the theater and rocking a monstrous dump and the guy next to me was a loud breather which is a big peeve of mine so by the end i totally lost focus and suddenly it was over and i was confused. the young woman i went with was very moved by the movie but i have no idea what was going on towards the end there. i was watching the movie without seeing anything thinking about my toilet.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

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This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

No Country for Old Men

Richard Foreman/Miramax

Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men."

November 9, 2007

He Found a Bundle of Money, and Now There’s Hell to Pay

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: November 9, 2007

“No Country for Old Men,” adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is bleak, scary and relentlessly violent. At its center is a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop.

But while that chilly sensation is a sign of terror, it may equally be a symptom of delight. The specter of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut, will feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

So before I go any further, allow me my moment of bliss at the sheer brilliance of the Coens’ technique. And it is mostly theirs. The editor, Roderick Jaynes, is their longstanding pseudonym. The cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and the composer, Carter Burwell, are collaborators of such long standing that they surely count as part of the nonbiological Coen fraternity. At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity.

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming.

By the time this moment arrives, though, you have already been pulled into a seamlessly imagined and self-sufficient reality. The Coens have always used familiar elements of American pop culture and features of particular American landscapes to create elaborate and hermetic worlds. Mr. McCarthy, especially in the western phase of his career, has frequently done the same. The surprise of “No Country for Old Men,” the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.

Mr. McCarthy’s book, for all its usual high-literary trappings (many philosophical digressions, no quotation marks), is one of his pulpier efforts, as well as one of his funniest. The Coens, seizing on the novel’s genre elements, lower the metaphysical temperature and amplify the material’s dark, rueful humor. It helps that the three lead actors — Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin along with Mr. Bardem — are adept at displaying their natural wit even when their characters find themselves in serious trouble.

The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.

Mr. Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty-hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh’s mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth — just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell — and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.

And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Mr. Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to get away with taking the $2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.

Taken together, these three hombres are not quite the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but each man does carry some allegorical baggage. Mr. Jones’s craggy, vinegary warmth is well suited to the kind of righteous, decent lawman he has lately taken to portraying. Ed Tom Bell is almost continuous with the retired M.P. Mr. Jones played in Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” and the sheriff in his own “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Mr. Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling.

Still, if “No Country for Old Men” were a simple face-off between the sheriff’s goodness and Chigurh’s undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card — a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen — and Mr. Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.

And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, “No Country for Old Men” leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

“No Country for Old Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A lot of killing.

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i saw it last night but i was having stomach problems and was twisting and turning in my seat as i tried to hold in farts and my stomach was knotting into painful cramps and i anticpated getting out of the theater and rocking a monstrous dump and the guy next to me was a loud breather which is a big peeve of mine so by the end i totally lost focus and suddenly it was over and i was confused. the young woman i went with was very moved by the movie but i have no idea what was going on towards the end there. i was watching the movie without seeing anything thinking about my toilet.

Sounds like a Coen movie within a Coen movie.

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i saw it last night but i was having stomach problems and was twisting and turning in my seat as i tried to hold in farts and my stomach was knotting into painful cramps and i anticpated getting out of the theater and rocking a monstrous dump and the guy next to me was a loud breather which is a big peeve of mine so by the end i totally lost focus and suddenly it was over and i was confused. the young woman i went with was very moved by the movie but i have no idea what was going on towards the end there. i was watching the movie without seeing anything thinking about my toilet.

:lol: So not all of the reviews are positive...

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Just saw the movie and the actor playing the psychopath killer is the scariest character i've seen on film in a while. He looks like a middle aged Johnny Cash with an haircut gone wrong.

The movie is very strong, great storytelling and it is a thrilling flick that keeps you on the edge of our seats. For those who are squeamish about violence although there are some brutal murders depicted, there is no voyeuristic instinct that will be filled, they are mostly shown in a chirurgical fashion, well almost.

The psychological violence given by the Anton character is way harder than any violence shown on screen.

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I love Coen Brothers films and was eager to see this one which I did this past weekend. For over an hour and a half, it was riveting and I agree with all the reviews that praise the Coens and their collaborators for their filmmaking prowess. Acting, especially that of Javier Barden whom I've enjoyed in several of his Spanish language films, was great. The fault AFAIAC lies I guess with Cormac McCarthy's novel to which the Coens, I understand, adhered to completely.

I didn't at all appreciate much of the philosophical ramblings particularly during the last 20 minutes or so of the film especially in light (NO SPOILERS INTENDED) of this viewer's terribly thwarted expectations. Most of the attendees left the theater muttering to one another and more than a few opined to complete strangers the equivalent of WTF???? The ending IMO is enough to kill the commercial appeal of this film by word of mouth.

For my money, "Miller's Crossing", "Fargo", "O Brother, Where Art Thou" and even I daresay, "The Big Lebowski". are my favorite Coen Brothers endeavors.

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I love Coen Brothers films and was eager to see this one which I did this past weekend. For over an hour and a half, it was riveting and I agree with all the reviews that praise the Coens and their collaborators for their filmmaking prowess. Acting, especially that of Javier Barden whom I've enjoyed in several of his Spanish language films, was great. The fault AFAIAC lies I guess with Cormac McCarthy's novel to which the Coens, I understand, adhered to completely.

I didn't at all appreciate much of the philosophical ramblings particularly during the last 20 minutes or so of the film especially in light (NO SPOILERS INTENDED) of this viewer's terribly thwarted expectations. Most of the attendees left the theater muttering to one another and more than a few opined to complete strangers the equivalent of WTF???? The ending IMO is enough to kill the commercial appeal of this film by word of mouth.

I felt pretty much the same way the first time I saw it, but seeing it a second time with no expectations to be thwarted I wasn't as unhappy about the ending.

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Just got home from seeing it tonight. Thoroughly absorbing - definitely among the Coens' best. At the end I felt there were unanswered questions, but ultimately decided that the details didn't matter. It was the way the journey unfolded, and the unswerving single-mindedness of the Javier Bardem character, that were at the center of the movie.

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Been getting great reviews, but sounds too violent for my taste.

... and I really like the Coens.

I gather you didn't much care for "Blood Simple", "Miller's Crossing", "Fargo", "The Man Who Wasn't There" either. They all have their fair share of violence but are in varying degrees, wonderful Coen Brothers films.

Haven't seen Blood Simple since it came out.

I didn't think that The Man Who Wasn't There was all that violent, plus it was in B&W and somewhat "cartoon-y".

Wait just a minute...a Coen brothers film that was "cartoon-y"???? I'm shocked, SHOCKED...

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