No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2007)

Written and Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
Starring: Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly MacDonald, Woody Harrelson, Garret Dillahunt, Tess Harper, Beth Grant

Okay, so, new Coen Brothers movie. Yay! This one is about a man who comes across a heroin deal gone wrong and finds a suitcase full of money and does what anybody would do (what would you do?). Anyway, then he finds himself being tracked by this scary fucking guy who kills people with an air pressure gun. And then some other stuff happens. Tommy Lee Jones stands around in a cowboy hat and Kelly MacDonald does a southern accent (squee?).

So it's pretty gripping. I mean, edge of your seat thriller type thing. The woman sitting behind us in the movie theatre kept gasping and going 'oh no!' whenever anything happened, so I kept laughing which made things a little weird. It's not the kind of movie you should be laughing at.

Oh, yeah, there's funny stuff, the boff dialogue you would expect from a Coen Brothers movie. But generally the thing was gruesome and horrifying.

But hey, I like gruesome and horrifying. I like to be horrified every now and then (in this sense. There are other kinds of horrifying which are just horrifying).

I won't go so far as to say I liked the movie - you can't like something that horrifying. It made my toes curl in horror. But I enjoyed it, I guess. That isn't really a good term either.

Well, anyway. I liked Javier Bardem, even though he freaked the hell out of me. Scary, scary fuckin guy. I kept laughing at Josh Brolin, as I kept thinking of Planet Terror ("I'm going to eat your brain and gain your knowledge..."). I have trouble taking Tommy Lee Jones seriously. My friend has trouble taking Woody Harrelson seriously (but who doesn't, really?). Both of us had trouble accepting Kelly MacDonald's Southern accent. But I do like her. She's cute.

Moving on. My biggest problem with the movie is that it had no ending. This would have worked in a novel, I'm sure, but on screen it's brain-jarringly annoying. It's going along. I'm sitting there going "What's gonna happen?!?!?!". And then it ends. "What the fuck?" said I. "I demand satisfaction". Lot's of movies have open endings, but I feel satisfied at the end (lots of movies have open endings where I don't feel satisfied).

I realize that there is something else going on there, that it did, in fact, have an ending, and a very clever ending at that, but it's beyond my hick brain to comprehend.

Mind you, it's often necessary to see one of their movies twice in order to like it. I'm going to try this technique - I think it might clear things up a lot for me, so I should probably reserve official judgment until such time as I can view it a second time. I wonder if it's still playing? Why yes, it is. Incredible. Maybe I'll wait 'til it goes to Empire Dartmouth (they're prices are about three dollars lower than the other theatres. Tee hee!).

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