Who is the Luckier?
Below from the midNovember review of No Countryat www.tnr.com
Orr has blog up today with even more links about the greatness with esoteric examples and dissection of No Country.
If you don't go see it on the best screen you can find; well then you don't know nothin, don't appreciate nothin and don't deserve to be reading my blog.
I'm sorry but that is the way I feel about it.
Sam Bobbit of the "advantage, lives on County Road 355, a dirt road."
I've seen it three times and me go twiced more.
And if you appreciate good film and want to see anuthern a friend of mine with his wife recently saw in Paris, not Texas; the google up ferdyonfilm.
But today belongs to Cormac McCarthy who I just missed by a few days on the streets of Knoxville in 79; and the Coen Brothers.
But even as No Country for Old Men recalls past Coen brothers films, it represents something new. Though they have mined literary sources in the past (Hammett for Miller's Crossing, Homer for O Brother), this is the Coens' first true adaptation. And while their trademark flourishes still appear--the meticulous compositions (a pickup on a hill silhouetted against the night sky), the ominously amplified sounds (a candy wrapper uncrinkling, a light bulb being unscrewed), the snatches of absurdist dialogue ("You get a lot of people who come in here with no clothes on?" "No, it's unusual")--they are anchored to something weightier. McCarthy's ferocious tale gives the Coens room to unleash their cinematic gifts, but keeps them from wandering too far afield and losing themselves in the marshes of technical prowess or easy irony.
The result is a masterpiece, a film by turns harrowing and contemplative. There are moments when it is difficult to stay in one's seat--a scene in which Moss is chased down a river by a dog-paddling pit bull; a hotel encounter with Chigurh that is as extraordinary an exercise in sustained suspense as I can recall--and moments when it feels hard to get up out of it. Like the novel, the film ends on one of these latter moments, with the recounting of a dream. It is a dream about death, but a death more welcoming than feared. "You can't stop what's coming," a character advises late in the film, and indeed there's only one thing that comes for all of us. For some people it will be sudden and unexpected, perhaps the violent outcome of an unlucky coin toss. For others, it will accumulate over time, enough time for them to recognize what's been lost, to fall out of step with the world. The very title of No Country for Old Men suggests which people might be the luckier.
CHRISTOPHER ORR is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Orr has blog up today with even more links about the greatness with esoteric examples and dissection of No Country.
If you don't go see it on the best screen you can find; well then you don't know nothin, don't appreciate nothin and don't deserve to be reading my blog.
I'm sorry but that is the way I feel about it.
Sam Bobbit of the "advantage, lives on County Road 355, a dirt road."
I've seen it three times and me go twiced more.
And if you appreciate good film and want to see anuthern a friend of mine with his wife recently saw in Paris, not Texas; the google up ferdyonfilm.
But today belongs to Cormac McCarthy who I just missed by a few days on the streets of Knoxville in 79; and the Coen Brothers.
But even as No Country for Old Men recalls past Coen brothers films, it represents something new. Though they have mined literary sources in the past (Hammett for Miller's Crossing, Homer for O Brother), this is the Coens' first true adaptation. And while their trademark flourishes still appear--the meticulous compositions (a pickup on a hill silhouetted against the night sky), the ominously amplified sounds (a candy wrapper uncrinkling, a light bulb being unscrewed), the snatches of absurdist dialogue ("You get a lot of people who come in here with no clothes on?" "No, it's unusual")--they are anchored to something weightier. McCarthy's ferocious tale gives the Coens room to unleash their cinematic gifts, but keeps them from wandering too far afield and losing themselves in the marshes of technical prowess or easy irony.
The result is a masterpiece, a film by turns harrowing and contemplative. There are moments when it is difficult to stay in one's seat--a scene in which Moss is chased down a river by a dog-paddling pit bull; a hotel encounter with Chigurh that is as extraordinary an exercise in sustained suspense as I can recall--and moments when it feels hard to get up out of it. Like the novel, the film ends on one of these latter moments, with the recounting of a dream. It is a dream about death, but a death more welcoming than feared. "You can't stop what's coming," a character advises late in the film, and indeed there's only one thing that comes for all of us. For some people it will be sudden and unexpected, perhaps the violent outcome of an unlucky coin toss. For others, it will accumulate over time, enough time for them to recognize what's been lost, to fall out of step with the world. The very title of No Country for Old Men suggests which people might be the luckier.
CHRISTOPHER ORR is a senior editor at The New Republic.
posted by foxofbama | 12:37 PM
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