1243 No Country for Old Men

[Cold Bishop]

Having just read RED HARVEST not long ago, I could say that Kurosawa only lifted the basic idea of a man pitting fueding gangs against eachother. YOJIMBO's plotline isn't nearly as expansive as the novels, nor does it tackle the idea of corruption as much as Hammet's novel. However, I would definitely reccomend the book regardless, as I think it's the epitomy of hard-boiled fiction. Ironically, I have yet to read THE GLASS KEY.

[bufordsharkley]

I agree that Yojimbo is only a loose adaptation of Red Harvest. Miller's Crossing owes a credit to Hammett only as much as The Big Lebowski owes a credit to Chandler; his fingerprints are all over the movie (hell, The New Yorker dismissed Miller's as merely a "clever reading of Hammett"), yet it isn't a faithful adaptation to any one piece of writing that Hammett did-- it's a loving pastiche, so obvious that a credit isn't necessary.

Some moments and quotes, (including the relationship between Tom and Leo, Caspar's opening-scene standoff, and Verna's line "The original Miss Jesus,") are lifted almost perfectly from The Glass Key, yet the plot has almost nothing in common, sharing more basics with Red Harvest. To confound things, other Hammettisms abound-- for instance, a good number of the characters names are lifted from the story "The Big Knockover."

[HerrSchreck]

Nonetheless I think MILLERS CROSSING by far their best film, then RAISING ARIZONA, FARGO, then some of FINK. Problem with the Coens is they are their own biggest fans, and every setpiece of every one of their films since FARGO is written with the self-conscious intention of having what they believe people think is the thing called The Coen Touch... like an irritating comedian laughing after every single one of his own jokes. I personally cannot stand these two imbeciles nowadays, because in my opinion they have turned out to be perhaps the biggest damned letdown in modern mainstream film over the past 20 yrs-- all on sheer ego, condescention to audience (listening to them snidely giggletalk about how much 'America' is going to really love the main character of THE MAN WHO WASNT THERE, and create buttons & bumper stickers of him, annoyed me to high hell), and fascination with their own artistic freedom. What a waste. They make me nuts because I started out as a rabid, maniacal total fan, seeing their stuff in the cinema multiple times and telling everyone I could about these dudes... they should be beaten silly with the reels to O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?

What a waste of potential-- and precious artistic freedom, so prized and rare nowadays.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

I disagree somewhat. While it's true, their last two films were major disappointments (esp. The Ladykillers which was painfully bad), they had a pretty awesome track record up until that point. The Man Who Wasn't There was a fantastic homage to the old b&w noirs and yet they also managed to inject, strangely enough, some of the '50s sci-fi in there as well. And it worked, IMO. Not to mention the incredibly restrained performance they got out of Billy Bob Thornton (his best to date). This was a fantastic film. And yeah, O' Brother, Where Art Thou? is probably one of their more popular crowd pleasers but still a damn fine film nonetheless with a fantastic comedic performance from George Clooney (who woulda thought?) and a pretty clever tweaking of The Odyssey.

I do agree that Miller's Crossing is still probably their best film to date... altho, The Big Lebowski is a close second followed by Barton Fink but it depends on my mood as they are all so good.

[Titus]

I agree that they occasionally strain for quirky effect. The character idiosyncracies that they effortlessly spliced into their characters early in their career have begun to comprise their entire characterizations. The last two films they've made have been egregious (particularly THE LADYKILLERS, which was painfully bad).

I'm not sure I'd credit that to self-congratualation and condescension, though. I remember reading Frances McDormand, in response to a question as to why France seems to be more receptive to the Coens' work than America, answering that they "get" their films more over there, and Joel promptly disagreed with her. The comments about Ed Crane's would-be "popularity" didn't strike me as snide so much as playfully aware that they're working in a niche. The whole track seemed more perfunctory than anything else, with Thornton having to pry any sort of comments from Joel, and Ethan adding pointless anecdotes here and there (some of which I'm sure were made up--didn't Thornton and Ethan carry on about "Rhoderick Jaynes" at one point?). The only particuarly worthwhile comment during the track was Ethan's remark that Crane introduced himself "as if he were apologizing for it". It was filler, probably done by the duo just to get people off their back regarding their reluctance to do commentaries.

They seem to have been on cruise control for nearly a decade now, making only one "serious" piece since FARGO (and I thought TMWWT was very much a return to form). Hopefully the rampant criticism of their last two offerings wakes them up.

FWIW, I also agree that MILLER'S CROSSING is easily their best picture.

[HerrSchreck]

[ The Man Who Wasn't There was a fantastic homage to the old b&w noirs and yet they also managed to inject, strangely enough, some of the '50s sci-fi in there as well. And it worked, IMO. Not to mention the incredibly restrained performance they got out of Billy Bob Thornton (his best to date). This was a fantastic film. And yeah, O' Brother, Where Art Thou? is probably one of their more popular crowd pleasers but still a damn fine film nonetheless with a fantastic comedic performance from George Clooney (who woulda thought?) and a pretty clever tweaking of The Odyssey.

I had a dude who recommended MAN WHO WASNT to me. I came back from that film and confronted him with my hands on hips and a long, long look. The film for me was just a whole lotta nothing. O BROTHER is.. phew, breathtakingly bad. Each artist of substance & originality has a special ongoing conversation with himself from which all his best work springs. Tend to be what drab souls call 'space cadets', like Hendrix, always off in a corner lost in his own thoughts. When that conversation gets polluted by fame and turns into a self-aware conversation with one's audience, quality plummets. Like Bowie says "you better hang on to yourself,"

A dude in a similar comedic vein as the Cohens (clearly more visually spacey however) is Giliam, and has managed to hang on to himself.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Each artist of substance & originality has a special ongoing conversation with himself from which all his best work springs. Tend to be what drab souls call 'space cadets', like Hendrix, always off in a corner lost in his own thoughts. When that conversation gets polluted by fame and turns into a self-aware conversation with one's audience, quality plummets. Like Bowie says "you better hang on to yourself,"

I dunno 'bout that. The Coens are hardly famous like, say, Spielberg but maybe working with big-time, marquee names like George Clooney and Tom Hanks has corrupted them? The problem I had with their last two films is that they really didn't feel like Coen brothers movies. They felt like someone else's... or, worse, someone trying to imitate one of their movies.

A dude in a similar comedic vein as the Cohens (clearly more visually spacey however) is Giliam, and has managed to hang on to himself.

You'll get no arguments from me on that one. I love Gilliam's movies.

[HerrSchreck]

[I dunno 'bout that. The Coens are hardly famous like, say, Spielberg but maybe working with big-time, marquee names like George Clooney and Tom Hanks has corrupted them? The problem I had with their last two films is that they really didn't feel like Coen brothers movies. They felt like someone else's... or, worse, someone trying to imitate one of their movies.

Is George Clooney & Tom Hanks the "audience" whose expectations they are anticipating? I never said they are as big as Spielberg.. and does one even have to be as big as Spielberg, to qualify as "famous"? Or to be affected by fame?

I never said they were in supercalafragablockbusterville. Nor does one have to be. Anyhow their own perception of their fame is the issue at play here, not yours or mine.

And they are quite famous.

[Andre Jurieu]

They might be famous to people who pay attention to who directs a film, but most people within the general public don't really care who directs a film, so I can understand Fletch saying they aren't very famous (to the general public).

I think Fletch's mention that "working with big-time, marquee names like George Clooney and Tom Hanks" may have "corrupted [the Coens]" might have some merit, though I doubt I would call it "corruption" so much as re-framing the conversation. Working with bigger names changes the audience you are having a conversation with, usually by expanding the audience to people who may not be aware that the director is having a conversation with them at all, so that conversation might not exactly translate very well. Making bigger pictures also changes the dynamics of filmmaking, so what the Coens accomplished with smaller pictures in the past, and the conversations they attempted, may no longer be possible now.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Yeah, that is exactly what I was trying to say!

Seriously, thanks for articulating that. I guess "corruption" is the wrong word but it certainly has changed their approach to the material that they make into movies. Also, I believe both Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were originally written by the Coens with the intention of being directed by someone else but they ended up doing it. And therein may lie the problems with these two movies.

[bufordsharkley]

Intolerable Cruelty, I'm almost sure, was intended to be directed by their former cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld. Or maybe it was the other one. In any case, I don't believe both films were so devised.

[Scharphedin2]

Has anyone heard anything further on the Coen's adaptation of No Country For Old Men? I have to say that even as someone who has enjoyed almost all of the Coens' films (I have not seen the last 2 or 3), on paper at least I have my doubts about this project.

Cormac McCarthy has got to be one of the greatest living American writers, and like someone said way back in the beginning of this thread, his lyrical style is difficult to imagine translated into film. I just read the first few pages of his new book The Road, and I was overwhelmed (once more) by the elegance and economy of his style. It is so vivid in its images that I can see the lure for filmmakers. At times, one even has the sense of reading a transcript of a film. However, it is also a deceptive quality, I think. It will take a director as great as McCarthy is a writer to reinvent the rich imagery of his prose into moving images.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Carter Burwell has an official site where you can download previously unreleased tracks from the various soundtracks he's worked on:

The Ladykillers

Intolerable Cruelty

The Big Lebowski

Fargo

Barton Fink

[Lemmy Caution]

AMB, here's a few examples of Rosenbaum's slightly more favorable opinions on the Coen Bros.

That's some spectacularly misguided writing on the Coens.
Obviously he doesn't like their particluar brand of humor and satire. But I could almost picture him reading Dickens and dismissing the characterizations as too one-dimensional in a TV way. And Dickens also has that "problem" of making it clear that we are rooting for the honest salt-of-the-earth type over the assortment of bad-intentioned strange characters that surround him. I actually laughed out loud when he termed such populism as "elitist."

And his whole TV discussion is nonsensical. Citing nothing, he asserts that there is some kind of vague consensus that TV-watching in general makes people aggressive and anti-social. His speculation as to why seems to insult TV-watchers as clueless morons who can't differentiate TV programs from real life. Conversely, I usually think of TV as encouraging passivity and granting observer status in life ... television as the opiate of the people. I could see an argument that TV reduces attention spans, thereby making people less patient, and then maybe an iffy link from that to aggression. But then again, his whole blather about television only connects to the Coens because ... well, because he finds the Coens movies to be sit-comish.

I pretty much disagree with both reviews in almost all particulars. He clearly doesn't have much clue about the choices the Coens made and why, when he walks away from Fargo wondering how Jerry got in debt, or why we see the killer watching Tv while the dead body is ignored.

For me, Raising Arizona is the best Coen film. Cage is amazing. Interesting camera work and detail. And my appreciation of the film has increased with repeated viewings. Oh, and it's hilarious.
Miller's Crossing and The Big Lebowski really create and sustain interesting moods.

I'm also a fan of O Brother, which I saw as a return to form for the Coens. Clooney does a great job. The film overreaches a bit trying to throw in too much mythology of the era, and some scenes could have been cut. But overall it's a fun romp and the high point of the Coens' fusing of music and film. I always have a soft spot for Blood Simple, as I saw it in the theater twice during its first run, and became an early Coen Bros. fan. It has a few rough patches, but has such a distinctive style and vibe to it, which made it jump out so much at the time. Anyway, I'm always fascinated by first films.

Barton Fink always blends in in my mind with Miller's Crossing. The film has some great moments, but I'm not sure its message is well-thought out or comes across clearly. Fargo is very well-crafted, but I think is overrated. The straight-forwardness of the plot places all of the weight upon the characterizations and evocation of a particular region. While that comes off impressively with an understated flair, I'm just not convinced the film has enough depth to compensate for the basic plotline.

The Man Who Wasn't There left me with no impression. While Hudsucker too often veered off into silliness and exaggeration, though I could see the framework of what they were trying to deliver. Ladykillers seemed juvenile and clanked around embarassingly. Intolerable Cruelty I've skipped.

Definitely looking forward to the new Coen film.

[dadaistnun]

Carter Burwell on the score:

The film is the quietest I've worked on. Often there is no sound but wind and boots on hard caliche or stocking feet on concrete. Then again there are shootouts involving an unknown number of shooters with shotguns and automatic weapons. It was unclear for a while what kind of score could possibly accompany this film without intruding on this raw quiet. I spoke with the Coens about either an all-percussion score or a melange of sustained tones which would blend in with the sound effects. We went the latter route.

The all-percussion score sounds like fun, and I look forward to doing it sometime, but it is such a cliche to have drums accompany "action" that this sound immediately pulled the film back into familiar territory. The sustained tones, however, kept the film unsettled. Skip Lievsay, the sound editor, and I spoke early about these approaches and he sent me some examples of processed sound effects just as I sent him examples of tone compositions, mostly sine and sawtooth waves and singing bowls. When the film is mixed the effect will be that the music comes out of and sinks back into the sound effects in a hopefully subliminal manner.

The end titles of the film raised an interesting question: the entire film takes place without songs or identifiable score, so what could play over five minutes of end titles that wouldn't be self-conscious (like wind or sine waves) or intrusive (like a pop song)? I ended up writing a tune that features the only acoustic instruments in the score, but they take quite a while to appear. The first sounds are percussion but almost sound like sound effects. The next sounds are the sustained tones which are featured in the rest of the score. Only after two minutes of this do truly familiar instruments arrive - guitar and bass - which then play to the end along with the percussion. Hopefully this somehow works with the rest of the film, although we won't really know this until we mix the film, and maybe not until much later.

[jorencain]

That just reignited my excitement and anticipation for this movie. The last couple of Coen films had me a little nervous, but I'm hoping this is a return to form for them.

[jbeall]

I think Miller's Crossing and Fargo are the unequivocal Coen masterpieces, striking a balance between comedy and drama that they don't quite hit with as much accuracy, style and verve as they do here.

Closely following them are Raising Arizona and O Brother Where Art Thou. All that said, the last few Coen brothers movies have been outright failures (The Ladykillers was awful and Intolerable Cruelty was too in love with itself to be effective). I really hope No Country For Old Men is the film that gets the Coens back in stride.

I haven't seen The Ladykillers and have no desire to, but I agree that Intolerable Cruelty wasn't very good. And while I like Blood Simple, it's certainly a first effort, not a mature work, IMO. I *love* their other films, especially the ones you listed. O Brother is my favorite, and Raising Arizona gets funnier every time I see it. I would definitely have to question the aesthetic judgment of anybody who claimed O Brother was 'breathtakingly bad', and I suspect Rosenbaum has completely missed the boat on more than one or two Coen Bros. films.

I don't see Barton Fink as anti-intellectual at all. Rather, I see it as an indictment of the anti-intellectualism of Hollywood. There are more than a few talented scriptwriters over the years who have complained about being ordered to dumb down or commercialize their films in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and in a town where Joel Schumacher and Michael Bay keep getting work, there clearly isn't much of an emphasis on quality control. Barton is a great playwright who takes an opportunity to write screenplays, but finds out that Hollywood is Hell (literally!) for serious, committed writers. What's anti-intellectual about that?

[Polybius]

I didn't know that! All the same time, I don't know, there's one thing to be said for translating a plot into a radically different idiom (while I haven't read RED HARVEST, I doubt there are samurai in it) and doing what the Coen's did -- to make a gangster film which is 80% identical to Hammett's gangster novel, and not acknowledge it. YOJIMBO may steal an idea, but MILLER'S CROSSING steals its characters, situations, theme, and probably even some of its language from THE GLASS KEY. It goes far beyond lifting a plot device.

They've never made the slightest secret of their use of that novel as the basis for Miller's Crossing.

"Miller's Crossing is pretty much just a shameless rip-off of Dashiell Hammett, mostly his novel The Glass Key, but to a lesser extent Red Harvest. More than anything else, it was an enthusiasm for Hammett's writing that was the genesis of that movie. It's Hammett -- in a word, that's what it is." --Ethan Coen

Or their use of a lot of Marlowe tropes in The Big Lebowski, for that matter.

The major aspect of the whole Red Harvest-Yojimbo-Fistful of Dollars scenario they use in Miller's Crossing is a guy playing two warring sided against each other, with the twist that unlike the Continental Op, Mifune's ronin or Eastwood's poncho wearing guy, Tom Reagan is angling for one side to win, rather than positioning two rotten entities to knock each other off.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

An early review with a pic of Bardem.

[Jeff]

I've yet to read a blogger review of this film that has been less than ecstatic, and the word out of Cannes is very strong. It seems that the Coens are truly back in form. Here is the first full-length legit-media review that I have come across. Variety says it is one of the Coens' best.

[Jeff]

five clips from the film

[Greathinker]

I haven't seen The Ladykillers and have no desire to

Why is this film universally slammed? Maybe I'm not familiar enough with their canon for it to be ruined by any self-conscious narcissism, but I think its one of the funniest films of the decade.

[Nothing]

can't say I'm loving those clips. they really don't live up to the book.

clip 1 - okay, they've the got the location and the colours exactly right, but the over explanatory dialogue grates ("where's the last man standing?"); perfs are ok here.

clip 2 - not keen on the performances; the old guy is a classic Coen caricature and Bardem is putting on too much of an act here - he doesn't scare me, I don't believe it. And it's boringly shot too.

clip 3 is ok, though his hair is too shiny.

clip 4 - Tommy Lee is great, as expected, and the deputy is good too. shame he's not behind the camera, too. the editing and use of cinematic space are distractingly awful, surprising for the coens.

clip 5 - ok, good, everything works in this one.

[jorencain]

clip 3 is ok, though his hair is too shiny.

Are you for real? Do watch movies this way?

[Nothing]

the hair stood out.