1243 No Country for Old Men

[flyonthewall2983]

DVD and Blu-Ray release announced at dvdactive.com:

Title: No Country for Old Men (IMDb)

Further Details:
The film itself will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along wit h an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track.

Is that the right aspect ratio?

[dx23]

The film itself will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along wit h an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track.

Is that the right aspect ratio?

According to the IMDB.com, yes it is, but they have been wrong before.

[hot_locket]

The film itself will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along wit h an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track.

Is that the right aspect ratio?

It looked like it when I saw it. I was wondering if it's the first Coen brothers film shot in scope. . .

[Jeff]

The film itself will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along wit h an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track.

Is that the right aspect ratio?

It looked like it when I saw it. I was wondering if it's the first Coen brothers film shot in scope. . .

Well, not shot in "scope" exactly. As is Roger Deakins' preference, No Country was shot in Super 35 and projected at 2.35. O Brother Where Art Thou is the only other Coen film that I can think of that used this approach though.

[HerrSchreck]

For all the praise, there's something about this film that doesn't add up or function properly. Yes, it has lovely photography, and as expected, Javier Bardem is very good as the (more or less, conveniently) insane killer, but there seems to be something drab about the entire event. Granted, there are shades of ambiguous complexities that emerge as the film progresses but it was all happening to transparent, logically-challenged and motivational-free characters. There were innumerable instances throughout where I felt like yelling Why? or What? or Where the hell is the logic? or What were the writers thinking?

More personally, I also wasn't clear on whether the girl was Brolin's daughter or his wife until the second to last scene (which made the "Mama" character confusing, as I was considering the possibility that "Mama" was his wife and it was a quirky Coen thing thrown in there). For me, that part of the film was seriously lacking clarity. And although I understood it was 1980, I seriously wonder how many other people caught onto Bardem's 1958 plus 22 years? I also felt it kept ending, and ending, so many times that I was expecting more 'endings' after the final denouncement.

Throughout the film one gets the vague impression that there's something kind of interesting going on (the opening is strong), but when it finishes and I really gave the film a lengthy reflection, so much of what the characters do just doesn't make any damn sense to me (emotional or motivational or otherwise), and in the end the film just fizzles out with absolutely no momentum.

I don't understand why even the negative reviews are calling this film "immaculate" and "perfectly constructed" or "executed with great skill." For me, this film is like a house without a roof. Pretty weak stuff.

I finally saw this thing yesterday, and although I confess the film held my interest, it just left many more irritants in me from bad narrative than it did conjure up a world, weave suspense, etc. It left me with nothing. Dylan's sentiments above-- gleaned a few pages back-- pretty much sum up my own.

The Coens will forever fucking mystify me. Some say the Coens didn't inject their smugness into this narrative as has been typical of them over the past decade. I whiffed it in there all along with their little Antonionisms, which were so amateuristic and feeble: they establish the time aspect of Time/Place by the whispiest attribution on the date of a coin versus an off the cuff utterance of the killer indicating that 22 years have gone by since it's minting? We're supposed to do math while hanging onto a blanks-filled narrative... during a moment of heightened suspense no less?
Who killed Brolin exactly and why? How does Bardem's character just stroll around nonchalantly blasting people with a shotgun, sauntering away nice and easy, with impunity. Where in fuck was this shootout between Bardem and Brolin with bodies piling up, hotels and residences all around, with not a soul in sight? Is it this easy to kill people in the flatland wilds of Texas mid-USA? (this may well be so, and may be the point of the film/book).

Good adaptations are just that-- you don't have to read the book to Gain The Universe of the film. Good directors usually piss off the book authors because they have to reshape, collapse, expand, etc, to create a functional film universe. I had no idea who in god's name Bardem was-- was he the head of the dope ring? Was he a mass murderer who double times in drugs on the side? Does he just kill everybody he meets? How long has he been doing this? WHy did he kill his men at the original deal's murder site? Who were those guys? Was he the ringleader? Were they the ringleaders and he wanted their share of the money? His coin flipping pre-occupation read entirely without substance and wound up a Tough-Killer-ism along the lines of "go ahead make my day... BOOM".

There's a certain magic in Swiss Cheese Narrative Film.. Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni: versus other, more conventional films there's far too little but yet there's So Much More. It's magic the way their poetry works out so perfectly and fully in the end, and pulls you back for repeated viewings like a polar magnet.

The Coen's hubris is again on huge display, and their hubris is: "..if we do it, if it comes from us, it's got to be right." No editorial necessary. And here I see that hubris with them jumping into Straight Crime Melodrama, while deciding "let's bring a little L'eclisse into it too; I know we can do it."

It wasn't a bad film necessarily, but I thought the ending was awful, the structure and unfolding just terribly clumsy. They put too much trust in their own deeply indulged impulses.

As far as what I think this film was trying to give me, the bewilderment and accidental poetry gleaned from the senseless tragedy in an episode of The First 48 will do much better. If you want to meditate on the senselessness of Real Murder, watch that show. It's so moving, and sad.

On the good side this was much better than their last few films.

[Dylan]

One thing that's interesting to me is the reason that Josh Brolin's character goes back in the book (which I didn't read, but was told), which is to kill the one guy who saw him, not to give him a jug of water. And of the course, the entire scene in the book with the hitchhiker girl, and after being told in detail what occurs in that passage I can't imagine why it was left out.

[HerrSchreck]

One thing I will say is I knew right away that Brolin's young pretty housemate was his wife, when he came home, they were bullshitting and he said (after she nagged him for a bit) "how bout I take you back there in the bedroom for a good fucking?" and she says "big talk".. I pretty much knew she was not his daughter.

[Knappen]

I saw the film a couple of hours ago. He actually says "how 'bout I take you back there in the bedroom and screw you".

[Dylan]

One thing I will say is I knew right away that Brolin's young pretty housemate was his wife, when he came home, they were bullshitting and he said (after she nagged him for a bit) "how bout I take you back there in the bedroom for a good fucking?" and she says "big talk".. I pretty much knew she was not his daughter.

Well, that was pretty obviously a fault on my part, but it fits in pretty snug with the rest of the Coens' direction.

[HerrSchreck]

I saw the film a couple of hours ago. He actually says "how 'bout I take you back there in the bedroom and screw you".

Still not as bad as mixing burton up w harris. Or a board poster w the British pm. The gist is (and the Brits political and thespian worlds remain) intact.

[Nothing]

Honestly, bad narrative isn't the problem with this film. The source novel is close to genius and it is to the Coens' credit that they remain quite faithful.

The problem is the Coens' tendency toward caricature, which only Jones and Harrelson seem able to transcend.

Moss goes back to give the Mexican water in the book.

[HerrSchreck]

Clearly this is all opinion-based... but for this viewer, this film is Clumsy Narrative Incarnate. Breathtakingly so.

[Nothing]

Why? Because the main protagonist is snatched away before the finale? Killed by the mexicans instead of Bardem? The coldness of this twist and the wreckage it makes of the narrative is central to McCarthy's philosophy. If the Coens has betrayed this moment they might as well have called their film "No Country for Cormac McCarthy" because it sure as hell wouldn't bare any resemblance to its source. I nevertheless found the film too explanatory at times - for example, when Moss vocalises his thoughts with "who's the last man? there's always a last man in a shoot-out, where is he?"

[Grand Illusion]

Why? Because the main protagonist is snatched away before the finale? Killed by the mexicans instead of Bardem? The coldness of this twist and the wreckage it makes of the narrative is central to McCarthy's philosophy. If the Coens has betrayed this moment they might as well have called their film "No Country for Cormac McCarthy" because it sure as hell wouldn't bare any resemblance to its source. I nevertheless found the film too explanatory at times - for example, when Moss vocalises his thoughts with "who's the last man? there's always a last man in a shoot-out, where is he?"

I posted about this earlier, but there are so many excellent films where the main character meets their end before the finale. The argument here is that the execution is clumsy.

It's not enough that the only flawed, pragmatic, layered character in the whole film meets his demise. He also vanishes. Camera angles obscure if he is actually the victim or not. He doesn't have to have a shoot out with Bardem, but he is just unceremoniously discarded.

The Coens are done with their empathy vessel, used cynically for the audience's attention. It's time to make their grand statement, so they trash the only real human in their movie and stumble to the finish line.

As for your second point, the handling of Tommy Lee Jones is also clumsy. His entire purpose seemed to wander from location from location, pontificating about the meaning of the film. No subtext at all.

If Tommy Lee Jones's character were in the theater behind me, I would've turned around and told him to shut up. And for all his speechifying, he wasn't even given an effective counterpoint to say that, quite frankly, America hasn't been decaying with recent violence; it's always been this way.

[kaujot]

And for all his speechifying, he wasn't even given an effective counterpoint to say that, quite frankly, America hasn't been decaying with recent violence; it's always been this way.

Did Ellis not state that exact thought?

"Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming, it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity."

[John Cope]

It's not about that anyway. It's about Sheriff Bell's changing response to the ineluctable violence. That's why he's put in opposition to the guy spouting off about "all those damn punk kids" or whatever it was. That scene is meant to suggest different registers of disillusionment; a qualitative distinction.

[HerrSchreck]

Why? Because the main protagonist is snatched away before the finale? Killed by the mexicans instead of Bardem? The coldness of this twist and the wreckage it makes of the narrative is central to McCarthy's philosophy. If the Coens has betrayed this moment they might as well have called their film "No Country for Cormac McCarthy" because it sure as hell wouldn't bare any resemblance to its source. I nevertheless found the film too explanatory at times - for example, when Moss vocalises his thoughts with "who's the last man? there's always a last man in a shoot-out, where is he?"

I'll say it again and I'll jump up & down stopping just short of my nutsack flying thru space, disconnected from my poor torso:

A good novel doesn't necessarily make a good film. Your holding the novel up as a "reason" or "justification" for clumsy cinematic unfolding doesn't hold water for me. Great directors may well have made "No Country for Cormac C" if they felt they couldn't fashion a workable cinematic universe with the elements at hand (and to be sure, fantastic films were made of far less with muuuuuuch less explanatory exposition and a far higher Ambiguity Ratio than this almost-wreck). This is why men like Jules Dassin had guns pulled on them by authors of their so called "source novels" (Rififi, Night & The City). You've got to understand, given your own skills in the terrains of both (and lying between the extremes of) Detail Overload, and Trance-like Emptiness, what you can and can not make work given your poetic propensities as a director and feel for different types of narrative. And for me the Coens are rank amateurs in this terrain. Their "poetic propensities" are centered around their own perception of their intelligence and wit, and are like gorillas on roller skates in the realm of the "rarified ambiguous sublime".

But again, this is just me.

[Nothing]

he is just unceremoniously discarded.

This being precisely the point.

Moreso than a lot of adaptations, NCFOM can very much be seen as a screen 'translation' of a literary work. It doesn't quite achieve this, nor does it rise above it, however I believe that your dissastisfaction, which strikes me as a philosophical opposition more than anything else, would extend to the book.

Let's say there is a certain feeling that CmC wants to create when Moss is torn away from us and the Coens have managed to realise that pretty well. It's something very different from Psycho, in which Janet Leigh never convinces as more than a set-up for a kill anyway. One cinematic precedent, perhaps, is To Live & Die in L.A., although Friedkin's work (superior to the Coens) seems classical by comparison. In NCFOM, the narrative seems to have a purpose and a direction, feeding genre expectations, a climax in which Moss, the shadowy mexicans, Bell and Chigurh come together and Moss gets to fulfil his 'special project'... Except it doesn't work out that way and this human construct, this supposed narrative, is off-handedly brushed aside by chance. Leaving us together with Bell and his attempt to come to terms with the ramifications.

Must a narrative film abide by more conservative rules? The point of empathy extended until the final beat? The three-act structure clearly apparent?

Whilst I have reservations about adaptation in general - and view this particular film as a valiant if ultimately pointless enterprise - I find that the best adaptations of 'great' or 'very good' literature tend to be pretty faithful to the source. A 'great director' should have better things to do than take a significant piece of literature and massacre it because they can't get their head around it. Of course, a different rule book is in place when adapting dimestore quickies.

[Robotron]

It's not about that anyway. It's about Sheriff Bell's changing response to the ineluctable violence. That's why he's put in opposition to the guy spouting off about "all those damn punk kids" or whatever it was. That scene is meant to suggest different registers of disillusionment; a qualitative distinction.

Which is why two thirds of the film wallows in suspense and action entirely without him and his knowledge of the narrative events.

[HerrSchreck]

I believe that your dissastisfaction, which strikes me as a philosophical opposition more than anything else, would extend to the book..

Even you know that's not true (philosophic angle). I have no problem with anything, provided it's executed well.

Must a narrative film abide by more conservative rules? The point of empathy extended until the final beat? The three-act structure clearly apparent?..

Are you a Coen? If you're not I can't understand your tossing such absurdly sophomoric (and rhetorical) questions at me which go against the grain of everything I have been saying (as well as my notorious obscure loves shouted ad infinitum on this board). I've been relentlessly answering those questions in my above posts-- it's not the style of cinema on display here, it's the clumsy script and execution. It lacks a coherent mission and sense of construction or style-- it feels vacant and halting. I love unconventional narrative turned inside out and upside down and sucked nigh clear of emotional event. I just like dudes who do it-- for me-- better.

I find that the best adaptations of 'great' or 'very good' literature tend to be pretty faithful to the source.

That says a lot. I'll grant you there are very few Drugstore Cowboys & Clockwork Oranges out there, and they are refreshing to encounter. But again, compared to NCFOM...

[GringoTex]

Why? Because the main protagonist is snatched away before the finale? Killed by the mexicans instead of Bardem? The coldness of this twist and the wreckage it makes of the narrative is central to McCarthy's philosophy.

Except that McCarthy gives Moss his most tender scene of the narrative (with the hitchhiker) right before he is killed. This scene is key to why Moss lives and why he dies. The Coens inexplicably removed this scene.

[Nothing]

That says a lot. I'll grant you there are very few Drugstore Cowboys & Clockwork Oranges out there, and they are refreshing to encounter. But again, compared to NCFOM...

Funnily enough, I find A Clockwork Orange and Lolita to be the least of Kubrick's adaptations and the lack of fidelity and/or sympathy with the canonical source material is an essential weakness in the foundations of both.

Just wait - if this wins the oscar you can bet that Hollywood will treat us all to a string of suicide-inducingly-bad McCarthy adaptations that make NCFOM look like La Bete Humaine. If anything happens to Suttree, I'll lynch and quarter the criminal myself...

[portnoy]

Just wait - if this wins the oscar you can bet that Hollywood will treat us all to a string of suicide-inducingly-bad McCarthy adaptations that make NCFOM look like La Bete Humaine.

Blood Meridian

Personally, I've always wanted to adapt Outer Dark to the screen...

[M]

There's a certain magic in Swiss Cheese Narrative Film.. Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni: versus other, more conventional films there's far too little but yet there's So Much More. It's magic the way their poetry works out so perfectly and fully in the end, and pulls you back for repeated viewings like a polar magnet.

This sounds like you have more of a contention with contemporary Hollywood filmmaking than with the Coens specifically. You're talking about more of an elliptical structure with lots of spaces but which allows the viewer to draw more and more connections over time. But none of the filmmakers you cite are American, and none of them are contemporary. They all come from very different places. Is this not condemning the filmmaking tradition (conventional action/story-based Hollywood filmmaking) as a whole out of which the Coens spring? While I tend to agree with you, I think that at the same time films as cultural and social products are much more complicated than that, than to say that one narrative style is correct and others are not. But I'm sure you're own ideas on the subject are more complicated than that as well.

Also, I don't see how more of a 'Swiss-Cheese Narrative' style would have helped No Country for Old Men in being more explicit on the plot points you said were unclear. You'd think that would confuse things further. Clarification via elision?

[Michael]

Personally, I've always wanted to adapt Outer Dark to the screen...

I liked the book but have you read Child of God?