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List Price: $29.99 | | Label: Miramax
Salesrank: 145
Released: March 11, 2008 |
| Our Price: $11.22 |
| Used Price: $6.15 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
The Coen brothers make their finest thriller since Fargo with a restrained adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Not that there aren't moments of intense violence, but No Country for Old Men is their quietest, most existential film yet. In this modern-day Western, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a Vietnam vet who could use a break. One morning while hunting antelope, he spies several trucks surrounded by dead bodies (both human and canine). In examining the site, he finds a case filled with $2 million. Moss takes it with him, tells his wife (Kelly Macdonald) he's going away for awhile, and hits the road until he can determine his next move. On the way from El Paso to Mexico, he discovers he's being followed by ex-special ops agent Chigurh (an eerily calm Javier Bardem). Chigurh's weapon of choice is a cattle gun, and he uses it on everyone who gets in his way--or loses a coin toss (as far as he's concerned, bad luck is grounds for death). Just as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a World War II vet, is on Moss's trail, Chigurh's former colleague, Wells (Woody Harrelson), is on his. For most of the movie, Moss remains one step ahead of his nemesis. Both men are clever and resourceful--except Moss has a conscience, Chigurh does not (he is, as McCarthy puts it, "a prophet of destruction"). At times, the film plays like an old horror movie, with Chigurh as its lumbering Frankenstein monster. Like the taciturn terminator, No Country for Old Men doesn't move quickly, but the tension never dissipates. This minimalist masterwork represents Joel and Ethan Coen and their entire cast, particularly Brolin and Jones, at the peak of their powers. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
No Country for Old Men Reviews:
SAVE YOUR TIME..... 
2008-10-07 - I tried to watch this film 3 times on one of the premium channels and fell asleep each time. I guess I don't find the characters that exciting. Sure the film is violent but that doesn't equate to interesting for me. If you like watching a senseless hood track people down to kill them with a "souped up" cow killer, this film is for you. FOR THE REST OF US - WE HAVE BETTER USE FOR OUR TIME.
No Movie For Sensible People
2008-10-05 - I tried to watch the recent Coen brothers movie No Country For Old Men last night. Real crud. Its based on the novel of the same name by an ultra-pretentious and hyper-established hack named Cormac McCarthy. The story telling (in both the book and movie, I'd imagine) is completely unrealistic. Here's an example of crummy dialog. Trailer trash protagonist to wife as he is heading out the door to do something dangerous: "If'n Ahh don't cum back, say hello to Muther fer me." "But LouEllin, Yer Muther is dade!" (considers a moment) "Well, then Ahh reckin Ahhl tell'r muhself."
The movie is psychologically completely unrealistic. For example, toward the end, the "Sheriff" (who does absolutely nothing and seems to have no interest in actually apprehending anyone or doing more than read the paper and occasionally offer a bit of folk wisdom), played by Tommy Lee "Folksy" Jones, ruminates about some dreams he had to his long-suffering wife. "Ahh had me some dreams lass naght." "Anythang innnarestin'?" "They alwuz iaz to the party concerned."
Now, this is false. Dreams are a digestive product directly analogous to feces. I have written down my own dreams for more than ten years and can report that frequently I have to force myself to write down a dream, forcibly overcoming an aversion to revisiting it, not because it was unpleasant but simply because the most frequent first impression of most remembered dreams is that the dream is too worthless to recount. But none of this matters in the mind of Cormac McCarthy or the Coen brothers. They are not interested in reality, only gimcrack everyman profundities that fall apart the moment they are looked at steadily. McCarthy is a man who likes the sound of his own supposed eloquence. He is imbued with the notion that just because a sentence comes out of him, it's got to be good. This is what makes for bad, fraudulent writing. Hemingway was exactly the same. And so you have stylized gibberish like when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Any real need for that ungainly middle name, Cormac? Usually down south the first and middle names are carefully chosen so that the nicknames can be run together, like Robert Joseph becoming Bobby-Jo.) says of himself and his deceased father, "We wuz sheriffs at the same tahm. Ahh think he's proud of that. Ahh know Ahh wuz." Why the mixing of tenses, other than a knee-jerk narcissistic urge toward pretentious bilge? I mean, why is Sheriff Bell's father, who is deceased, STILL proud of this fact, whereas Sheriff Bell himself is, seemingly, NO LONGER proud of this fact. It's not deep, it's just nonsense. And, no, this is not The Hunting of the Snark. I tried to look at the movie from that angle and it doesn't work.
The movie is unrealistic in too many ways to enumerate. However, one example of how crizap No Country For Old Men is, which most people would consider nit-picking, is the following: LouEllin, the trailer trash protagonist, is hunting deer when he stumbles across the scene of a drug deal gone bad, with dead bodies everywhere, a bunch of kilos of Columbian bam-bam and the inevitable tired stock plot element of the Briefcase Full of A LOT of Dirty Money. He then decides that some one of this group who shot each other to hell and gone must have survived and walked away from the scene. So he takes a submachine gun from one of the dead guys and, slinging his own rifle across his back, goes in search of this fugitive. He finds him some while later and, leaving his rifle behind, he goes to investigate holding the newly-acquired (Uzi-like) submachine gun. This is completely unrealistic. No person familiar with guns would, in a bad situation, exchange his own rifle for a weapon he is completely unfamiliar with and which he has never test fired or even inspected to be sure it is not jammed. The movie is full of stuff like this. I believe it won Best Picture. This is what the world is, halfwits making entertainment for halfwits who then praise the other halfwits to the skies.
Another key plot device of No Country For Old Men is that the Bad Guy, a killer who dresses all in black, originally enough, goes around with a cattle gun, which is an air powered device that shoots and then retracts a bolt, used to stun cattle. This cattle gun derives its compressed air from a large metal oxygen tank that he lugs around, not to breathe out of but merely to power the cattle gun. He uses this cattle gun to kill people and also, many times, to knock the cylinder clean out of door locks. The scene is, the cattle gun busts the lock cylinder right out of the door and it goes shooting across the room. As I say, this happens many, many times.
So this morning I'd had enough of this nonsense and I called a locksmith to ask his opinion. The guy I talked to had actually seen the movie and so he knew exactly what I was talking about. He said that it was completely unrealistic and that he laughed when he saw it. However, this preposterousness did not cause him to stop taking the movie seriously, strangely enough. Seemingly people do not go to see movies expecting any degree of realism of any kind, be it physical, mechanical, psychological, what have you. In short, a people get the movies it deserve.
No Country for Old Men, DVD 
2008-10-01 - DVD arrived within a few days - like brand new. I highly recommend purchasing from this vendor.
Good Acting...nothing else. 
2008-10-01 - If you buy this wanting only to study the acting of the exceptional cast, then you will be very pleased. If you have any concept that this will be a good movie...forget it. It has half a story, literally the story just sort of stops at the half way point. Despite what some reviews have said, not showing what happens to the main characters is not revolutionary story-telling. I know a lot of people don't want to say that this film sucked because the makers are well respected, but it sucked. If it had been made by an indy director it would be getting blasted hard by the same people now singing it's praises. Real life may end with people saying, "Heck with it...I'll just retire", but that's not an ending for any dramatic work.
A COEN Brothers masterpiece
2008-09-30 - This is a TRULY great movie, with a flawless script, incredible directing, cinematography and acting. WOW.
The COEN brothers, who always have fantastic dialog, where many times, it takes the second watching of their movies to catch all of the humor and subtlties, made an extremely, "Quiet" movie.
They left the camera and the sound of the southwest do the talking for them. There was not a scene in this morality play that was NOT totally fascinating and it grabs the audience totally with 10 seconds.
To be great, there always has to be a fantastic villain. Where the heck did they get this incredible Spanish actor, with his warped sense of morality and ability to be so amoral, yet so human at the same time. That gentle voice and mannerisms of his, as well as his gentle features, REALLY made him frightening.
The movie really shows the decline in morality and ethics in the U.S. The insanity and accepted amoral behavior of the leadership in the U.S., the random violence, the ends justify the means and how hard it is for many of us to accept and understand the lack of ethics, morality and random violence that is all over our society. From the gang violence and acceptance of torture and outright destruction and murder of innocent civilians going on in Iraq to the using of the children in our military like waste products for individual gain and profit.
I loved how the Coen's used the dryness and sound of the boots crunching along the dry earth.
If you are looking for standard, mindless, Hollywood fare go to Rocky 100 or some other Hollywood sequel, one dimensional characters, artificial dialog and most of all, nothing that might allow on to "think". This masterpiece is an example where only independent movies and movies from Australia or Europe have any depth to them.
Want a bad script, horny teenagers, a contrived love story, mindless escapism, go to Hollywood.
This is a classic that will hold up with its timeless theme.
Jon
