Review of No Country for Old Men

**** MY TAKE FIRST!!!*****

i loved this film. the review below said it all. and i just can't add any more praise at the brilliance of how the movie was directed and played, much less rave about the performances of the actors. and i'll never find words big enough to be worthy of being called a review of my own. all i can say is oh, i just loved the chigurgh character! he sure was scary as hell! he totally gave me the creeps! and he's absolutely cute, too! hehehe.... although i think it's true that in the last 20 minutes running the movie will more or less make you say "WTF is going on???" and the ending kinda leaves you saying "no joke????", i still think it's a brilliant film, though. and oh yes, the last 20 minutes will leave some audience angry and disappointed, and killing off the good guy at the height of the climax surely takes the audience in the "drop-and-then-it-all-slows-down" part of a roller coaster.... but well, that's basically what watching the movie's like... a roller-coaster ride. you know, just when you think it's never gonna stop, it suddenly slows down after the highest drop and then you know the ride's coming to its end but you still feel your nerves jumping even hours after it has stopped.

and yes, i felt sad about the ending. but i didn't feel bad about the movie. and i certainly wasn't disappointed. what other kind of ending could one hope for? this is the kind of story that from the very beginning gives you the feeling that no good is ever gonna come out in the end. you just can't see a situation in which the good guys are gonna be treated right. i don't want the last 20 minutes of the film to spoil the best first 100 minutes of a film i've seen in a long time! besides, unconventional endings don't really bother me at all. i feel sorry for the viewers who, after seeing the film, still had questions and needed a verbal account of what happened to everbody in the end. because every single scene in the movie told it all. you just had to pay attention. you just had to watch more, than listen to every single sound and every single dialogue being said. moss was killed by the mexicans. sheriff bell retired because he no longer feels adequate to keep up with the changing times that's becoming increasingly violent and evil. chigurgh's got the money. he killed the wife. and yes, he got to walk in the end. i'm sure some people prefer the bad guy to be killed or apprehended atleast, but this isn't one of your ordinary action films where the good guy MUST survive because he's the good guy. and that is what the movie's been saying all along. That evil does win sometimes. and in this story, it did. and THAT is the end. i'm amazed at how some people needed to be told a narrative of this key point to be convinced that indeed, the movie has an ending. only not the usual stuff where the cast hug one another in the end or yell in triumph or what other kind of endings that we've been used to seeing to know it's the end.

and it's really unfair of accusing the coen brothers of not having the guts to pull off a proper ending that's why the movie ended the way it did. the brothers presented the movie exactly as the book told it according to the author. the audience has to understand that the movie ended the way it ended because that's how it ended in the book.

but then if you're the kind of audience who needs every detail to be spoon-fed or atleast narrated or post-scripted before the end-credits, and who's looking for a "good-triumphs-over-evil" kind of ending... well, this movie isn't really for you. better wait for The Dark Knight batman sequel (or whatever it's called... which, incidentally, i'll be watching as well not because i'm a batman fan... in all my life i've only ever seen one batman film - Batman and Robin, and that's because i wanted to see what all the hype was about Poison Ivy.... but this time, i'm gonna watch it because it's the last film that the late Heath Ledger did. and i don't doubt that in this movie, like all other typical movies, the antagonist will pay for being the bad guy, and the good will surely prevail.

oh, i don't really like rating by stars. so i'd give No Country for Old Men a 9.9 over 10.... well, of course, i can't give it a perfect 10! after all... i did say i felt sad about the ending! (",)


Review from New York Times

“No Country for Old Men,” adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is bleak, scary and relentlessly violent. At its center is a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop.

But while that chilly sensation is a sign of terror, it may equally be a symptom of delight. The specter of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut, will feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

So before I go any further, allow me my moment of bliss at the sheer brilliance of the Coens’ technique. And it is mostly theirs. The editor, Roderick Jaynes, is their longstanding pseudonym. The cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and the composer, Carter Burwell, are collaborators of such long standing that they surely count as part of the nonbiological Coen fraternity. At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity.

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming.

By the time this moment arrives, though, you have already been pulled into a seamlessly imagined and self-sufficient reality. The Coens have always used familiar elements of American pop culture and features of particular American landscapes to create elaborate and hermetic worlds. Mr. McCarthy, especially in the western phase of his career, has frequently done the same. The surprise of “No Country for Old Men,” the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.

Mr. McCarthy’s book, for all its usual high-literary trappings (many philosophical digressions, no quotation marks), is one of his pulpier efforts, as well as one of his funniest. The Coens, seizing on the novel’s genre elements, lower the metaphysical temperature and amplify the material’s dark, rueful humor. It helps that the three lead actors — Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin along with Mr. Bardem — are adept at displaying their natural wit even when their characters find themselves in serious trouble.

The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.

Mr. Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty-hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh’s mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth — just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell — and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.

And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Mr. Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to get away with taking the $2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.

Taken together, these three hombres are not quite the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but each man does carry some allegorical baggage. Mr. Jones’s craggy, vinegary warmth is well suited to the kind of righteous, decent lawman he has lately taken to portraying. Ed Tom Bell is almost continuous with the retired M.P. Mr. Jones played in Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah.” It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Mr. Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling.

Still, if “No Country for Old Men” were a simple face-off between the sheriff’s goodness and Chigurh’s undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card — a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen — and Mr. Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.

And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, “No Country for Old Men” leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.