No Country For Old Men (Blu-ray + Digital)

Another compelling story adapted to film by the Coen brothers

This movie is one of my all time favorite flicks. There will never be a stronger more well played villain than in this movie.

I'm a HUGE fan of the Coen Brothers. Even some of their less successful movies always leave me delighted because they dare play around with tone and audience expectations. Who but this brotherly team would attempt a movie like THE LADYKILLERS or MAN WHO WASN'T THERE? But in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, they return to their true forte...the crime thriller.Although my personal favorite is RAISING ARIZONA...it is probably true that in decades from now the Coens will be best remembered and admired for BLOOD SIMPLE, FARGO, MILLER'S CROSSING and now their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bleak Southwest thriller.NO COUNTRY...tells the story of how one simple man (Josh Brolin), out on a hunting trip somewhere in the vast emptiness of west Texas, stumbles across the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Empty pickup trucks, dead men everywhere, and one lone survivor. This dying man asks for water (which Brolin doesn't have) and then Brolin finds a big bag full of about $2 million. He takes the money, not really thinking about the consequences. We find that he lives in a single wide mobile home with his attractive but too compliant wife.We think Brolin is a simple and probably heartless man...but when he decides he needs to go back and give that dying man some water...his moment of kindness is his undoing. He is discovered and soon his is identified. Now he's being hunted by the authorities, the drug dealers and most awfully, he's being chased by Anton Chugurh (Javier Bardem), who could be one of the most malevolent serial killers / hitmen in movie history.Brolin sends his family into hiding and goes on the run himself. He hops from one rundown hotel room to another, leaving a trail of death and violence following him. And drawing ever closer is Bardem...calm, steady and absolutely convinced that he will recover the money and kill the man who took it.Trying to sort everything out is Tommy Lee Jones as the local sheriff, who feels that not only is he in over his head (although we see very early on that he has a native instinct and craftiness for his work that actually make s him a pretty brilliant investigator)...but he feels that society itself has moved on without him. The scenes of violence he encounters are beyond anything he's experienced. He is afraid, but worse than that, he is spiritually shaken.These three men, and a host of supporting characters (including a well-cast Woody Harrelson) chase each other around...and just the chase itself would make an entertaining film. But what we have here is a film that makes us smell the desperation, feel the emptiness and loneliness of the landscape AND the people who live there. This is a brutal and non-compromising film.It's so great because it is splendidly entertaining...and yet it fills you with a tension that goes beyond the simple plot developments. In a way, we begin to feel about the events much the same way that Tommy Lee Jones feels. We are invited into his inner turmoil...and we feel it. And as always, the Coens are utter masters of tone. They know exactly how funny they want humorous scenes to be and exactly how to turn tension up and down. Then just up and up and up.It is a VERY well acted film. Bardem will almost certainly be nominated for an Oscar...and he deserves it. What a role! He's a complete success at conveying emptiness. He kills with no pleasure...but he has also made killing his first line of action in almost any situation. I guess he's just learned that this is the best way to solve problems and get people out of the way. Bardem is riveting. It's a complete cliché to say "you can't keep your eyes off him," but I'm comfortable reporting that for me, I couldn't keep my eyes off him. It's a brilliant creation of McCarthy's...interpreted by the Coen Brothers and then brought to amazing life by Bardem.Brolin gives by far his finest performance. With this performance and his role in AMERICAN GANGSTER, he must now be taken seriously as an actor. Jones is the ONLY actor who could have played his part...he's that good and that iconic. What other actor do we know who should be playing a grizzled Texas lawman in the modern age? Robert Duvall perhaps? Other than that, the list only includes Jones.I must warn you...you almost certainly will not like the ending. McCarthy has never felt the need to wrap up his stories in a tidy package (doing so would in fact undo much of what he's trying to say about life) and the Coens have not shied away from his vision. I found the ending a little jolting myself...until I took the time to reflect on what it meant and how it made me feel. Then I understood a little better how brilliant it was.This is easily one of the most satisfying, most artistically mature and most viscerally entertaining movies of the year! A triumph for the Coen Brothers!

Awesome

Anton Chigurh attempts to prove his flawed doctrine of Fatalism with a coin flip, but makes the philosophical error of forgetting that it was his CHOICE to perform the flip in the first place and it will still be his choice to pull or not pull the trigger regardless of the outcome.Further demonstration of the inherent contradiction informing his life philosophy---- that made pretense of a superior way of being but reveals itself as mere psychosis--- is the way in which Chigurh tries to move through life as though he were unemotional and devoid of conscience, allthewhile operating by his own moral code. This is a man perpetually triggered, seething beneath the placid exterior. He has not disassociated himself from the afflictions of other mortals, just created his own, like the bright boy who has formulated his own language with which to converse inside his own head and share with no one.Lucifer did envision to climb to the throne of God, as well, but his fall was no less spectacular than a calculated mercenary being plowed in traffic by an inattentive driver.Lewelyn Moss, the manli-ess hombre to wear a feminine name since the boy named Sue, had to have been disappointed, were he able, at his "Plan B" outcome.While this is not a "feel-good movie," two somewhat underrated aspects of this film are its social critique and its "MacGyver-ism."The former is best exemplified in the scene, "What's Coming," toward the end of the film, when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by the wryly stoic Tommy Lee Jones, sits down with another old boy and discusses the case. The old boy laments how "It's all about the money and the drugs...it's just g-d beyond everything. What's it mean? What's it leading to?"After the other old boy speaks to the decline of the culture, Sheriff Bell replies, "I think once you stop hearing, 'Sir' and 'Ma'am' the rest is soon to foller." To which the other old boy replies, "Well, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide."I think it's safe to say that tide has washed on shore like a tsunami.