Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Playing Catch-Up -
No Country for Old Men
and Others

No Country for Old Men

It’s taken me a while to sit down and write some thoughts on this one.  I can very easily say that this has been the most important film to come out in 2007 for myriad reasons, but the most important is that it has been quite some time since I have seen so many people in the film community want to talk about a single film.  Literally, everywhere I go and anyone I talk to, they only want to talk about this film.  My inbox fills up every day with e-mails about what my thoughts are on this film.  If you want to see the most civilized and thought-provoking discussions in the history of web-film journalism, then simply go to a blog that has a discussion of No Country for Old Men.  This is the film topic that everyone wants to hear opinions on.
           
Why is this film generating such genuine enthusiasm?  Why does it seem like this film, above all others this year, has such passion in its viewers?
           
The answer is that this is a film that does not spoon-feed its audience, that respects its audience and wants the viewer to participate.
           
I’ve said before in this space that many of my favorite films are ones that are “interactive” experiences, where there are a few missing puzzle pieces that I have to supply.  No Country for Old Men gives the viewer a rather straight-forward narrative for the first three-fourths of the film and then it enters territory that most filmmakers are too nervous to venture into.
           
Many people have called this a Western and if that’s the case, then the final shootout happens off-screen, followed by twenty minutes of loose-ends that are wrapped up in a philosophical, almost Jungian way.  This has caused a divide amongst people who either loved it or hated it, similar to the response to the series finale of The Sopranos. 
           
I loved it.
           
For the uninitiated, the film is about a man named Llewellyn Moss, who is out hunting in the middle of nowhere in Texas one day when he happens across a drug deal gone wrong.  At the scene of the carnage, he finds a satchel with millions of dollars in cash in it, so he decides to take it.  Meanwhile, a very bad man named Chigurh is hot on his tail, trying to get the money, killing everything in his path.  On the outskirts of this story is a Sheriff who is having a crisis of conscience, trying to figure out his place in the world and trying to find Llewellyn Moss before it’s too late.
           
Sounds simple enough, right?  I was astounded that the film starts off as something resembling A Simple Plan, then is basically structured like a Terminator movie for a good chunk of the running time.  It’s essentially Moss (Josh Brolin) running from Chigurh (Javier Bardem) for about an hour and Chigurh keeps on coming and coming, nothing stopping him, not even bullet wounds.  But it’s neither of those movies and it’s both of them, taking basic plot points and creating something richer and deeper than those movies were capable of.
           
This is a film about nothing less than life and death.  It is about how we become more inured to death and devastation as we get older because every day it seems like things are getting worse.  Even though at times it might seem like there is nothing new under the sun, there is always something lurking around the corner that is worse than we can imagine.  Eventually, we have to either accept that this is the way things are or we have to change it.  This film has one man who tries to change his own fate (Moss), another who accepts things the way they are (Chigurh) and then there is another man who just wants to give up (Sheriff Ed Tom Bell).
           
This is a return to form for Joel and Ethan Coen, who had kind of floundered in their last several films, seeming to lose their way in their own off-beat world.  The Big Lebowski is perhaps my favorite of their films, but the cult success of that film seemed to have pushed the Coens to greater surreal extremes O Brother, Where Art Thou? as well as causing them to rebound from that surrealism with two “Hollywood” pictures with The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, arguably their biggest failures as filmmakers simply because they are trying to work within a system that does not work for them. 
           
The joy of the best Coen Brothers movies is that they are willing to subvert genres, whether it is by taking the typical film noir film and making the lead character a stoner or by having a police procedural with a pregnant woman as the cop.  In Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, they weren’t trying to subvert the genre exactly, but they also weren’t trying to tell straightforward narratives either, leaving those films in a kind of purgatory that is neither fish nor fowl.
           
The beauty of No Country for Old Men is that it doesn’t seem like it is trying so hard to subvert the Western, but it sneaks up on you.  This is the first time that the Coens have officially worked from source material and it has turned out to be a stroke of genius.  The roots of Cormac McCarthy’s book keep the Coens grounded in something solid, giving them the freedom to roam around the plains without getting lost.  The Coens owe a huge debt to Roger Deakins, who bathes the film in an angelic glow in certain scenes and creates magnificent shadows in the darkness.  The scene where Moss is running at night and jumps in the river is one of the best photographed sequences I’ve seen all year.
           
Throughout the whole film, I really just wished that Frances McDormand’s Marge character from Fargo would show up and tell these people, “There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it.”  Instead, we have Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell character, who is basically Marge in another twenty years.  Ed Tom didn’t understand it then, but he really doesn’t understand it now.
           
There is one scene that I’d like to point out and it is the scene where we watch Chigurh recovering from his wounds.  This scene, like the scene of Marge meeting her old friend in Fargo, seemed extraneous at first, but if you think about in relation to what happens next in the plot, it makes perfect sense.  I realized that the Chigurh recovering scene lays the groundwork for what happens to him at the end, enabling the viewer to have a good sense of where that character winds up after the credits have rolled.
           
The acting is unbelievable from top to bottom, starting with the man who is assured of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, Javier Bardem.  I’ve been a fan of Bardem since I saw him in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, where he played the gentle Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas.  Here, he is a menacing manifestation of death, his voice gravelly and assured and a look in his eyes that is almost inhuman.  There is no better villain in the movies this year, especially because this is one that actually has his own set of principles.  Bardem has proved that he is a chameleon as an actor, equally adept at playing the constantly mobile as he is at being completely immobile, as he was in The Sea Inside.  Josh Brolin continues his shining year, after memorable turns in American Gangster, Planet Terror, and In the Valley of Elah.  Brolin doesn’t have many lines, but is able to convey a full range of emotions with his eyes and his body language.  Speaking of Elah, Tommy Lee Jones is ten times more powerful in this film than he was in that other one.  Jones is playing the same role he always does; the weary, laconic old-school lawman, but this one is more sensitive, more somber.  This is essentially a movie about Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, even though he has less screen time than the other two men, and it’s a credit to Jones’ powerful presence that we always feel like he’s the one we should be following.  Woody Harrelson also makes a great impression in a small role and between this and Paul Schrader’s The Walker, Harrelson is reminding folks of just how talented he can be.
           
I’m hesitant to get into spoilers on this one because even if you have seen the movie, my view of the way things happened really doesn’t matter.  This is a film where you have to make up your own mind about how events occurred and why.  I could tell you, for example, about what I think 2001 is about, but it really shouldn’t impact you because it’s an individual experience to be treasured on your own.  What I think happened in No Country for Old Men might be the same as your view or completely different, but ultimately neither of us are right and both of us are right.  The only thing I can do is urge you to see this film and then find someone else who has seen it and compare opinions.  I can almost assure you that the two of you have seen very different films.

Southland Tales

Not a whole lot written about this one since Cannes 2006, it seems.  I wonder if it’s because there aren’t a lot of folks who have seen it or if people just don’t know what to say about it.  It seems that most critics think this film is a complete disaster on the level of Heaven’s Gate while the select few think it is some kind of masterpiece.  Well, the truth is that it’s neither.  It is a big, fat mess of a movie that has some really intriguing ideas that unfortunately don’t gel in the end.  The film seems to be constructed rather haphazardly with little regard for the audience, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating to watch at times.
           
This is the second film from Richard Kelly, writer/director of Donnie Darko, which I was a very big fan of.  I thought that film was a perfect blend of pop, pulp and philosophy.  It had strange ideas and surreal images, but it was grounded by the fact that most of the craziness was in Donnie’s head.  With Southland Tales, it’s like the entire film is taking place in the head of Donne Darko.  There is no sane character that we can identify with nor is there a storyline that makes sense all the way through.
           
The biggest problem with this film is that it takes place in a world that is not familiar to any of us.  The other thing that was great about Donnie Darko is that we can all relate to being in high school, so when there are little bits that satirize the high school experience, we can laugh at it because we’re in on the joke.  Southland Tales is satirizing a world that does not exist.  Kelly never shows us what his vision of the world looks like before the events in the film, it simply just throws a bunch of oddball characters at the wall and hopes that images, faces and lines like “pimps don’t commit suicide” somehow stick.  We either get the joke and it’s not a very good one or we don’t get it because it’s lost in the thousands of texts that Kelly is trying to reference and he has bungled the punch line.
           
The film is set in a kind of alternative 2008 where there has been a nuclear attack on Texas and the United States is fighting a five-pronged war against Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea.  There is a presidential election coming up, but it seems like the Republicans already have it sewn up by instilling fear in the American people, but there is an energy crisis and the only hope is something called “Liquid Karma”, a process that uses the ocean to create energy.  In the middle of all this are Boxer Santaros (The Rock), who is a movie star suffering from amnesia; Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a kind of porn star Barbara Walters; and then there is Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer.  Krysta and Boxter have written a screenplay called “The Power” which seems to be oddly prescient and there is also a rip in the space-time continuum. 
           
As you can see, this is a very complicated picture, but it is needlessly so.  The truth of the matter is that this is a film with a lot of ideas and Kelly that thinks he’s being clever about the way he is saying them, referencing Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and Philip K. Dick.  But really, as you can see from the description above, the film is too on-the-nose with its points.  There is nothing resembling subtlety in this film, as certain lines are repeated over and over.  We got the joke the first time a character says, “This is the way the world ends.  Not with a whimper, but with a bang.”  It’s a line that only needs to be said once, but is instead repeated about six or seven more times.
           
There is an interesting scene with Justin Timberlake lip-syncing to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done,” and it would have been really interesting in a different movie.  Kelly really just wants to smuggle in the line from that song, “I’ve got soul/but I’m not a soldier,” but instead shoe-horns in a full-on musical sequence.  Kelly is constantly adding extraneous material to an already bloated film.
           
Still, I would recommend the film as a curiosity to check out because it’s not very often that a filmmaker is given the carte-blanch that Kelly was given and even rarer still that a filmmaker uses that freedom to create something singularly unique.  So, Kelly gets points for originality, but I am thankful that his next picture - The Box with Cameron Diaz – will be a more straightforward narrative.

The Mist

I was surprised by how much I liked this one.  I knew that Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) was adapting Stephen King once again, but I pretty much figured it would be similar to the remake of John Carpenter’s The Fog.  Instead, this is a film that might be one of the most interesting indictments of the war in Iraq; it’s certainly a more engaging and subtle attack on both Conservative and Liberal politics than In the Valley of Elah or Redacted.
           
The film is about the titular mist rolling into a small town in Maine.  We follow artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his son Billy as they go to the supermarket to stock up on supplies after an electrical storm the previous night.  Once they get to the market, the mist surrounds everything and then the silly folks who willingly walk into the mist starting dying.  Drayton is almost felled by tentacles that come out of the mist and he just wants to protect his boy from whatever monsters lurk both inside and outside the supermarket.  Meanwhile, many of the supermarket denizens are convinced by Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) that the mist represents the End of Days, stirring up religious fervor.
           
This is a film that has a blunt attack on Christianity, the Iraq War and American stupidity and it was made and released by a major studio.  This is pretty heady stuff and some very controversial territory and the film doesn’t back away.
           
Also, it’s pretty damn scary.
           
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a horror film that has truly gotten me scared, but this one did.  I was on the edge of my seat for nearly half the film, wondering what the hell is in the mist and how our heroes were going to escape.  The explanation for what it turns out to be is kind of lame, but within the context of the movie it makes perfect sense; it’s only later that you think about what a cop-out it is.  But really, it doesn’t matter why this mist shows us, the only thing that matters is what the mist makes human beings do to each other.  And Darabont and King’s picture is not very rosy. 
           
The acting is about as solid as it can be in this type of picture, with particular credit for Thomas Jane for doing his best Kurt Russell imitation and for Marcia Gay Harden, playing the impossibly hideous Mrs. Carmody.  The audience I saw the film with booed and hissed every time Harden showed up on screen, a testament to how good she played this bad person.  Special mention should be given to Toby Jones, for playing the most unlikely action hero of the year.
           
The ending of this film is one of the boldest I’ve seen in a Hollywood film in years.  It’s like a Twilight Zone ending.  I won’t say any more because it really shocked me, everything about it.  Even if you’re not a particularly big fan of horror films, this is a great matinee, reminding me of the best B horror films of the 40’s and 50’s, the ones that had an agenda beneath the mayhem.

Quick Hits – Lions for Lambs and La Vie en Rose

Lions for Lambs is not nearly as bad as most people are being led to believe.  It’s actually two-thirds of a decent film.  Tom Cruise is still a good actor, despite all the media hoopla surrounding everything he does.  He plays a Republican Senator convincingly and I was surprised that it’s not completely one-sided.  Robert Redford has done an admirable job of crafting a film that makes interesting points and asks difficult questions.  It’s basically just a collection of scenes of people sitting in rooms, talking about politics.  Lucky for us, the people are Redford, Cruise, and Meryl Streep. 
           
The film falters, however, every time we cut to the section of the film that has Derek Luke and Michael Pena on a mission in Afghanistan.  I figured out what would happen to them the moment they appeared on the screen and figured that my suspicion was too obvious, that it would be subverted.  But no, what you think will happen to them, happens to them.  It is trying to be the most powerful aspect of the film, but turns out to be the least. 
           
It’s not a great movie, nor is it a particularly good one, but it’s certainly not a bad one and definitely worthy of your time.

I finally got around to seeing Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose and I must say I was pretty under-whelmed.  I thought Marion Cotillard was fantastic, of course, and any praise or awards she gets will be deserved.  However, I felt that the film was kind of flat for a biopic, getting progressively less interesting as time wore on.  I felt the most interesting aspect of Edith Piaf’s life was the beginning, where she was a poor daughter of a circus performer, living a life of squalor in a brothel.  I thought Emmanuelle Seigner was powerful as Piaf’s caretaker at the brothel and would have liked to have seen more of that period in her life. 
           
I thought Dahan made a crucial structural mistake by showing us Piaf when she’s older, about twenty minutes into the film, so we know where she wound up.  For me, unfamiliar with Piaf’s life story before this film, it took all of the dramatic tension out of the story.  Once you know where somebody ends up, especially in a biopic, it’s not as interesting to see how they get there.  Once I know that somebody is going to fall, it’s not as much fun to watch them rise. 
           
Still, Cotillard was fantastic and the production design in the early part of the film is reminiscent of the great work Tom Tykwer did on Perfume, beautiful in its griminess.

E-mail of the Week

“So, I just finished reading your article about the Oscars (which I thoroughly enjoyed, as always), and I have a question for you. All the films that you mentioned (Atonement, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd, etc.) that will be in the running for Best Film have either JUST come out, or have not even been released yet. I feel like the Oscars (and every other awards show) always pick the winners from the films that come out RIGHT BEFORE the awards show. It’s like, did they forget about the other 10 months of films (or music videos, or albums)? Do movie houses purposely release films at this particular time of year hoping to get a nom? Am I crazy? Have you noticed this as well?” – Danielle, Austin, Texas

I’d like to use this e-mail as an example of why studios should stop trying to release “Oscar” films in the last third of the year.  I would like to implore the Academy to try and nominate some of the good films from earlier this year, but more importantly, I think the studios need to realize that there is never a bad time to release a good movie.  I just hope that if the studios release good movies in February and March, the Academy will remember them.  They are both to blame.  Of course, every once in a while there is a film released earlier in the year that gets love from the Academy, but not nearly enough.
           
There is some talk this year for Julie Christie in Away From Her and Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, both of which were released earlier in the year.  But, in the Best Picture category, it’s lucky if a summer film gets a nomination (like Gladiator or Seabiscuit), but otherwise it’s always films released in the last two or three months that get the nominations.
           
I get jazzed every year when September rolls around because it means that the good movies are finally coming, but I wish that I could feel that way about every month and every season.  Man cannot survive on Transformers alone.

- Noah Forrest
December 3, 2007

Other columns by Noah Forrest
11.19.07 - Thanksgiving
11.12.07 - Redacted
11.05.07 - Oscar, Don't Forget the Subtle Guys
10.30.07 - Ridley Scott - Overrated?
10.21.07 - Clooney Straddling The Line
10.08.07 - Wes Anderson
10.02.07 - Jake Paltrow's The Good Night
09.27.07 - Cleaning House
09.20.07 - Top 10 To Date
09.13.07 - Film Vs Television
08.31.07 - Halloween Review
08.28.07 - Who Is The Next Scorsese?
08.21.07 - Fall Preview
08.14.07 - The Horrific State Of The Horror Film
08.10.07 - Reservations About Catherine Zeta-Jones
08.07.07 - Saving Steven Spielberg
07.30.07 - Skinheads in the Cinema & This Is England
07.28.07 - Siena Miller: Good or Evil?
07.26.07 - The Frenzy on the Wall

Noah Forrest is a 24 year old aspiring writer/filmmaker in New York City.

The opinions expressed in these columns are the writers and do not neccessarily reflect the opinions of Movie City News or any of its editors or other contributors.

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