'No Country for Old Men' - The anticipation thread

I saw it - it's not good. It's probably their best since "The Man Who Wasn't There", but that just means that it was better than "Intolerable Cruelty" and "The Ladykillers". And actually, I'd say "The Ladykillers" might have been better.

i liked intolerable cruelty! more than the man who wasn't there, definitely.

the general reviews at Cannes are not so good

Good novel, mostly because of the quality of the writing itself, more than the storytelling. It's hard to imagine telling this story without falling into the cliches of 1990s hitman violence.

the book was pretty awful, I thought.

Enjoyed the book but can't remember more of it than the shootout at the hotel.

The book started out with a lot of promise - it read like "notes towards a mid-90's indie thriller starring Bill Pullman and J.T. Walsh" - but went absolutely nowhere

"If it ain't a mess, it'll do 'til the mess gits hyar."

(squints)

The trailer looks pretty great: http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/nocountryforoldmen/trailer/

best coen bros movie in over a decade.

really good.

hmmm my expectations are low and I hate Tommy Lee Jones this may be a renter

noted

can't wait

trailer looks dope

javier bardem is the best actor

in the world

he's awesome in it

his hair looks awesome

in it

s lushness

LOL HELMET

http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/miramax_films/no_country_for_old_men/javier_bardem/country1.jpg

I HAS A AIR TANK^^

hair and voice

i was hopping up and down in my seat when i saw this preview

were you able to watch it?

i meant the trailer. i saw the trailer, yes.

This looks really good! I just saw the trailer on tv. Coen bros seem at their best when at their most violent; and Javier Bardem, omg. I think it comes out Friday here!!!

I'm skeptical

Okay.

I'm tall.

let's go see it, nicka

oh yeah, he is tall! he ain't lyin'!

best coen bros movie since the early 90s. i thought it was great.

i've been pretty 'eh' on everything they've done since barton fink but this looks awesome.

Even if it's an adaptation of a below average novel?

(xpost)

i dont understand the question

cf a number of great noir flicks

cf a number of great movies, period, and vice-versa

i thought it was a good book, alfred, maybe you should re-skim it

i actually think they improve on the book in some ways... as an adaptation it's really faithful but at the same time they bring their own coen bros thing to it in a really good way. and im not really a fan of theirs.

the book was not even close to good. it was too heavy handed with the sheriff and the morality stuff at the end, it really fell apart in the last 50 pages.

that said, i think it might make for a great movie

OTM

they fuckin nail the ending too i thought.

I think I need to have the book's ending spoonfed to me a little, which I'm guessing the movie will do.

it's still a little elliptical but to see tommy lee jones actually saying that stuff goes a long way.

is it only ny & la this friday or what?

it's opening here so i guess not

Sure, plenty of great films were made of shitty novels, but this novel has pretensions, and I'm worried about a collision of sensibilities here; everything about the Coens suggests that they'll freeze them in amber.

i thought it was a good book, alfred, maybe you should re-skim it

I read it for the first time last week! Say what you want, but a couple of heavy-breathing sentences scattered hither and thither do not illuminate the souls of characters who stepped out of airport fiction. In this case minimalism = zero content.

I loved the confrontation between Chigurh and the wife. Well done. Although I haven't seen the movie, this'll probably be the clip shown to the Academy when Javier Bardem's name is read.

its opening on ilx?!!! xp

didn't we discuss the recent-period audience connection thing on the Stranger Things thread? Except there IIRC it's mostly Shakey calling it pandering and moaning a lot

did he see that one or is it the one-two punch where he also keeps saying he won't watch it

Stranger Things has a related appeal but is definitely closer to "pander" territory for a number of reasons. I liked it and was charmed but it uses the early 80s (aka really late 70s) in a different way, to different ends.

I refused to watch it once I heard they played Hazy Shade of Winter (by the Bangles) in a scene set in 1983.

Big Lebowski uses that trick too. A 1998 movie set in 1991, and not centrally about a historical event. It's a neat device.

Oh right, forgot about Lebowski's setting. Doubly impressive/uncanny because I think it was much harder to uniquely visualize 1991 from the perspective of 1998 than it was to reimagine 1988 from the perspective of 2001.

the only reason big lebowski is set in 1991 afaict is so that there's an in-movie reason for the dude to say 'this aggression will not stand, man', after he sees president bush saying it on tv

After all the hype and the Oscars, I think I expected something a little more monumental, a Statement, etc. But taken as just a movie, man, that's a darn fine movie.

coens in a nutshell?

Xp It was also just a running joke, right? The coens were known for making period films, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century, so it was funny to chuck in a few pointless gulf war refs in the new one

yeah, i think so - it's basically just one more non-sequitur in a movie which is full of 'em

Killing Them Softly came out in 2012 was based on a 1974 novel and was set in 2008 (basically just so they could make some pretty facile points about capitalism maaaan)

1991 adds resonance to "condolences, the bums lost"

Saddam Hussein cameo in Gutterballs.

I mean, just that last sentence alone makes setting the movie in 1991 worth it.

The introduction of the setting seems like more than a pointless non-sequitur. The Dude is supposed to be "the man for his time and place."

fargo was supposed to be a true story

political allegory of TBL has always made the most sense to me - Dude as burnt-out left from the 60s, Walter as triumphant Reaganite right, Donnie as hapless disengaged "moderate"/middle America, with the Iraq War as backdrop against which the conflict plays out

did he see that one or is it the one-two punch where he also keeps saying he won't watch it

lol what is this ad hominem nonsense

it's lovable and totally your shtick, own it

not gonna bother reading your response, I'm sure it was terrible anyway

:)

Allegorical Lebowski basically works; I've also read the Dude (maybe got this from an ILXor, dunno) as a man profoundly out of his time and place - this hangover of a much earlier Los Angeles scene that seems to have totally disappeared from around him; he has no peers or compatriots from his old agitator days and just sort of stumbles around in a stupor as events happen to him, dipping in and out of different pockets of contemporary Los Angeles in which he has no place and which basically baffle him. Even the Dude's soundtrack is all turn-of-the-seventies stuff - he actively resists The Eagles.

This doesn't really hang together entirely, since Treehorn is also an anachronism (though at least one making concessions to the here-and-now), Walter is obsessed with 'Nam, etc. And really the most straightforward reading of it is probably just that it's the next in the progression of The Big Sleep > The Long Goodbye, where now the hero of the overstuffed shaggy-dog detective meander really is just utterly clueless. He's not merely wandering between scenes that don't add up, but - to the extent that he does anything actively - working steadily on the wrong mystery with the wrong people, while the plot happens and resolves itself without him really having to do anything to intervene.

and yet he literally provides the seed for future generations

coming soon from gramcery pictures, Dude: Legacy

All of the weird Lebowski cult people (I know a few) kind of overshadow all of the smaller parts of the movie that don't immediately code as character traits you can easily parody. All of the Maude/Dude interactions have this out-of-sync feeling, with their characters maybe not that different -- is Maude actually a successful artist, or is she rich and is actually kind of a layabout?

Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance is so glad-handingly awkward

With the exception of the pornographers I don't think anyone in The Big Lebowski actually has an active job. Even Big Lebowski is pretty much an inheritance-squandering scammer!

PSH's delivery and body language on "Mister Lebowski is in seclusion in the West Wing" was beloved by a college friend of mine and now burned into my brain. I do like this reading of Maude as basically the Dude if he had a fortune to goof around with.

making modern art basically the going bowling of the intellectual class

!! actually that's on point - - - note similarity between maude's pendulum painting swing and the basic motions of bowling, also.

In 1969, President and Mrs. Nixon, both avid bowlers, had a new one-lane alley built (paid for by friends) in an underground workspace area below the driveway leading to the North Portico.

http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/lebowski-nixon1.jpg

Another gag on the Dude's location/dislocation in time:

http://pics.blameitonthevoices.com/062012/small_big%20lebowski%20time.jpg

there's no depth but it pretends to be more meaningful than it really is by presenting itself in a stylized way and trying to create a mood

Watching again it right now. I love the aesthetics and faux-depth, as you call it, of this film. The Coens totally know lines like this are nonsense: If you put it in your pocket, it gets mixed up with the others, becomes just a coin. Which it is. Chigurh is a dangerous but mortal freak and more than a little bit of a clown with all his spooky affectation. And they specifically said they went with the pulpiest McCarthy novel for the adaptation. Anything heavier and the whole enterprise would implode, like The Counselor.

story is set in 1980 because that's when the drug trade began to shift from florida and the gulf to the mexican border. this was foregrounded a bit more in the book, from what i remember.

(re period piece discussion from two weeks ago)

all of the foreboding and the dread over "what's coming" are specific to the sadistic violence about to be unleashed on either side of that border over the next couple decades. even in the film i thought this was a little heavy-handed, by coen standards at least

Beth Grant as the mother-in-law is so awesome

Watching Sicario right after this really helps illustrate how much humor the Coens put into everything & how important that is

otm

watching Torn Curtain. definitely getting an Anton Chigurh vibe off Wolfgang Kieling as Hermann Gromek. especially the provocative unyielding stare while mockingly repeating back what was said to him. wonder if his performance/character was one of the inspirations for the Coens/Bardem? he's the highlight of the film for me so far (even over the infamous no-spoiler Hitchcockian scene).

When you're in a hotel room and this is on >>>>>

looking for a man who has recently drunk milk

I will always remember looking over at my wife in the theater during the hotel shootout scene and seeing her looking in horror with her hands shielding her face.

the onethat scene is one of the best staged pursuit scenes I've ever seen.

just love the moment where you see Bardem's shadow pass the bottom of the hotel room door, disappear, and return, or when Moss peaces out and moments later you hear the ricochet of a bullet making clear Chigurh is indeed still in pursuit.

never seen this movie!

read the book and sort of hated it

I’m appreciating this read more than ones in the past.

Well, audiobook version, and also I’m older.

i love the movie but that never made me want to read the book. the movie is infinitely watchable. like the wizard of oz or something. i used to feel that way about miller's crossing. i would watch it over and over. haven't seen it in years now because i watched it so many times. on vhs even.

The Counselor is to No Country for Old Men what Miami Vice is to Heat]: more flawed and more weird, but in a way more compelling as well because it's not quite in control of what it's doing.

i love the movie but that never made me want to read the book. the movie is infinitely watchable. like the wizard of oz or something. i used to feel that way about miller's crossing. i would watch it over and over. haven't seen it in years now because i watched it so many times. on vhs even.

― scott seward, Friday, 20 December 2024 20:48 (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

three great picks imo

Eazy OTM, and thanks for the reminder that I need to rewatch The Counselor (I have the screenplay, tho)