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Old 05-23-2008, 11:35 PM   #23 (permalink)
standardman
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Manchester, England
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I'm writing this at 5.30 in the am after a playing gta4 while listening to the episode so pardon any unwieldy sentences.

I really enjoyed No Country For Old Men but I get why people don't like it. The marketing sold it as more a blockbuster thriller movie which it really isn't. I was actually surprised how closely they stuck to the book for such a widely released film. McCarthy isn't a friendly or welcoming writer – his books are dense and self-reflective, violent and bleak and tend to end with ambiguity - which hardly makes them obvious box office draws.

No Country is less concerned about the money than how these characters deal with this unstoppable force who can not be reasoned with.

The deaths of the lead characters were clear but not lingered on.

I really liked the way Chigurh looked at his boots when leaving the wife's house. Thanks to him moving his feet out of the way of the blood when he killed the other bounty hunter, we know what he's checking for and therefore the fate of that character.
We didn't need to see it and we didn't need him to say it. It's the difference between seeing someone burst into a room with a gun and blast someone sitting in a chair in the face and seeing a cartridge eject and a hand drop.

As for Llewelyn Moss, we saw the girl he was drinking with dead, we saw all the carnage around and it showed him dead.

In the end of the movie, Chigurh is hit by a car, he gets out and carries on. The last we see of the character is him walking off, he cannot be stopped.

Tommy Lee's recollection of a dream at the end is the entire movie.

Quote:
Alright then. Two of 'em. Both had my father in 'em . It's peculiar. I'm older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he's the younger man. Anyway, first one I don't remember to well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he's gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
Like I said, I get why you didn't like it and I'm not judging you for it, but you do seem a little too quick to judge people who do like it. Although for the record, I do immediately want to shoot anyone who can't talk about a movie without mentioning Goddard and auteur theory in the face.

Also the guy who plays Niko Bellec in GTA4 just killed his career, which is a shame because he was good.
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