No Country For Old Men

So I finally saw this masterpiece. Kelly and I had planned to see Guillermo Del Toro's (Pan's Labyrinth) latest, The Orphanage, but it stopped playing this weekend so I was like, have you seen No Country For Old Men? She hadn't and it was exciting because I'd just about given up on seeing it in theatres.

Anyway, it was effing amazing. The Coen Brothers have made some of my favorite movies (Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski) and they keep getting better. Everyone keeps talking about how it's so violent, but honestly it's not much in comparison to say, a Tarantino flick in which the director obviously finds a great deal of beauty in violence. The most violent bit was at the beginning but after that the violence is relegated to either the discovery of what was a violent scene or shooting scenes. There are some scenes of cleaning of gunshot wounds as well.

Really what got me was the way the story was told. I'm sure a lot of this rests on the Cormac McCarthy novel it's based on, but it was just amazing the way it took all of these storytelling conventions and flipped them on their head. It's steeped in ideas of folklore, in western heroes and villains, and yet the way it handles these conventions and expectations makes the theme of changing times--at least in the view of the protagonists--all the more potent and evident. It was somewhat meta. Not as nearly in self aware a way Atonement, but it was still there.

Also, this guy?


Awesomely creepy.

Go see it. Now.

Reading: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan