No Country for Old Men

[ZevGun]

i saw it the other day with my cousin

it's an interesting movie, i was thinking it was a modern day western going into it

Tommy Lee was really good, maybe the best character in the movie
i really liked the story, and was wondering what was going to happen next after each scene. The atmosphere was well done almost every scene (that quiet got a little repetitive by the end)

i was really enjoying it until the very end
the ending was so bad it almost killed my entire enjoyment of the movie (kind of like Contact)
sure it was a really believable ending, but it's not the one most movies would have (perhaps this is why the movie has stellar reviews?)

anyone else seen this mostly really good movie?

[fearembodied]

It was one of the best films of 2007, along with Eastern Promises.

[Urufu]

Yeah definatly a great movie, very good acting, directing, dialouge, etc... but near the end a few things in the story bothered me. :monk:

[auslander11]

It was a good movie, well-directed, and I'm told that it was true to the book (I never read it, personally). My only beef with it was that they took the idea of everyone being 'cattle' to the killer too far. I understand that most people are ill equipped to deal with someone who would rather kill you than look at you if he could help it. I get that. But nevertheless, if you live a violent life, EVENTUALLY, you're going to cross someone who's going to be just a bit faster than you, or smarter than you planned - and that moment never came. Even people who should've been prepared weren't - by the end of the movie, it really just seemed to have taken the point and driven it into the friggin' ground.

It was a good movie, but I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy it as much as I feel I should have.

[waywas]

My favorite scean in the whole movie is when the bad guy flips his coin and ask the old man to call it and the conversation leading up to calling it. I think that's my favorite scean of the whole movie.

[aloofman]

The unconventional ending didn't hurt the movie, in my opinion. An unsatisfying ending isn't a bad thing if it stays true to the themes of the story.

[kcseretuk]

I agree - a good relaistic ending rather than the usual Hollywood tripe. The random way in which the hero (Josh Brolin) died was true to life - in so much as we have as much control over what happens as a "flip of a coin" or a "rollof the dice"'. At any moment your life could go either way. Or something like that, if you get my drift? Woody:@#44: Allen used the same device in MatchPoint - another good movie.

[miryô---suru]

i like the weapon of the bad guy, and his personnality. He is insain...

[Ryss1]

Javier Bradim makes the movie imo. The ended fit perfectly to me and I think it is one of Tommy Lee Jones best perfomances, understated but perfectly played. Top movie of that year along with There Will Be Blood and Juno.

[nomonan]

the voice tone javier barden gives to his character is very powerfull,

btw, who do you think takes the money finally?

[Obloquy]

btw, who do you think takes the money finally?

The Mexican cartel do. Although it hardly matters.

I find it funny how few people see the correlation between Jones' and Bardem's characters. They're connected by their incomprehension of the world around them.

Each has a code, a method by which they impose an understanding upon the world. Both are confronted with the fallacy of their method, of the ultimate futility of their struggle.

It is not an individual, it is the world, to each man. Bardem is a man that through his code, Jones can understand to a point. There is a connection there, as in the shadow represented in the television, at both men's incomprehension of the world- why did the couple kill elderly people for the SS checks and evade capture until one ran out from their house naked? Why did they send more than Bardem out to retrieve the money? Why did the wife refuse to play his game?

Bardem is broken before the car-crash, he is as soon as he is forced to confront the meaninglessness of his code. Of his life and his resistence to the constant, unfeeling change about him. He's broken, the world has passed him by. He will be killed by men with no code. It is both inevitable and meaningless, so meaningless they don't even have to show it*.

I liked the bittersweet note at the end, that as nihilistic as the movie was, it presents the audience with the cautionary hope that until death, there is always a fight against the darkness and it behooves us to "make fire out in all that dark".

*incidentally, in the book, his body just ends up on a slab in a mortuary. Its handled equally undramatically in the film.