The Coens are onboard the adaptation of my favorite author's most recent work: Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men.
This'll be very much in the vein of Fargo. In other words: serious.
It might be shooting in Autin - RK, get your resume out!
i hope its redemption. i've almost completely written them off after the last two and they are/were some of my favorite filmmakers.
gb, what's the book like?
I just visited my dying grandmother in the hospital and it's been a super shitty day/week/month...but this news just really really made my day thanks gb!
Quote from: Hedwig on November 19, 2005, 08:43:57 PM
gb, what's the book like?
It's a somewhat minor work from one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century. It's really good, and will adapt splendidly into a film. Here's the Publisher's Weekly synopsis from Amazon.com:
"Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns with a mesmerizing modern-day western. In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex–Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match. In a series of thoughtful first-person passages interspersed throughout, Sheriff Bell laments the changing world, wrestles with an uncomfortable memory from his service in WWII and—a soft ray of light in a book so steeped in bloodshed—rejoices in the great good fortune of his marriage. While the action of the novel thrills, it's the sensitivity and wisdom of Sheriff Bell that makes the book a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life. "
That barely does it justice, though.
Did a search to find more info:
Coens will direct "No Country for Old Men"
Source: coenbrothers.net
Chris Hewitt of the St Paul Pioneer Press and Variety are reporting that the Coen Brothers next project will be an adaptation of the recently published "No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy. The August 28th article states that they will direct, not just an adaptation this time.
'Old Man' McCarthy wows with tale of life and death
Les Chappell, Daily Cardinal
*READ AT OWN RISK*
Shockingly, Cormac McCarthy is not one of the titular ´Old Men.´At first glance, there are many reasons why the directing team of Joel and Ethan Coen has decided to direct an adaptation of "No Country for Old Men," the first novel in seven years from author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy fills "Country" with the unique characters and flowing dialogue inherent to a Coen film.
"Country's" distinctive cast includes a Vietnam veteran, a Mexican hitman and a straightforward sheriff. McCarthy infuses the text with dialogue that is instantly quotable, as well as a setting that begs for expansive camera angles.
But more than that, "No Country for Old Men" follows a key theme the Coens touched on in "Fargo"-a lot can happen in the middle of nowhere. In McCarthy's case, nowhere is his stamping ground of southern Texas and what happens is a drug deal gone bad with $2.4 million recovered among the corpses by Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss.
After seven years, McCarthy has returned to the landscape he visited in "All the Pretty Horses," but this time his tight and natural prose is aimed at achieving pure suspense. McCarthy doesn't waste time with rambling speeches and run-on sentences. McCarthy puts the story in a lively present tense where there's no time to think before the next event occurs.
The vividness of McCarthy's style contributes greatly to his main characters, who, in the hands of a lesser writer, could be reduced to stereotypes of running man and psychopath. Moss moves across the state like a drifter, noticing nothing beyond what he needs to survive, while the pursuing hitman, Chigurh, can spend pages examining details such as the smell of milk and dust near the air vent.
Although Sheriff Bell comes in after Moss and Chigurh and spends the whole book trying to catch up with the body count, his presence somehow bears more weight than either character. Every section of the book opens with his reflections on topics such as World War II, law enforcement technology and death row. With Bell, McCarthy evokes the image of an old man smoking his pipe on the front porch explaining a long-lost tale to his grandchildren.
"Country's" dialogue can go on for pages and pages with barely any details of the outside world, and while readers may have to count lines to figure out who said what, it feels so much like movie dialogue that the Coens may not even need to rewrite.
Unfortunately, by the end of the book it's clear that the speed of bloodshed and heartache has drained Bell of his spirit, and once again McCarthy seems to share his protagonist's viewpoint. There is no great shoot-out confrontation between the main characters and McCarthy leaves many questions unresolved.
While he may be saving up material for a sequel, this sudden tired attitude throws a wrench into the book's finale.
The weak ending cannot offset the sense of satisfaction this book provides; McCarthy has brought life and death into focus better than most writers in years. He has written a story readers cannot help but finish-and with its sharp, witty language, the Coens will have a field day with "Country."
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 20, 2005, 01:49:24 AMUnfortunately, by the end of the book it's clear that the speed of bloodshed and heartache has drained Bell of his spirit, and once again McCarthy seems to share his protagonist's viewpoint. There is no great shoot-out confrontation between the main characters and McCarthy leaves many questions unresolved.
While he may be saving up material for a sequel, this sudden tired attitude throws a wrench into the book's finale.
That's a really ignorant critique; the ending is where the book's brilliance comes into its own - the narrative builds to such great heights that it can't be wrapped up in a neat and tidy confrontation. It goes from being hard boiled to being mythic.
Quote from: Ghostboy on November 19, 2005, 08:32:58 PM
It might be shooting in Autin -
Autin... where's that then?...
After reading the synopsis from GB I'm psyched. It should be Fantastic.
paramount classics reads xixax and is tracking down all our directors for their next films...
Jones and Bardem in Coens' Old Men
Source: Variety February 2, 2006
Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem are in talks to star in Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, reports Variety.
Shooting on the co-production of Miramax and John Lesher's Paramount-based classics division will start this May in New Mexico and Texas.
Scott Rudin is producing with Ethan Coen, who wrote the script with his director brother Joel
Set in West Texas in 1980, the story is about a young Vietnam vet who stumbles over the remnants of a drug deal gone bad. He's hunted by two extremely vicious assassins who want the money back.
check out this month's Harper's for a really detailed defense of "no country for old men" against its harsh critics.
Brolin Will Star in Coen's Country
Source: Variety
April 27, 2006
Joel and Ethan Coen have set Josh Brolin to join Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, says Variety.
Filming begins late spring. The project is a co-production between Miramax and Paramount Classics. Scott Rudin is producing with Ethan Coen. The Coens adapted the novel, which is set in West Texas in 1980.
Brolin will play a Vietnam vet who works in the Texas plains and scoops up a bundle of cash he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad.
Brolin just wrapped the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino film Grind House for Dimension, and moves into the Karen Moncrieff-directed indie The Dead Girl.
I like Josh Brolin. He's got a freakishly large head, which I respect in an actor.
i thought all actors have freakishly large heads? :bravo: hooray for the Coen brothers related news! i just had a thirty minute conversation with a professor about the coens and i come home directly afterwards to read this, great day.
Quote from: polkablues on April 27, 2006, 04:32:21 PM
I like Josh Brolin. He's got a freakishly large head, which I respect in an actor.
you mean ON an actor?
Coens tap Root, Harrelson
Source: Hollywood Reporter
The Coen brothers have lassoed Woody Harrelson and Stephen Root for their contemporary Western thriller "No Country for Old Men." The film will be distributed by Paramount Vantage domestically and by Miramax Films internationally. Based on the acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel, the story deals with the battle between good and evil and the importance of choice and chance in shaping destiny. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. Scott Rudin and the Coens are producing, while Miramax is co-financing.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fgraphics8.nytimes.com%2Fimages%2F2006%2F08%2F27%2Farts%2F27join.1.600.jpg&hash=919fad36677fa0719c4637bd41c0c16f76cf5123)
from composter Carter Burwells site...
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.carterburwell.com%2Fgraphics%2FProject_Images%2FNCFOM_Moss_Boots.jpg&hash=1860762d9dd617c457f6b8465831733167537c65) (https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.carterburwell.com%2Fgraphics%2FProject_Images%2FNCFOM_Chigurh_WildEyes.jpg&hash=ac2de904668c4ceb6698b47bcfc15f396a31ff37)
Carter's Notes
The film is the quietest I've worked on. Often there is no sound but wind and boots on hard caliche or stocking feet on concrete. Then again there are shootouts involving an unknown number of shooters with shotguns and automatic weapons. It was unclear for a while what kind of score could possibly accompany this film without intruding on this raw quiet. I spoke with the Coens about either an all-percussion score or a melange of sustained tones which would blend in with the sound effects. We went the latter route.
The all-percussion score sounds like fun, and I look forward to doing it sometime, but it is such a cliche to have drums accompany "action" that this sound immediately pulled the film back into familiar territory. The sustained tones, however, kept the film unsettled. Skip Lievsay, the sound editor, and I spoke early about these approaches and he sent me some examples of processed sound effects just as I sent him examples of tone compositions, mostly sine and sawtooth waves and singing bowls. When the film is mixed the effect will be that the music comes out of and sinks back into the sound effects in a hopefully subliminal manner.
The end titles of the film raised an interesting question: the entire film takes place without songs or identifiable score, so what could play over five minutes of end titles that wouldn't be self-conscious (like wind or sine waves) or intrusive (like a pop song)? I ended up writing a tune that features the only acoustic instruments in the score, but they take quite a while to appear. The first sounds are percussion but almost sound like sound effects. The next sounds are the sustained tones which are featured in the rest of the score. Only after two minutes of this do truly familiar instruments arrive - guitar and bass - which then play to the end along with the percussion. Hopefully this somehow works with the rest of the film, although we won't really know this until we mix the film, and maybe not until much later.
MP3: http://www.carterburwell.com/audio/NCFOM_Audio/Jackpot_edit.mp3
MP3: http://www.carterburwell.com/audio/NCFOM_Audio/Blood_Trail_edit.mp3
Starring Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Woody Harrelson.
U.S. Release 2007
New plan for manning 'Men'
Miramax to release 'Country' in fall
Source: Variety
Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films, the two worldwide partners on Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of the 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel "No Country for Old Men," are switching gears on the eve of the film's expected launch at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Instead of releasing the noir Western internationally, as initially planned, Miramax will handle its domestic distribution, while Par Vantage will take over international. Scott Rudin and the Coens are producers; the film stars Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem.
"The Coens felt strongly about going in the fall," explained Par Vantage president John Lesher, who had tried to talk the brothers into an August release along the lines of "The Constant Gardener." "These are great directors at the top of their game. It's a really good, muscular movie that works well with older men; it's violent and visceral. The fall is a long time to wait."
Miramax prexy Daniel Battsek, who has enjoyed a long relationship with the Coens via Buena Vista Intl. on such films as "The Ladykillers" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," was happy to add "No Country for Old Men" to his fall slate.
Citing a prior Miramax/Warner Bros. switch on Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," Battsek said, "Looking at their fall schedule, it made more sense for us to take domestic. We have the best interest of the movie at heart. We've been working on the movie with Paramount all along. We're in great shape."
Lesher, on the other hand, has his hands full of high-octane fall contenders. Paramount Vantage will open DreamWorks' Afghanistan drama "The Kite Runner," directed by Oscar perennial Marc Forster, as well as Sean Penn's "Into the Wild"; Noah Baumbach's relationship drama "Margot at the Wedding," starring Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh; and another Rudin project, Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood."
Par Vantage had already developed a marketing campaign and trailer, but with no fall slot available, "It was important for all of us to do right by the movie," said Lesher. "I love the movie. It was a tough decision. But Miramax has more manpower. Every movie is going to get its fair shake."
test screening review on AICN: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/32494
no score!
...and Carter Burwell's laughing all the way to the bank.
Review: No Country for Old Men
By TODD MCCARTHY; Variety
A scorching blast of tense genre filmmaking shot through with rich veins of melancholy, down-home philosophy and dark, dark humor, "No Country for Old Men" reps a superior match of source material and filmmaking talent. Cormac McCarthy's bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen brothers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own touch. Result is one of the their very best films, a bloody classic of its type destined for acclaim and potentially robust B.O. returns upon release later in the year.
Reduced to its barest bones, the story, set in 1980, is a familiar one of a busted drug deal and the violent wages of one man's misguided attempt to make off with ill-gotten gains. But writing in marvelous Texas vernacular that injected surpassing terseness with gasping velocity, McCarthy created an indelible portrait of a quickly changing American West whose new surge of violence makes the land's 19th century legacy pale in comparison.
For their part, Joel and Ethan Coen, with both credited equally for writing and directing, are back on top of their game after some less than stellar outings. While brandishing the brothers' customary wit and impeccable craftsmanship, pic possess the vitality and invention of top-drawer 1970s American filmmaking, quite an accomplishment these days. It's also got one of cinema's most original and memorable villains in recent memory, never a bad thing in attracting an audience, especially as so audaciously played by Javier Bardem.
Set in rugged, parched West Texas (but filmed in New Mexico) and brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins in tones that resemble shafts of wheat examined in myriad different lights, yarn commences with several startling sequences: A crime suspect (Bardem) turns the tables on his arresting officer, strangles him with his handcuffs, then kills a driver for his car using a stun gun made for slaughtering cattle; in the middle of nowhere, a hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), stumbles across five trucks, several more bullet-ridden corpses, a huge stash of drugs and $2 million in a briefcase, which he impulsively takes. When he returns to the scene of the crime that night, he's shot at by unknown men and chased into a nearby river by a fierce dog before getting away.
Central figures in this tale of pursuit is rounded out by Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), the local county sheriff, who tours the truck crime scene on horseback and in short order gets Moss in his sights, although not as quickly as does Bardem's Anton Chigurh, who is able to tune in to a transponder in the moneybag the unsuspecting Moss has stashed in a heating duct in a local motel.
Death walks hand in hand with Chigurh wherever he goes, unless he decides otherwise. Clearly a killer by profession, the lucid, direct-talking man considers anyone else who crosses his path fair game; if everything you've done in your life has led you to him, he may explain to his about-to-be victims, your time might just have come. "You don't have to do this," the innocent invariably insist to a man whose murderous code dictates otherwise. Occasionally, however, he will allow someone to decide his own fate by coin toss, notably in a tense early scene in an old filling station marbled with nervous humor.
In addition to the pared down dialogue, pic is marked by silences, wind-inflected ones to be found naturally in the empty expanses of the West, as well as breathlessly suspenseful interior interludes, notably an ultra-Hitchcockian sequence in which Moss, aware that Chigurh has tracked him to an old hotel, listens and waits in his room as his hunter comes quietly to his door.
It's amazing how much carnage ensues given that the action essentially focuses upon three men playing cat-and-mouse across a beautiful and brutal landscape. Three guys in the wrong motel room at the wrong time get the treatment from Chigurh, and a cocky intermediary (Woody Harrelson) for the missing money's apparent rightful owner makes the mistake of getting in between the trigger-happy assassin and Moss. And they're far from the only victims in a story that disturbingly portrays the nature of the new violence stemming, in the view advanced here, from the combination of the drug trade and the disintegration of societal mores.
The manner in which the narrative advances is shocking and nearly impossible to predict; viewers who haven't read the best-seller will be gripped by the situations put onscreen and sometimes afraid to see what they fear will happen next. Those familiar with the story will be gratified to behold a terrific novel make the shift in medium managed, for once, with such smarts.
The Coens build a sense of foreboding from the outset without being heavy or pretentious about it. They have consistently worked in the crime genre, of course, beginning with their first film, "Blood Simple," whose seriousness perhaps mostly approximates the tone of this one, although there are overlaps as well with "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo." But while they have eliminated one especially poignant character from the book in the interests of time, slashed Bell's distinctive philosophical ruminations and perhaps unduly hastened the ending, the brothers have honored McCarthy's serious themes, the integrity of his characters and his essential intentions.
They have also beefed up the laughs, the majority of which stem from the unlikely source of the cold-blooded Chigurh. From the outset, the powerful and commanding Bardem leaves no doubt that Chigurh would just as soon kill you as ask you the time of day. His conversation brooks no nonsense or evasion. But it is the character's utter lack of humor that Bardem and the Coens cleverly offer as the source of the character's humorousness, and the actor makes the most of this approach in a diabolically effective performance.
Jones would practically seem to have been born to play Cormac McCarthy roles, and he proves it here in a quintessential turn as a proud longtime sheriff dismayed by what he sees things coming to. Holding his own in distinguished company after long dwelling in TV and schlock, Brolin gives off young Nick Nolte vibes as an ordinary man who tries to outsmart some big boys in order to get away with the score of his life.
Scottish thesp Kelly Macdonald registers potently as Moss's country wife, while tasty supporting turns are delivered by Harrelson, Stephen Root as the latter character's employer, Rodger Boyce as a sheriff who commiserates with Bell, Barry Corbin as Bell's crusty old uncle, Ana Reeder as a swimming pool floozy who offers Moss some company and Gene Jones as the old fellow Chigurh makes call his own fate.
Deakins' stunning location work and precision framing is joined by Jess Gonchor's production design, the Coens' cutting under their usual pseudonym of Roderick Jaynes, Carter Burwell's discreet score and expert sound work to make "No Country for Old Men" a total visual and aural pleasure.
Camera (Deluxe color, widescreen), Roger Deakins; editor, Roderick Jaynes; music, Carter Burwell; production designer, Jess Gonchor; art director, John P. Goldsmith; set decorator, Nancy Haigh; costume designer, Mary Zophres; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Peter Kurland; supervising sound editor, Skip Lievsay; sound designer, Craig Berkey; re-recording mixers, Lievsay, Berkey, Greg Orloff; associate producer, David Diliberto; assistant director, Betsy Magruder; second unit director-stunt coordinator, Jery Hewitt; second unit camera, Paul Elliot; casting, Ellen Chenoweth. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 18, 2007. MPAA Rating: R, Running time: 122 MIN.
i can't wait for silias to remind us he can't wait. seriously psyched.
Coens' 'No Country for Old Men' keeps faith with Cormac McCarthy
Source: Los Angeles Times
CANNES, FRANCE — Expectations to the contrary, Joel Coen is "not an indiscriminate fan of violent films." He and his brother Ethan may have made some legendarily ferocious films, including the likes of "Fargo" and "Blood Simple," but, Joel says, "there are certain violent ones I see the previews for and I say, 'I don't want to go.' "
The Coens, sitting side by side in the noticeably peaceful lobby of the Hotel du Cap, are in competition at the Festival de Cannes with yet another violent film, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men." Yet there is something different about this one, so much so that the brothers, who share writing, directing and producing credit, say they would consider letting their oldest children, not quite teenagers, see it. "They could both watch this," Joel says, "and take it in the right way."
That's because there is on-screen violence and on-screen violence, and "No Country for Old Men," the story of stolen drug money and the carnage it precipitates, is a film that doesn't celebrate violence, it despairs of it. This is a completely gripping nihilistic thriller, a model of impeccably constructed, implacable storytelling. All you could hope for in a marriage of the Coen brothers and McCarthy, it's a film that you can't stop watching, even though you very much wish you could as it escorts you through a world so horrifically bleak "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it.
One of the things that makes "No Country" different, the brothers agree, is that pitiless quality. "That's a hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and characters but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being sentimental," says Ethan. There is, adds Joel, "no sort of relief from the unrelenting nature of the story."
It was producer Scott Rudin who bought the book rights and offered it to the Coens, who at the time were working on a project that fell apart, an adaptation of James Dickey's "To the White Sea," a novel about the firebombing of Tokyo that the brothers say had a similar violent theme.
With this adaptation, the Coens have stuck remarkably close to the book, doing more pruning than anything else. "We weren't going to rewrite Cormac McCarthy in any substantial way," says Joel, while Ethan, dealing with the common misunderstanding of what's involved in adaptation, adds a mocking, "It's work to hold the spine open so you can copy the words."
One of the places in where the Coens found common ground with McCarthy was in the novel's tendency to fool around with genre conventions. "That was familiar, congenial to us; we're naturally attracted to subverting genre," says Joel. "We liked the fact that the bad guys never really meet the good guys, that McCarthy did not follow through on formula expectations."
Another area that attracted the Coens was the novel's intense sense of place. "The regional thing is strong for us, and this was not East Texas or South Texas, this was West Texas," says Ethan. The Coens and their regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins, shot key exteriors in that part of the state. "We turned over the idea of shooting exclusively in New Mexico, where there are great tax incentives, but Tommy Lee Jones, who comes out of that West Texas landscape, yelled at us that it would be a mistake," says Ethan. "So it wasn't all principle, it was partially browbeating."
Jones, who plays disillusioned Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, was the first person cast in the film. "It was an easy decision, but not an automatic one," says Ethan, and Joel elaborates: "You're sort of aware you don't want to be too much on the nose with casting, but it's not exactly like you'd read the book and think Tommy Lee embodied the character exactly. Tommy Lee brings acid to him that isn't in the book, and that was kind of interesting to us." Ethan adds, "We had a horror of sentimentality; we didn't want Grandpa Charlie Weaver."
The next to be cast was Javier Bardem, who plays the golem-like contract killer of mysterious ethnicity, Anton Chigurh. "We wanted somebody who could have come from Mars; we even shot the beginning of the film like 'The Man Who Fell to Earth,' " says Joel. Given that the story takes place in the Southwest, the Coens worried briefly that Bardem's Spanish ethnicity might make him too tied to place, but Bardem's gifts won them over.
But because "No Country" is what Joel calls "a three-headed monster," the Coens still needed to find the third lead, a local named Llewlyn Moss who takes the drug money. "Having cast these two guys," explains Ethan, "we didn't want to cut to 'Here's the dull guy.' We were like, 'Oh God, what are we going to do?' "
Fortunately, just before shooting started, the Coens found Josh Brolin as Llewlyn. The major surprise of the film, Brolin, who grew up on a ranch in Central California, easily holds his own with his costars, bringing the kind of grounded rural presence to the role the brothers considered essential. "We lucked out with the casting," says Ethan. No one who survives this disturbing, unsettling film will be in any mood to argue.
There's a clip here (http://www.arte.tv/fr/Video/183604,CmC=1576620.html).
Looks fantastic.
Coens' Wild West thriller wows Cannes
A taut thriller with existential overtones set in the contemporary Wild West by Oscar-winning film-makers the Coen brothers is emerging as a favourite to snatch the Cannes filmfest's top prize.
"One of their very best films," raved film mag Variety as the movie premiered at the world's biggest film fest, which culminates May 27 with the awarding of the prestigious Palme d'Or trophy.
"No Country For Old Men", Variety added, is "a bloody classic of its type destined for acclaim."
The film, based on a novel by US Pulitzer-winner Cormac McCarthy, takes place in 1980 in the wild, desolate scrubland bordering the US-Mexico frontier, when drug-runners have taken over from cattle rustlers and violence sweeps small towns.
"Some say it's a Western, we saw it as a crime story," Joel Coen said at a press conference.
With corpses galore and rivers of blood -- not to mention a fearsome psychopathic killer whose favoured weapon is a deadly compressed-air device used to slaughter cattle -- the film shows the West more lawless, more violent than in the frontier days.
But the brothers, makers of the Oscar-winning feature "Fargo", as well as "Barton Fink" and "Raising Arizona", and in competition at Cannes for the eighth time, denied the film and its wry dialogue carried a political message on guns or violence.
"That's not the way we think about the films that we do," said Joel.
"We loved the book and wanted to be faithful to it," said Ethan, finishing, as always, his brother's sentences.
The movie centres on three characters: the sheriff, an upright moralistic man phased by the changing times; the killer, who is fundamentally, metaphysically bad; and a decent Vietnam vet whose life takes a twist when he stumbles onto a bag stuffed with two million dollars of drug money.
The latter, played by Josh Brolin (currently in the Tarantino-Rodriguez double feature "Grindhouse"), triggers a bloodbathed sequence of events when he walks away with the ill-gotten gains.
Oscar-winning Tommy Lee Jones ("The Fugitive", "Men In Black") plays the sheriff and Spanish actor Javier Bardem ("The Sea Inside"), wearing his hair in a horrendous long mane, plays the killer.
"Being here at Cannes and working with the Coens is more than I would ever have dreamed of. But did I enjoy my haircut? No!" said the Spaniard, whose character is Terminator-like in his implacable lethal effectiveness.
"The reason I have this look is because I don't speak English," he joked of his unnerving off-kilter gaze through the film.
Also starring is Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald of "Trainspotting" fame, who threw off her Glaswegian accent for a remarkably authentic Texan one.
Joel Coen said her nationality almost excluded her from the beginning.
"When they first mentioned her I said "No f... way!'" he said. But "when I heard her speak Texan I said 'How did you do that?'"
"No Country For Old Men" is one of 22 films vying for the Palme d'Or. It is to hit movie theatres around the world starting November, putting it in line as well for the 2008 US Academy Awards.
i think that's really great. bump it up a few spots on my 'most anticipated' list.
Quote from: polkablues on April 27, 2006, 04:32:21 PM
I like Josh Brolin. He's got a freakishly large head, which I respect in an actor.
i dont know if i mentioned this already but during the Coens Q&A they said that everybody in this movie has a very large head.
i have a very large head.
Spain's Bardem Surprises Himself in Film
Javier Bardem is one of Europe's hottest actors. But the Spanish star is astonished to find himself feted at Cannes for starring in a modern-day Western set under the big skies of west Texas.
Bardem plays a psychopath who dishes out death without reason or remorse in "No Country for Old Men" from filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen ("Fargo," "The Big Lebowski").
It isn't a typical movie, or a typical role for Bardem. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 for playing persecuted Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in "Before Night Falls," and gained more plaudits for "The Sea Inside," the Oscar-winning Spanish film about a paralyzed man fighting for the right to die.
"I'm a European actor, and I have some problems with violence," Bardem said Sunday. "Violence is something I haven't really played very much in movies."
Meeting the Coen brothers and reading their script eased his worries. Adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the film is a taut thriller that explores the meaning of violence and the nature of good and evil.
"Our first talk with Javier was about his qualms," said Ethan Coen, half of the writing/producing/directing partnership. "He wanted to make sure we felt the same way (as he did) and that we weren't doing a Chuck Norris movie."
Bardem, 38, supplies much of the film's humor and horror as Anton Chigurh, a mysterious killer trying to retrieve a briefcase of stolen drug money. Josh Brolin is the laconic Vietnam vet who unwisely attempts to make off with the cash, while Tommy Lee Jones is the old-fashioned sheriff trying to stop a tide of carnage he can scarcely comprehend.
The film has been warmly received at Cannes, where it is contending for the Palme d'Or. It is slated for a November opening in North America.
A member of a Spanish acting family, Bardem became a sex symbol in the early 1990s in the surreal, steamy Spanish comedy "Jamon, Jamon."
He is cast against type in the Coens' movie: His character is jowly and deadpan, with a helmet-like hairdo and pasty skin. Chigurh is unrecognizable in the tanned, T-shirt-clad Bardem, who devours breadrolls during lunch with journalists at a beachside restaurant.
Bardem said he had wanted to work with the Coens for years, but doubted it would happen because they make "deeply American movies" with a strong sense of place.
"No Country for Old Men" is rooted in the unforgiving Texas terrain. But Chigurh is an outsider, an enigmatic stranger who comes to town with murder on his mind. Bardem says that made the character easier to play.
"All the work I usually do: imagining the past, the circumstances of the character in this case I didn't do it," he said.
"We all saw him as a force of nature the embodiment of violence."
The film is sure to raise Bardem's profile with English-language audiences. He'll soon be seen in an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" directed by Mike Newell ("Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.") This summer, he shoots Woody Allen's new movie in Barcelona, alongside Scarlett Johansson and his old friend Penelope Cruz.
Bardem said acting in English is getting easier.
"I'm getting more comfortable now, but it will never get to the point as if you are doing it in your own language," he said. "When I say 'I love you' or 'I hate you' in Spanish, many things come to my mind, aspects of my own life. When I say it in English, I don't have the memories."
Cannes Press Raving Over New Coen Brothers Thriller
Source: Cinematical
I don't know about you, but the arrival of a new Coen Brothers movie is a really big deal to me. (Yes, even after Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, both of which I enjoy more than most people seem to.) Their latest is a return to the old-school film noir form a la Blood Simple or The Man Who Wasn't There. Miramax won't be releasing No Country for Old Men until November 21*, but we've got a handful of very enthusiastic reactions from that big French film festival.
Our pals over at Rotten Tomatoes say: "not only does No Country deliver another excellent Coen Brothers film, it also delves thematically deeper than your average crime thriller with its sprawling saga of a drug deal gone wrong, a bag of cash, a hunter on the run (Josh Brolin), and the philosophizing psychopath on his trail (Javier Bardem)." The Tomato gang also mentions that the flick "created an audible buzz in the Debussy theater lobby as members of the press spilled out of the aisles after tonight's press screening." Cool! (Also in the cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson and the adorable Kelly Macdonald.)
Our own James Rocchi shares his thoughts: "A brilliant example of how plot devices as simple as murder and money can be used to explore larger sweeping themes of mortality, morality and more -- while still delivering rousing, intelligent pure entertainment." Over at Variety, Todd McCarthy was in agreement: "Cormac McCarthy's bracing and brilliant novel is gold for the Coen brothers, who have handled it respectfully but not slavishly, using its built-in cinematic values while cutting for brevity and infusing it with their own touch. Result is one of the their very best films, a bloody classic of its type destined for acclaim and potentially robust B.O. returns upon release later in the year." Argh, who wants to wait until November?? Then again, only a fool would release a Coen film in the middle of the summer.
* mark yer calendars.
ADMIN WARNING: VERY SPOILERY CLIPS
Some more clips here (http://www.commeaucinema.com/bandes-annonces=76586.html).
God, this looks great. I kinda wish I hadn't watched those clips, though. I've read the book and the material is already familiar to me, but I wish I'd seen everything in the proper context.
That shot of the blood creeping towards Bardem's boots is classic Coen Bros.
From msn movies
"The buzz machine slammed the French Riviera this weekend. Its target was one film: The Coen Brothers' noir-tinged, darkly comical and meditative Western, "No Country for Old Men." Critics and audiences have gone berserk over the film, and the Coens and their cast of Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin are already fielding Oscar questions (Tommy Lee Jones would be as well, but the notoriously testy actor steered clear of Cannes). A colleague wrote me late last night and asked whether the hype was justified, whether the Oscar talk could possibly be true. I can't predict anything about the Oscars, because Miramax won't release the film until November. But I can answer the first question.
Yes, it's that good and, no, it's not overhyped. I'm a rabid Coen Brothers fan, and for me, this near masterpiece is their best, most mature and beautiful work since 1990's "Miller's Crossing" ("The Big Lebowski" is on another plane, so I can't even compare the two). But I won't use the M word until I've seen it again — which I almost did this morning (I've never seen a film twice at the same festival) — until I saw the line around the block.
For those unaware, "No Country for Old Men" is the Coens' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2003 novel (if you haven't read it, you should; I think it's better than his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Road"). In retrospect, the pair seems perfect. "Country" is McCarthy's most accessible novel, a genre blur loaded with the type of colorful, local characters (West Texas, in this case) and the sharp, pitch-black funny dialogue that the Coens have written for more than two decades. It starts when ex-'Nam vet Llewlyn Moss (Brolin, in the type of rugged performance for which the word "breakthrough" was created) blindly stumbles upon a horrific desert scene while hunting: dead bodies and shot-up pickup trucks littering the sand. Inside one of the trucks, Moss finds enough heroin to keep a city on the nod for years and a case full of $2 million. When he decides to grab the money, he sets off a chain reaction of cataclysmic events for everyone involved. And there are a lot of everyones in "Country." There is Moss's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), whose unquestioning trust of her husband drives his insane ambition; there's Sheriff Bell (Jones, born to play this role), who knows Moss is in over his head and tries to chase him down; there's bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who's simply tracking Moss and the money as another paid gig; and most importantly, there is Chigurh (Bardem ... sure, start the Oscar talk), a Mexican assassin with a page-boy haircut, a ghost-white face, pink eyes and a coin he likes to flip for human lives. Chigurh is death and violence embodied; rarely has there been a badass like this on the big screen, one who kills for pure pleasure, without conscience and just because, well, as Nick Cave once sang, "All God's creatures, they all gotta die."
The plot is labyrinthine and ambiguous, but the Coens handle it with ease. It's bloody and messy, but also laugh-out-loud funny ("I laugh to myself sometimes," says Bell. "It's all you can do") and startlingly creepy. Good chunks of the film are shot in silence, with little, if no music, and only the Texas wind on the soundtrack. It's the sound of a country withering and dying, where money is worth any sacrifice, where violence has escalated to the point of inane hysteria and a simple, aging sheriff like Bell muses about "dismal tides" that he can no longer contain. And this is, at its core, what "No Country for Old Men" is about: an America now without logic, reason or conscience.
We're only halfway through the festival, but it looks like a two-horse race between "No Country" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" for the Palme d'Or. And win or not, prepare yourself for "No Country": It'll floor you."
thats it. no more reading this thread til November
yep this is pretty much the best movie of the year (so far).
intoleradykillers who???
looking forward to GT's review :yabbse-smiley:
Haha, I read the novel and didn't like it. But I like the actors and the Coens could have made significant edits so I'm hopeful.
Quote from: Ghostboy on May 21, 2007, 05:45:25 PM
God, this looks great. I kinda wish I hadn't watched those clips, though. I've read the book and the material is already familiar to me, but I wish I'd seen everything in the proper context.
That shot of the blood creeping towards Bardem's boots is classic Coen Bros.
Yeah, I don't recomend people watch all those clips... spoilers for sure.
I loved the book for what it was... sounds like they're taking the majority of the dialogue directly from the book... almost word for word, which the movie will definitely benefit from.
i havent watched the clips, and i wont, and i'm so thrilled at this news.
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Trailer here. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/no_country_for_old_men/trailers_player.php?IGNMediaID=2021759&playerType=playlist)
still holding out on clips, but thanks for the offer.
i want to give this movie every possible chance to succeed. kinda like my sig.
Yeah, don't watch it but rest assured that it's a damn good trailer.
Whoa, a Coen Bros. thriller!?
Quote from: Pubrick on June 14, 2007, 01:09:42 AM
i want to give this movie every possible chance to succeed.
all signs are pointing to 'yes' so far on that. tastey trailer.
Screenplay:
http://www.youknow-forkids.com/No_Country_For_Old_Men_2.pdf
Haven't watched a trailer. I'm not going to read that screenplay. But i just finished the book and good god damn i'm excited. This seems like it'd be the most violent coen film yet. Knowing that Josh Brolin is playing Moss made the character in the book that much cooler. I can't fucking wait for this.
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yeah pretty similar
New Redband Trailer here (http://www.nocountryforoldmen.com/redband/redbandBig.swf), Friendo.
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AWESOME.
hurrah for graphic design!
damn this for being in the vancouver international film festival preview guide then not in the actual festival for no reason.
Quote from: modage on September 19, 2007, 10:57:47 AM
AWESOME.
hurrah for graphic design!
did you work on them? do you know who did?
i did not work on them, but i know who did.
http://www.bltomato.com/
http://www.impawards.com/designers/blt_and_associates.html
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Coen Heads
The mind-melded Coen brothers have made a brilliant fetish out of favoring form over content. But now, with No Country for Old Men, they may have discovered they don't have to choose one over the other.
Source: NYMag
The first nine-tenths of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men—the centerpiece of this year's New York Film Festival—is the best thing they've ever done, with the possible exception of The Big Lebowski as seen for the third time, stoned. (No Country's last tenth I'm not so sure about, but we'll get to that.) The Coens' return to the festival is a glorious omen. The NYFF made the brothers indie darlings in 1984 with the screening of their first film, Blood Simple. Six years later, Miller's Crossing gave the opening-night glitterati an unexpected barrage of rat-a-tat-tat and splatter. Now, seventeen years after that, No Country for Old Men throws into stark (wide-screen, deep-focus, emotionally devastating) relief their evolution from snotty art-film postmodern jokesters to snotty art-film postmodern jokesters ... with soul. This one is Blood Subtle.
Before I continue: Writing about the Coens—and mining their oeuvre for Big Ideas—is a sure way of looking like an ass. When the Village Voice's J. Hoberman contended that the climax of Miller's Crossing was a Holocaust allegory, the Coens didn't know what the hell he was talking about. And when I interviewed them for American Film in 1986, on the occasion of their second film, Raising Arizona, they greeted my pointy-headed critical theories with the look of the Sundance Kid hearing a cockamamy new scheme: "You just keep thinkin', Butch. That's what you're good at." Their cinematographer at the time, Barry Sonnefeld, told me, "Topics are incredibly unimportant to them—it's structure and style and words. If you ask them for their priorities, they'll tell you script, editing, coverage, and lighting." Later, I pressed Joel for his thoughts on the movie's ostensible subject—procreation, infertility, child-rearing—and he squirmed and smoked and finally said a baby's face is "fodder," like a gunshot with blood running down someone's shirt: something you can play with in surprising (and perverse) ways. "Fodder" sounds a little glib. I'd prefer a more highbrow formulation: The Coens take found objects and arrange them for maximum disjunction.
At first, those found objects were movie conventions. The camera that travels smoothly along the bar in Blood Simple and ostentatiously rises and falls to avoid a slumped barfly was a cinéaste's in-joke—arty Mel Brooks. Raising Arizona—undertaken largely to be the polar opposite of Blood Simple, bright and raucous instead of dark and moody—is a hyperbolic cartoon, a riot of tacky décor, fashion, and hairstyles. Fargo is a dumb dialect comedy elevated (or deadened) by its wintry mise-en-scène and shocking violence. The Big Lebowski goes furthest: As I wrote in a Times piece celebrating its burgeoning cult, "[It's] not Fargo but one of filmdom's most inspired farragos ... The Coens take a disheveled stoner layabout, the former sixties activist the Dude—seen mostly in baggy shorts, sandals, an oversized T-shirt through which his gut is visible, often sucking a joint, mixing a White Russian, or lying on his rug with headphones listening to bowling competitions or whale songs—and make him the gumshoe protagonist of a convoluted Raymond Chandler–style L.A. mystery-thriller in the tradition of The Big Sleep."
It's a dope thing. I don't mean that the Coens were potheads. (I don't mean they weren't.) But they came of age artistically when Father Knows Best fifties culture was viewed ironically, through a cannabis haze; when kitsch was embraced with a nudge and a wink; when David Letterman turned the folks back home into Larry "Bud" Melman–like freaks; and when David Lynch homed in on the putrefaction under the paneling. Dope creates disjunction by fracturing bogus harmony. Nothing flows together. Nothing is beyond deconstruction.
But can disjunction be more than a source of easy yuks? In O Brother, Where Art Thou? the Coens did something radical. They introduced an element of authenticity—realistic objects embedded in a surrealistic canvas. The film takes its title from Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, in which a commercial Hollywood director bent on making a socially conscious melodrama ends up side by side with "real" people in a chain gang. Arguably the least of Sturges's masterpieces, the movie loses its satirical fizz when it dwells on the Walker Evans–like nobility of the common man. In O Brother, the Coens take a startlingly different tack. Cartoonish farce is now interwoven with authentic folk culture—period bluegrass so stirringly pure that the album, produced by T Bone Burnett, was a cultural event, far bigger than the movie. The tension is even more extreme in the badly received remake of The Ladykillers, in which a snaggletoothed Tom Hanks leads a bumbling gang of thieves to a soundtrack heavy on southern spirituals—stylized buffoons juxtaposed with genuine African-American church choirs and worshippers in a small Mississippi town.
I'm in the minority in disliking most of Fargo and O Brother; I don't think the disparate elements mesh on any level. But how many mainstream filmmakers are so ambitiously mischievous?
Another thing keeps the Coens' movies from seeming like the work of cold, patronizing, solipsistic formalists. Call it the X Factor. Or maybe the X-Squared Factor. Their aesthetic is grounded in a magical communion, a mind meld. The Coens are a biosphere. I imagine them pacing as they write—or, rather, Ethan pacing and Joel typing, always on the same wavelength, always able to finish each other's thoughts. Do they relentlessly crack each other up like Click and Clack on NPR's "Car Talk"? Jeez, I hope not. But their films are infused with the warmth of their process—a process that continues with J Todd Anderson, the storyboard artist who helps them compose their tricky frames.
Storyboarding every second does remove an element of live-wire-ness from the brothers' filmmaking: You don't feel that intangible excitement of a director hammering out scenes and shots on the spot. But it frees the Coens to concentrate on the most vital found objects: the actors.
The Coens often cite Stanley Kubrick as a model, but Kubrick in his last three decades depersonalized his actors, whereas the Coens cultivate their actors' distinctive weirdness. They love them some weirdos. I can imagine them in the editing room—they edit their films under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, who once "wrote" an essay disparaging them—chortling at the faces onscreen, like poor Dan Hedaya's as he leaks blood from every orifice in Blood Simple or roly-poly mouth-breather Jon Polito's as he dies one of several grotesque deaths. The Coens obviously adore John Turturro's hungry visage and Steve Buscemi's clammy dyspepsia. They relished John Goodman's bravura girth before anyone else did. They made Holly Hunter (former roommate of Joel's wife, Frances McDormand) a movie star by milking the tension between her pixieish face and snapping-turtle delivery. Listen to them on a DVD commentary track for The Man Who Wasn't There in the company of Billy Bob Thornton: Over and over, they point out "the Ed nod," the teensy bobbing of the otherwise catatonic protagonist's head. I could reel off twenty more performances—and I bet they could reel off a hundred. They're fans.
None of their previous actors show up in No Country for Old Men: The Coens are out of their comfort zone. The film opens with lonely vistas of desert and mountains and the plaintive narration of Tommy Lee Jones, as an aging Texas sheriff who stares with incomprehension at the horrors the young'uns inflict upon one another in these godless times. The horrors to come are formidable. Faithfully adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the movie centers on a likable trailer-park loser (Josh Brolin) who stumbles onto a scene of slaughter in the desert (Mexican drug smugglers shot to pieces along with their dogs), discovers a suitcase filled with millions of dollars, and decides—dumb!—to make off with it. It isn't long before he's tracked by teams of Mexican assassins and, more chillingly, a psychopathic Terminator (Javier Bardem) who reflexively murders thugs and bystanders alike with the kind of air gun used to blast the brains out of cows.
The film is somber, austere, yet rich in feeling. The Coens don't wink at you, but you know they're there and grooving on the barbed-wire witticisms and the actors' Weirdo Factor: Jones's hangdog face; Woody Harrelson's doofus air of infallibility as a cowboy-hatted bounty hunter; and especially Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut, basso-Lurch voice, and dark, freaky stare in the extended foreplay before his killings. You want thriller set pieces? A man leaps into a fast-moving river to escape an attack dog—but the dog is right behind him, its bobbing head both ridiculous and terrifying as it closes the gap. A sequence in a cheap motel room, in which the hunter and hunted—their rooms connected by an air vent—telepathically intuit one another's presence, is so insanely taut you have to whoop. The psycho's gun blasts come from nowhere and everywhere, relentlessly, like the whirligig decapitator of the kung fu schlock classic Master of the Flying Guillotine.
No Country for Old Men is a gorgeous fusion of its novelist's and filmmakers' sensibilities, at least until its climax—or, rather, its climacticus interruptus. What a shriveling is there! It's not that McCarthy's overriding cruelty is foreign to the Coens, who rarely miss an opportunity to linger on victims' suffering or their spreading pools of blackish blood. It's that there's too much life in their universe—and in their actors—for the film to end with a whimper of resignation. In McCarthy's novel, the characters are barely described, but the flesh changes all. Jones's liquid eyes and acid intelligence make it unthinkable he'd do—or not do—what his character does—or doesn't do—here.
McCarthy's novel is good trash dressed up with so-so metaphysics: In the middle of a description of the desert, you'll get something like, "That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash." (McCarthy does transcend genre fiction in The Road, the novel that followed this one.) In the film, you wait to see the sheriff, the venerable rock of decency, confront the newfangled evil in a showdown as cathartic as Carl Franklin's B-movie classic One False Move. But the Coens are true to their source, if not their strengths. I'm told that McCarthy liked the last part of the picture best, and he would.
Something about the ending bodes well, though. In Miller's Crossing, the protagonist has a recurring anxiety dream of a hat blowing away in a forest—an image that puzzled a lot of viewers but struck me as the perfect representation of the character's fear of losing control. The filmmakers', too. Film is a medium for control freaks, of whom the Coens are among the control-freakiest. The flat, unironic, nondisjunctive stoicism of the final scenes of No Country for Old Men must have been hard for these jokers. This might be the start of something thrilling: Joel and Ethan Coen learning how to let go.
New Trailer here. (http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/nocountryforoldmen/trailer3/)
Hey Friends,
You are invited--All you have to do is go to our website www.iffboston.org you can download and print passes for two free screenings at the Somerville Theater in Davis Square:
On Monday, Oct. 22 at 7:30pm, we will present a special advance screening of the Coen Bros. new film, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN starring Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin.
And!!
On Tuesday, Oct. 23 at 7:30pm, we will present Sidney Lumet's upcoming film, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
All you have to do is go to our website's homepage, click on the film title. It will bring you to a description page for each of the of the films. At the bottom of the page you can click the link to print a pass for the show. Bring the pass with you to the Somerville Theater. We recommend arriving early because these events are FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE and subject to the size of the theater.
Best,
IFFBoston
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What Happened When a Very Private Writer ...
Source: Time Magazine
If you were going to play the parlor game of arranging the most interesting, improbable, imaginary conversation among American entertainers, you could do worse than the one that took place in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. The participants were the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, known for smart, stylish and slightly silly movies like Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. If it were a reality show it would be called Eccentric Genius Island.
McCarthy and the Coen brothers have just collaborated on a movie version of McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, a thriller about a serial killer and a busted drug deal. It's a searing, shocking movie that plays like a eulogy for the great American West. It also features the best scene ever filmed of a dog chasing a guy in a river.
McCarthy is famous for two things: his omnivorous curiosity and his extreme reclusiveness. In his 74 years, he's given a total of three interviews. But here he chats freely with the Coen brothers, who have a tendency to finish each other's sentences. Time's LEV GROSSMAN was invited to observe. The conversation took place in a fancy hotel room with stunning views of Central Park in early autumn. Nobody glanced out the window even once.
CORMAC MCCARTHY What would you guys like to do that's just too outrageous, and you don't think you'll ever get to do it?
JOEL COEN Well, I don't know about outrageous, but there was a movie we tried to make that was another adaptation. It was a novel that James Dickey wrote called To the White Sea, and it was about a tail gunner in a B-29 shot down over Tokyo.
C.M. That was the last thing he wrote.
J.C. Last thing he wrote. So this guy's in Tokyo during the firebombing, but the story isn't really about that. He walks from Honshu to Hokkaido, because he grew up in Alaska and he's trying to get to a cold climate, where he figures he can survive, and he speaks no Japanese, so after the first five or 10 minutes of the movie, there's no dialogue at all.
C.M. Yeah. That'd be tough.
J.C. It was interesting. We tried to make that, but no one was interested in financing this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there's no dialogue.
ETHAN COEN And it's a survival story, and the guy dies at the end.
C.M. Everybody dies. It's like Hamlet.
E.C. Brad Pitt wanted to do it, and he has this sort of remorse or regret about it. But he's too old now.
J.C. But you know, there's something about it--there were echoes of it in No Country for Old Men that were quite interesting for us, because it was the idea of the physical work that somebody does that helps reveal who they are and is part of the fiber of the story. Because you only saw this person in this movie making things and doing things in order to survive and to make this journey, and the fact that you were thrown back on that, as opposed to any dialogue, was interesting to us.
C.M. David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just--this is what somebody said. That's it. You have nothing to fall back on. That's quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don't really know how it's going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I'd seen movies of Hamlet, I'd seen kind of amateurish productions, and I'd read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, "Holy s---." Now how did Will know that was going to happen? [Everybody laughs.] So my question is, At what point do you have some sense of whether a film is going to work or not, as you're working on it?
J.C. I can almost set my watch by how I'm going to feel at different stages of the process. It's always identical, whether the movie ends up working or not. I think when you watch the dailies, the film that you shoot every day, you're very excited by it and very optimistic about how it's going to work. And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.
C.M. See, I don't see how you could feel that. I would think that when you see the damn frames go by for the 45th time, it just doesn't mean anything anymore. Obviously that can't be true, but ...
E.C. Well, you're problem-solving at that point. You're working on it. It's only painful when the movie's done.
C.M. So tell me about this horrible dog. Was Josh [Brolin, who plays Moss] just terrified of this animal? You pushed a button, and it leapt for your jugular?
J.C. It was a scary dog. It wasn't a movie dog.
C.M. It was basically trained to kill people.
J.C. It was basically trained to kill people.
E.C. The trainer had this little neon-orange toy that he would show to the dog, and the dog would start slavering and get unbelievably agitated and would do anything to get the toy. So the dog would be restrained, and Josh, before each take, would show the dog that he had the toy, he'd put it in his pants and jump into the river ...
J.C. ... without having any idea of how fast this dog could swim. So the dog was then coming after him ...
E.C. ... so Josh came out of the river sopping wet and pulled the thing out of his crotch and said--he was talking to himself--he said, "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm an actor." [Everybody laughs.]
C.M. There are a lot of good American movies, you know. I'm not that big a fan of exotic foreign films. I think Five Easy Pieces is just a really good movie.
J.C. It's fantastic.
C.M. Days of Heaven is an awfully good movie.
J.C. Yeah. Well, he is great, Terry Malick. Really interesting.
C.M. It's so strange; I never knew what happened to him. I saw Richard Gere in New Orleans one time, and I said, "What ever happened to Terry Malick?" And he said, "Everybody asks me that." He said, "I have no idea." But later on I met Terry. And he just--he just decided that he didn't want to live that life. Or so he told me. He just didn't want to live the life. It wasn't that he didn't like the films. It's just, if you could do it without living in Hollywood ...
J.C. One of the great American moviemakers.
C.M. But Miller's Crossing is in that category. I don't want to embarrass you, but that's just a very, very fine movie.
J.C. Eh, it's just a damn rip-off.
C.M. No, I didn't say it wasn't a rip-off. I understand it's a rip-off. I'm just saying it's good. [Everybody laughs.]
E.C. Do you ever get, in terms of novel writing, stuff that's too outrageous? One wouldn't guess that you reject stuff as being too outrageous.
C.M. I don't know, you're somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I'm not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.
E.C. So it's not an impulse that you even have.
C.M. No, not really. Because I think that's misdirected. In films you can do outrageous stuff, because hey, you can't argue with it; there it is. But I don't know. There's lots of stuff that you would like to do, you know. As your future gets shorter, you have to ...
J.C. Prioritize?
C.M. Yeah. Somewhat. A friend of mine, who's slightly older than me, told me, "I don't even buy green bananas anymore." [He laughs.] I'm not quite there yet, but I understood what he was saying.
is anyone else a bit perplexed by this? like how did this come to be and how come its not a bigger deal (or is it?).. i had no idea until mac posted this!
i think its really great that this even happened but whats printed is way too abridged. i want the complete transcript.
its cool he likes malick though.
huge fucking spoilers in that article!
damnit.
you should read the book :wink:
I got a ticket to see this Monday the 5th. I'm so fucking hyped!!
Seeing it Wednesday at the Aero.
Coens Find New 'Country' to Roam
Joel and Ethan Coen have proved to be masters at mixing the horrific and humorous, the ominous and outrageous nowhere more so than in their latest film, the savage crime saga "No Country for Old Men."
The brothers take familiar Hollywood genres film noir ("The Man Who Wasn't There"), the gangster tale ("Miller's Crossing"), the true-crime thriller ("Fargo"), the screwball comedy ("O Brother, Where Art Thou?") and filter them into something uniquely their own.
Like that "Barton Fink feeling" a studio executive blathers on about in "Barton Fink," their tale of a playwright in Hollywood, there's a "Coen brothers feeling" that can defy definition, but you know it when you see it in their films.
"No Country for Old Men" co-star Josh Brolin calls it "Planet Coen."
"They find the absurdity of who we are in every situation. That's what they're fantastic at. Even in a movie as tense as this, they give you the ability to kind of chuckle and inhale and take a breath," said Brolin. "You never know what's going to happen around the next Coen brothers corner, whether it be fate or absurdity or a lack of humor where you're positive they're going to inject a joke."
Adapted by the Coens from Cormac McCarthy's novel, "No Country for Old Men" centers on three characters. There's a wily Texan (Brolin) who stumbles on a drug deal gone bloodily wrong in the desert and makes off with $2 million left behind among the corpses. There's a relentless, inhumanly brutish killer (Javier Bardem) tracking Brolin to recover the cash. And there's a valorous but wayworn sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) pursuing both men. The film opens Friday.
At its core, the story seems a bit conventional for the filmmakers who made yodeling the musical backdrop for baby-snatching in "Raising Arizona" and turned a urine-stained carpet into a key plot catalyst for a crime comedy set among bowlers in "The Big Lebowski."
But the balance of black humor and brutish violence, the sense of an otherworldly America in the vast Texas panorama, and the abrupt turns McCarthy sneaks in late in the story set the novel squarely on Planet Coen.
"It immediately seemed like the kind of thing we could make a movie out of, largely by virtue of what kind of story it is, which for Cormac is a little anomalous compared to his other things," Ethan Coen, 50, told The Associated Press during an interview with his brother. "I don't know what to call it pulpier, more of a chase-action thing."
"On one level," continued Joel Coen, 52, "it's a very straightforward crime story, and on another level, it's not that at all. Without sort of giving away the ending, he does certain things in terms of the structure of the story, the way the story moves, and what happens sort of three-quarters of the way through, which are quite unexpected and unusual and probably unique in terms of what one would expect from this kind of story. There's nothing predictable about this."
There has been nothing predictable about the Coens' work since their 1984 debut with another violent Texas crime tale, "Blood Simple," starring Frances McDormand, Joel Coen's wife.
They seemed like pure fringe players with their early films, including "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink." The latter earned the top honor at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, but it baffled many viewers, as did their next film, "The Hudsucker Proxy," the films helping to solidify the Coens as cult favorites well outside the mainstream.
Then came "Fargo," a surprise commercial success that grabbed seven Academy Award nominations, best picture and director among them, and won the best-actress Oscar for McDormand and the original-screenplay prize for the Coens.
"Fargo" spun the tragic farce of a real-life kidnapping in the Coens' home state of Minnesota, which seems like an alien landscape as the story plays out in a seamless mix of the grotesque and hilarious.
Likewise, "No Country for Old Men" twirls the audience through a whirlwind of bloodshed leavened with wicked laughs.
Strangely, it's Bardem, the film's most menacing figure, around whom much of the humor revolves as he brushes people and obstacles aside with stoic tenacity and a cache of outlandish weapons.
Bardem said he necessarily had to play such a ruthless character straight. The comedy came from the Coens.
"They made it happen by the way they put it together," Bardem said. "Thank God, I didn't know it, because then I didn't pretend to be funny. I had my job to do, which was to be dead serious and frightening. So when they put it together, they put it together with a reaction from another person listening to me. That makes it funny.
"That's why the Coens are the Coens. They know how to put it together to really release the tension and make you laugh out of fear, out of tension."
"They understand that even when the bleakest things happen in life, there's humor there," said Kelly Macdonald, who plays the wife of Brolin's character in "No Country for Old Men." "That's one of the biggest human traits. It's a coping mechanism or something."
The Coens deflect attempts to analyze their work or the combination of light and dark that goes into it.
"It's not like they're separate ingredients," Ethan Coen said. "There are some situations that you might react to by laughing or being horrified. Either way is fine with us, but again, they're not like two different ingredients that you measure and pour in. It's kind of the fact that you can react either way that's appealing."
"We're sometimes surprised when people laugh at certain places, although we're never bothered by it," Joel Coen said. "Every now and then, you get a laugh in really unexpected places."
His brother recalled one such scene that surprised the Coens in advance screenings since the film debuted at last spring's Cannes festival:
"Javier is in this motel room, and he unzips a bag and takes out a gun with this big honkin' silence on the end of it, and people laugh," Ethan Coen said. "You go, `OK, I didn't really expect that, but great.'"
"In that situation, it is quite funny. It's horrifying at the same time it's funny," Joel Coen said.
The Coens' next film leans more toward funny than horrifying, though Ethan Coen guaranteed that both qualities will be well-represented.
"Burn After Reading" is a comic adventure reuniting them with "O Brother" star George Clooney, who co-stars with McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins.
True to that Coen feeling, the brothers describe it as a yarn set in motion by the collision of two diverse cultures: the CIA and the physical-fitness world.
That juxtaposition reminded them of the time they met former Texas Gov. Ann Richards and described the plot of the film they were then working on, "The Man Who Wasn't There," with Billy Bob Thornton.
"We said, `It's about a barber who wants to be a dry cleaner,'" Joel Coen said. "She looked at Ethan as well as me and said, `I'm trying to get excited about that.'"
No Country is distinctly Coen brothers. The classical connotations of this term carry over, including the expected: wonderful, human, interesting, clever, etc. I'd like to see it back to back with Blood Simple, this film's cousin. I was thinking during the film that the Coens were born filmmakers, that all of their films have been movies, that they're really very little like their NYC independent brothers, and that No Country makes sense of their previous dissapointments because you are reminded of how capable and talented they are and you begin to think of their nimbleness. Because usually you say something like "The filmmakers sure have matured here, this is an excellent example of great talent coming into age" but it doesn't at all fit the Coens who were wine from the first film.
I really liked it.
I only now realized where I've seen Javier Bardem from. The from being Live Flesh. That's so funny.
Quote from: modage on October 22, 2007, 02:43:51 PM
huge fucking spoilers in that article!
damnit.
SPOILERSi skimmed that article and saw the "everybody dies in the end. its like hamlet" bit thinking it was a no country spoiler. i saw the film last night and kept waiting for EVERYONE to die, which of course, they don't because as i re-read that article, i see they were talking about To The White Sea. this made the abrupt ending even more shocking.
END SPOILERSthe short review is: its really good. there are some incredibly thrilling/tense scenes. i wouldn't put it near their best work, but its a really good paring down of everything that sucked about their recent films and will hopefully put them back on the right track. now,
Blood please.
Interview: Joel and Ethan Coen
The cinematic siblings discuss their latest opus, No Country for Old Men.
It might be an overstatement to call Joel and Ethan Coen enigmatic filmmakers, but their body of work certainly suggests that they are some weird fellows. From Blood Simple to The Ladykillers, they have consistently demonstrated an intelligent but remarkably unusual sense of tone, whether it's a matter of H.I. McDonough's hair in Raising Arizona or the strange lingo that elevates O Brother Where Art Thou? from hick epic to epic poem. In their latest film, No Country for Old Men, they revisit some of these ideas, but do it in typically iconoclastic fashion, destroying the arm's length detachment of their previous work for a more soulful examination of the world's penchant for betraying mankind's best laid plans.
IGN recently spoke to the Coen brothers during a roundtable interview in Los Angeles to promote the film. Though predictably evasive about some of the machinations of their directorial process, Joel and Ethan explain what appealed to them about author Cormac McCarthy's novel, and describe the process of deconstructing and rebuilding the source material for their big-screen adaptation.
Q: This seems to be the least mannered of your films to date. Was that dictated by the source material or did you make a conscious attempt to...
Ethan Coen: Knock it off? [laughs]
Joel Coen: No, well we never make those kind of overall abstract decisions or calculations. It's an adaptation of a book, and we like the story so we try to serve the story. But you know, it's also what we do in movies that derive from our own stories; our attitude toward them is the same -- you kind of want to treat it how it feels to you it wants to be treated.
Q: Does that extend to the characters as well? Because in some of your other films, you have characters who are maybe a little buffoonish and in this film they all seem to get a fair shake.
Joel Coen: Again, it's kind of like the answer to the last question. Yes, there's no question that we've written some buffoonish characters. Their stories are about buffoons, but this was not a story about buffoons so they're not treated that way or portrayed that way. The concept of giving the characters a fair shake is one that I don't understand, at least in the abstract.
Q: What was it about Cormac McCarthy's book that you responded to? Do you see this as perhaps a distant cousin to Fargo?
Joel Coen: Honestly, we didn't think about it that way, although retrospectively at one point I sort of realized there are certain superficial resemblances to Fargo like the very specific regionalism of the story and the fact that they're both about sheriffs in small towns confronting crimes. But no, to be quite honest we were presented with the book and just took it on as an interesting book that we had [read] that had another sensibility that comes from somebody else's imagination, and it was our job to take that and adapt it into a movie.
Q: Did any of the material's potential political or social relevance resonate with you?
Joel Coen: We never thought about it in terms of topicality.
Q: Why then was the location or setting so important to you?
Joel Coen: Well, in every story that we do it's important, just in terms of how you think about story, that it be very specific from the point of view of a region or location. It's hard to imagine stories for us sort of divorced from that aspect. I don't know why -- it's something that we share with Cormac McCarthy and part of why we were drawn to this, is that sort of intense focus on the place informing the story. But beyond that, there were lots of reasons that we liked the book. The ideas in the book were also very interesting to us -- the characters, all of those things. It's a big soup; you go and you try to parse the soup, and it's a little artificial; it was just kind of the whole package that just kind of appealed to us.
Q: Can you talk about your fidelity to McCarthy's novel, since you make some unexpected choices when filming key scenes?
Ethan Coen: Well, it's unusual in that kind of book -- it's a surprise in the book... but you're right, even moreso in a movie. The convention is even more ingrained that the good guy is going to meet the bad guy and they're going to confront each other. We were aware of how unusual that is and we talked about it with Scott Rudin, the producer, [because] we didn't want to do the movie if we got the idea that he was asking us to do a Hollywood-ized version of the [story]. And he was very much not. He liked the book too, and he wanted to see the book made, as opposed to seeing it turned into something else. I mean, the story is very much about how unforgiving and capricious the world can be.
Joel Coen: I think if the novel had been more conventional in that respect, I think we wouldn't have been much interested in making it into a movie, but that was one of the things about the novel, from a storytelling point of view that was interesting to us. But from the point of view of it being a full appropriate and satisfying expression of what the author was trying to say what we thought the book was about, and therefore there would be no reason to change that from our point of view either in terms of making it into a movie. We didn't feel that it was in conflict with some larger sort of dramatic idea that couldn't be satisfied for an audience, although whenever you're doing things you're aware -- as we're sure Cormac McCarthy is aware when he writes a novel -- that he might not be writing it for everybody. We're aware when we make a movie that we might not be making the movie for everybody, but we're convinced that we're making it for enough people who sort of will see it as an interesting thing that we don't worry about it.
Ethan Coen: Not just interesting, but satisfying, because in a way it's frustrating but it also has to be satisfying. And as Joel says, for some people it never could be, but...
Joel Coen: We didn't see it as being fundamentally as being so perverse dramatically that it couldn't work as Ethan was say in a satisfying way. That we didn't think.
Q: It seems like Tommy Lee Jones' character carries that satisfying portion of the story as he holds the movie together until the end.
Joel Coen: Right.
Q: Well, not to belabor the Fargo connection, but both Jones' character and Marge are in a line of work that puts them in contact with this evil that mystifies and saddens them.
Joel Coen: That's true.
Ethan Coen: Ehh, right. [laughs] Evil may not be the perfect right word, but yes, with the real, horrible world.
Joel Coen: What they share explicitly is a certain amount of bafflement, being baffled by what it is, by the world and how it manifests itself that way.
Ethan Coen: In the case of that character in Fargo, in kind of a naive way, and in the case of Cormac's character, sort of a more sophisticated way.
Q: Talk a little about how you cast Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh.
Joel Coen: Javier is someone that we always wanted to work with, but there's lots of actors we've wanted to work with, and it's all about finding the right marriage of that person you want to work with in a part that's going to be right for them. One of the things that was interesting about this character is that he is described so little in the book, but one of the things that you do get in the book is the sense that he's the one character that's not sort of "of the region" -- that there's something exotic or maybe foreign about him. That gave us a certain amount of license to think outside of American actors, and another thing that we needed which was extremely charismatic screen presence that we knew was necessary for that part. That's how it happened: We didn't know what Javier was going to do with the part, but we were utterly convinced that whatever he did, it wouldn't be what we were most afraid of, which is to make the character into a cliche of the sort of implacable, terminator killer. We felt having satisfied that fear, having allayed that fear in our minds, we were perfectly confident with him and we just thought it's going to be very interesting, whatever he does.
Q: Speaking of Chigurh, if he's not evil then what is he?
Ethan Coen: Quite clearly in the book, he's a personification of the world, which is an unforgiving and capricious [place]; the embodiment of that is the whole coin-tossing thing that gives the character place, and it doesn't have to do with good and evil. The book is also about trackers, it's about predation, which is a horrible thing in a way. But, you know, it doesn't have to do with good and evil.
Q: What about Kelly MacDonald? She's an unexpected choice to play a Texas wife.
Joel Coen: Yeah, it doesn't work on paper [laughs]. It's true. On paper we weren't even anxious to see her because we figured why would we see this actress with this thick Glaswegian accent for a gal from west Texas? But she came in and did this very convincing accent, just completely off the cuff, really, and so that went well.
Q: How would you describe the balance of humor in this? Because there seems to be an undercurrent of humor, but there wasn't much chuckling happening in the theater during the screening.
Ethan Coen: We weren't trying at all, although here's the best way of putting it: I think there's a lot of humor in Cormac's work and this book specifically, and we were alive to that and we tried to be faithful to Cormac's spirit. I think if you're alive to it, it's there.
Joel Coen: But on the other hand, it's one of those things where we don't really have any feelings positive or negative about how anyone takes the movie, in terms of that. If people choose to see the movie completely clenched, you know, in terms of what the movie is -- a chase movie or suspense movie or whatever it happens to be -- that's fine. And in fact from our point of view it means that a certain aspect of the movie is working well. And people also choose to laugh -- for instance, people often laugh in places we don't expect it, or never expected, and that doesn't bother us either. So it's not in any way bothersome to us if somebody takes it either more comically or not comically at all. The only thing that as Ethan was saying that we both thought that in the book there was a real sense of humor there as well, and as he said, that was part of the sensibility from our point of view that informed the movie.
Q: How does that mean you shape or direct the tone of the material on set? Tommy Lee Jones, for example, said that the way to play the character was to read the lines; how do you make sure that you're getting what you need or want artistically?
Joel Coen: Just again it comes down to a scene and story thing. Even when we're doing something which we're very conscious is a comedy, we're not asking the actors to sort of acknowledge the comedy in their performances. It's kind of the same thing here. It's like yes, there may be humor in this, but when it comes to sort of what you're looking for in a performance, you wouldn't want to be directing the actor towards a self-conscious awareness of that in a performance.
Q: So then are you just sort of dealing practically with what's going on in a scene, or do you discuss at any level what the film or even just the scene is about?
Joel Coen: Well, yeah. It depends on the actor, I suppose. They're all different, in terms of what they want to talk about or whether they want to talk about it at all. It just runs the whole gamut.
Ethan Coen: Yeah, we do what the actor wants to do, and it does vary. We don't have a position on that. In terms of discussing it in the abstract, discussing very specific things which some actors like to do as a way of getting at maybe deeper things, but you know -- everybody's got their own [process].
Joel Coen: There's so many different ways that actors arrive at a performance and it's just so idiosyncratic. Some do tons of research, some don't look at the script until the night before they're shooting the scene; [some get] everything down by heart weeks in advance, and other people are looking at the sides right before you start shooting the scene. Some people do lots of research, some people want to have very sort of subtextual discussions about motivation, and some wouldn't go near that.
Q: So how do George Clooney and Brad Pitt work, given that you just worked with them on Burn After Reading?
Joel Coen: Where would they fit in that spectrum?
Ethan Coen: George is interesting because on the last two movies we've done with him, our whole discussion of the character took place about five minutes before we started shooting [laughs].
Joel Coen: Brad is kind of the same, although Brad struggled a little bit more in terms of trying to find the right [approach]. But George had worked with us before -- this was the third movie we'd done with George -- so sometimes it's a little different in that respect too, and I think Brad was trying to find a place where he was going to both understand the character and find a place where he was going to pitch it that was going to be appropriate in terms of what everyone else was doing.
Ethan Coen: Sometimes this happens a lot with actors, they kind of don't know where to jump off from, like where do you start. Geographically where is he from, or ethnically, or could he be this or that? You kind of talk about those things, and you never arrive at any conclusion and you feel vaguely dissatisfied, but then everything's fine -- it takes care of itself.
Joel Coen: And they all start from different places. There are actors who if they get the right haircut, they'll know exactly what to do. There are actors who in the costume fitting start to understand the character, because they may get directorial signals just in terms of what you've chosen to show them, or your conception of how the character dresses that they didn't understand from the script. I mean, there are actors that can set up very externally like that and come to a really interesting understanding of their characters that helps them do the part that way, and others who that means nothing at all.
Ethan Coen: Actually with Brad, I think the character all came from a botched dye job that he had on his hair for a commercial, and we all looked at it, us and Brad, and thought, "Oh, OK. That's the guy."
Q: After doing something serious like this is it natural to move to a comedy?
Joel Coen: That happened really because of availability of all of these actors at this time. That had more to do with that in relation to the other movies than anything else.
Q: Have you ever thought of making a movie without one another?
Joel Coen: We think about it all of the time [laughs].
Q: Do you know what you're doing after this?
Joel Coen: Yeah [laughs].
Extremely well done. The tone reminded me alot of Miller's Crossing and Blood Simple. You could feel the texas atmosphere. I could tell that the audience I was with wanted it to be a bit more funnier in the vein of raising arizona and The Big Lebowski, because there were bouts of forced laughter in the theatre where it wasn't really that particularly humorous. Some of the violence and how it was shown reminded me of Cronenburg's films. The scene with the dog is one of the most invigorating scenes I've seen in a film in a long time. The ending was a bit abrubt but the more I think about it, the more I think that it fit the movie :yabbse-thumbup:
vague spoilers
I didn't feel cheated at all, far from it in fact. I kinda knew what was going to happen when he was in the car. it was a movie that delivered, nonetheless. I don't think there was any music in the film at all, though I may be wrong. that was pretty cool. the violence was great. I'm glad that after a year's worth of worthless violence a la 300 and Eli Roth films, I saw three films with very good use of violence in a week (the other two being There Will Be Blood, American Gangster).
but anyways, the Coen Bros have come close to featuring a few soulful characters, though most of the time they're only peripheral characters. as ruthless as this movie was, it was a big step forward for them to embrace soulfulness. I also do really enjoy seeing films by directors I love after their long pauses. This year I saw Death Proof, Darjeeling, There Will Be Blood, and this one. It feels good, the wait reminds you how much you loved them in the first place, and your favorite things about them. Like watching this film, I could really go, aw, thems was some great dialogue (though they probably came from the book).
spoils
i had forgotten how much the coens could terrify me.
- there was a moment where, without thinking, i craned my neck to look somewhere and the camera dolly'd in that exact direction. i was in this movie's grip.
- there are so many brilliant moments that have a clear coen ancestry. for example the motel scene (with the tracker and the shadow in the door) is a direct descendant of the barton fink scene where he disturbs the next door neighbor and the camera follows a man through a wall as though it can see him. they should've used the line "it's a true story in the sense that it's true it's a story" when fargo was happening. or not. it reminded me of it, though. it's a good thing to say.
- there are so many great cuts. "it's unusual" actually made me go 'that's damn good editing.' in my head. i was the agent cooper of observing editing for a second.
- javier bardum has given one of the best psychopathic performances EVER. every. single. syllable. was terrifying. every moment he's on screen is so damn WATCHABLE. i want him to win everything. or at least, he'll do 'till the blood gets here.
- i love how quiet the whole movie is. every little sound means something. any ambience is silence.
- i love the feeling (that seeps through the earlier parts of the movie especially) that all these characters are experts in their fields.. or amazing at what they do. murder, escape, tracking down people, standing by their man, etc. it's a game being played by masters.
- it lost me near the end. but i'm sure it will make sense eventually. i understand the frighteningness of this movie is only the first/most obvious layer.
- walking outside afterwards everything was lit like that scene lewellyn runs from javier and i was worried. then an hour later i found myself staring into a doorknob.
- i imdb'd lewellyn's wife because i knew i'd seen her somewhere before. girl in the cafe. holy crap. everyone in this needs a nomination at the very least.
Quote from: picolas on November 13, 2007, 04:20:33 AM
- there are so many great cuts. "it's unusual" actually made me go 'that's damn good editing.' in my head. i was the agent cooper of observing editing for a second.
Did ya say it to your non existant asistant quitely in a tape recorder afterwards or no....
i can see how you might find that similie an exaggeration, but the excellence of many edits made me approach the editing with a certain vigor; a thirst for cuts and non-cuts. it recalibrated my sense of it.
i wasn't sure when i left the theater. it was too much to think about. the more i've been mulling it over today, though, the more i'm loving this movie. i kind of want to see it again. or read the book. a review would be pointless before everybody here has seen it. it's best not to go in with expectations. i didn't know anything about this movie going in other than the coen brothers made it.
but, shit, man. i had no idea that was the chick from trainspotting! (she's next gonna be in the adaptation of choke, directed by the floor director on what do kids know)
The Coen Bros. are going to be on Charlie Rose tonight.
Quote from: idk on November 16, 2007, 01:49:09 PM
The Coen Bros. are going to be on Charlie Rose tonight.
Thanks mate. Seems like Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin will be on as well.
http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2007/11/16/1/a-discussion-about-the-film-no-country-for-old-men
darn. work. the moment there's a link for this, someone post it plz!
Quote from: SiliasRuby on November 11, 2007, 02:55:11 PM
there were bouts of forced laughter in the theatre where it wasn't really that particularly humorous.
It was the same when I saw it last night. Not sure what I think of this film. I just re-read this entire thread, and I want to think about it a bit more still. I'll put up a review in the next day or so.
what the fuck is going on here?? i had weird inappropriate laughter in my audience too! especially during one scene, it wasn't funny or supposed to be funny and clearly the person wasn't laughing out of discomfort. this one guy just burst into LOUD, piercing laughter. it was really weird.
apart from that, my theatre was packed with old people, the WORST. you know, asking each other what just happened after anything would happen. have they been airing tv spots during golden girls or something? one old lady gasped "finally!" when tommy lee jones appeared.
the movie is fucking outstanding. take the grim content of fargo (everything that happens to everyone except marge) and strip away any trace of hope or light (marge) and you've got No Country For Old Men. that's the COLDEST VILLAIN i've seen in a long long time. i guess he was kinda funny a few times, like when he put his feet up on the bed. or the way he answered the phone. the scene at the end with lewellyn's wife was chilling and beautiful. actually, maybe she was the only bright spot in the movie. that scene was so incredibly sad. it was scary the first time i watched it, but the more i think about, the sadder it becomes. i'm dying to see this movie again.
the coen brothers are back. finally!
SPOILERS
I admire the direction they took after Brolin's character died and it fits into the whole flippin' coin subtext, but I can't say that I liked or enjoyed it very much. The ending that is. The rest of the film is pretty incredible, but the last 20 minutes are really unsatisfying. I understand that's what the Coen Bros were going for and that's why I admire it, but don't really like it.
the chilling thing about this movie is that.. you end up agreeing with the killer and pointing the finger at Lewellyn.
the chilling thing about this thread is everyone's done away with spoiler warnings.
i really loved this. REALLY loved it. it's right behind BLOOD for me. Chere Mill by the way, not Simple. and when i say right behind, i mean trying to catch up.
INTRO TO SPOILER
ive drank a bottle of wine - pinot/label had lil guy on a bicycle on it..
SPOILER
randomness..
i was thinking the whole time that the money would end up with someone random. maybe like them kids on the bikes or another dude like broil's character - unaware of what the money was involved in. maybe chunk from goonies would cameo as this fella. and it would somehow relate to what javi said about the 1957 quarter - how it traveled so long and ended up with the old hick store guy. i know the story won by not meeting my thoughts, but i kept expanding on them and thinking of what the movie couldve been... and then, SOMEHOW, the ending got better on the ride home. even the scene with tommy lee j and the old dude which when the credits were rolling, i thought was pointless altogether. somehow it unexplainably (question: is unex;lainably a word?) became magical only when thinking back on it.
why did i love broil's (yesiam aware his reel name is brolyn) character so much? everything about him. his tone and movement just grabbed you/me - before the story even did. and the lil phrases that he would say aloud to himself - classic coens.
i believe this concludez my spoils
wtf is going here? i had the same laughter in my theater. hmmm, that must mean it's... appropriate. classic coens.
SPOILERS
in ways i'm wondering if this is the Silence of the Lamb to all the Hannibal sequels - i.e. killer walks away free with not much known about him. one cop survives...
i could see the popularity with this turning into another book/film that is both prequel/sequel - switching back and forth between events after this film, and explain the killer's past.
i'm tired of all the car crash/turning points in films of recent years.
how do you interpret the editing of the return of tommy lee to the hotel after brolin died - that whole scene? simply that the killer was in the other room?
SPOILERSQuote from: bigideas on November 18, 2007, 11:51:52 PM
i'm tired of all the car crash/turning points in films of recent years.
what? the crash didn't halt his escape, as far as we know. it would've been lame if he'd died or been too injured to move on.. he just walked away, bone sticking out of his flesh. it wasn't really a "turning point" in that sense.
Quote from: bigideas on November 18, 2007, 11:51:52 PM
SPOILERS
in ways i'm wondering if this is the Silence of the Lamb to all the Hannibal sequels - i.e. killer walks away free with not much known about him. one cop survives...
srsly? cos that totally defeats the purpose of the movie (not the sequels usually "get" it anyways..) the whole brilliance of tommy lee jones' character comes from his idleness.
Quote from: JG on November 19, 2007, 12:35:36 AM
Quote from: bigideas on November 18, 2007, 11:51:52 PM
SPOILERS
in ways i'm wondering if this is the Silence of the Lamb to all the Hannibal sequels - i.e. killer walks away free with not much known about him. one cop survives...
srsly? cos that totally defeats the purpose of the movie (not the sequels usually "get" it anyways..) the whole brilliance of tommy lee jones' character comes from his idleness.
he is defintely getting old - his face looked like a vast desert landscape itself - but the cop coming out of retirement because he knows the killer is not unheard of. there probably will be no sequels in this case, it just made me think of Silence and even Three Burials which Tommy Lee was also in. actually a combination Zodiac/Three Burials.
in reference to the car crash comment - it didn't necessitate the 'turning point' tag in this case (and i almost deleted that distinction) but the other car crashes of recent years (adaptation, office space, pdl, and probably others i can't think of).
MY REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
I'm not sure how to start this review. I have some conflicting thoughts about this film... Certainly this is a far superior film to the Coen's last two efforts, and yet it still sits somewhat uncomfortably with their other films I feel (even their debut). I like the darkness, the emptiness of this film. Visually, aurally, I like the tense sparseness of it all. The first half of the film is without a doubt some of the finest film-making the Coens have ever achieved. Whilst watching the film I kept thinking of 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada', but since I have been mulling this film over in my mind it keeps reminding my of Lynch's 'Dune'. Well, to me both films have moments of greatness, but I can't help but feel there is a better film within, desperately trying to get out. I can't help thinking how I would like to be given the opportunity to improve on what is already there.
I have a few problems with 'No Country'. Not too many, but a few. My biggest problem is with Tommy Lee Jones' character, Sheriff Bell. I get that he acts as narrator, I get that we are supposed to sympathise with his views that times they are a-changing, that there are evil men in the world... I even get the whole nature of his relation to the investigations, and admire the choice made by the Coens to remain faithful to the novel in not building to a cathartic climax where Bell and Chigurh fight to the death. My problem lies in the fact that Bell just doesn't seem to care. It's all very well him popping in and out of the story, trying to help Bell's wife towards the end, but I grew more and more frustrated with a sheriff who sat around in a diner seemly not even wanting to pursue an investigation. I personally would have liked for Bell to become more involved in the story in some way, rather than just act as a passive observer of these terrors, and then his constant musings on evil, and the emphasis put on him at the end would have been far more resonant.
Two other things that bugged me were the inclusion of Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) and that whole story line; and the scene in the convenience store where Chigurh presses the clerk to call the flipped coin. The Wells storyline seemed pretty pointless to me. He turns up what, three times: to accept assignment in the office; when he tracks down Moss in the hospital; and when Chigurh kills him. I haven't read the book, but I gather he plays a more significant role there. In my opinion, the film would have lost nothing by cutting him out completely, along with the whole office/origin of the money aspects. Now, with the convenience store, the thing that I disliked most about it was that it didn't seem to fit tonally with the rest of the film. It played like an almost comedic scene, complete with a typical Coen-quirky store clerk. I'm guessing this is the scene that other people have said there was much inappropriate laughter in the audience? It just didn't gel with the rest of the film. Now, I loved the whole thing about the coin having travelled over the years to be there at that moment, but maybe there was some other way that ideology could have been incorporated? To have one kitschy scene stick in there, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
Now, the ending, the more I thought about it I liked. But as I said earlier, I feel it could have been made so much more stronger if only Bell had actually been more of a presence throughout the film. Also, if I had the power to do so, I would have put the scene with Bell and Ellis after Chigurh's car crash and getaway, before the final scene. When I saw the film, there was a large group of the audience who started giggling when the end titles came up, laughing no doubt at the way the film ended. I think that's because Bell was just not a substantial presence in the film. Bell is supposed to be the one who holds the movie together. He is the reason it's called 'No Country For Old Men'. But I really don't think it worked. That is the film's weak spot, and it's one helluva flaw.
On the upside, however, there are many truly great aspects to this film. As ever, the Coens demonstrate their remarkable talent in saturating their films with a detailed sense of place. And the use of sound and visuals to add to this, and emphasise the tone and emotions of the film are brilliant. Also, the set-pieces are some of the most exciting scenes I've seen this year. I was trying to think back, the only real "set-piece" I can recall from previous Coen films is the attack on Leo in 'Miller's Crossing'. Maybe the showdown at the end of 'Blood Simple'? But the ones in 'No Country For Old Men' demonstrate the quality of the Coen's ability: the dog chase in the river; the hotel escape – wow. Fantastic stuff.
Performance wise, there's nothing really to fault. Jones trots out his habitual tired law man, perfect as usual (my beef is with the way Bell is used, not the character himself necessarily). But we've seen in before. Javier Bardem is of course going to get all the attention, and of course it is a great performance. Larger than life, yet minimalist and contained. The kind of performance Academy voters love to love. For me though, the two performances which really stood out were those of Josh Brolin and Kelly MacDonald as Moss and his wife. They both came across as very genuine people. Not two-dimensional Hollywood personas, nor Coen-of-old caricatures.
I'm still not sure exactly what I feel about this film. It's good, certainly, but certainly won't be on my end of year list. The only reason that would happen would be for the lame reason simply that it was a Coen Brothers film. These are all just my own thoughts, of course, I'm trying to assess the film in any serious way, simply giving my own honest reaction after I've thought about it for about 36 hours. Maybe my thoughts don't make much sense, I don't know. Maybe I'm being unduly harsh to two film-makers whose work I have loved for many years, simply as a reaction to their past two films – I want them to work harder than this to atone for their misses? I'm not sure. But this is what I feel.
I'm looking forward to seeing this film again. I really, really am.
Quote from: Pubrick on November 18, 2007, 07:58:32 PM
the chilling thing about this thread is everyone's done away with spoiler warnings.
No shit! BC Long, I'm going to kill you with high impact microwaves emitted through your monitor. It's a new technology. Make sure to PM me when you're in front of your computer, please.
Quote from: Sleepless on November 19, 2007, 10:21:12 AM
CONTAINS SPOILERS
Quote from: Sleepless on November 19, 2007, 10:21:12 AMI can't help but feel there is a better film within, desperately trying to get out. I can't help thinking how I would like to be given the opportunity to improve on what is already there.
Quote from: Sleepless on November 19, 2007, 10:21:12 AMI personally would have liked for Bell to become more involved in the story in some way, rather than just act as a passive observer of these terrors
Quote from: Sleepless on November 19, 2007, 10:21:12 AMIn my opinion, the film would have lost nothing by cutting him (wells) out completely
Quote from: Sleepless on November 19, 2007, 10:21:12 AMthe convenience store... It just didn't gel with the rest of the film....kitschy scene
Quote from: Sleepless on November 19, 2007, 10:21:12 AMI would have put the scene with Bell and Ellis after Chigurh's car crash and getaway, before the final scene
which is why your version of the film woudn't have been as good.
The film does almost EVERYTHING right... almost EXACTLY what it's supposed to be. I didn't really like Woody H. too much... he was a little too Woody and I didn't dig Beth Grant as she was a little to theatery, but I feel like everything else was done just about perfectly.
Quote from: picolas on November 16, 2007, 06:29:52 PMthe moment there's a link for this, someone post it plz!
It's up now:
Quote from: ASmith on November 16, 2007, 03:27:44 PMhttp://www.charlierose.com/shows/2007/11/16/1/a-discussion-about-the-film-no-country-for-old-men
Quote from: RegularKarate on November 20, 2007, 04:50:37 PMI didn't really like Woody H. too much...
** Spoilers **Sir, you simply MUST be shitting me. I will never forget the way he played Wells when facing death in the hotel room with Chigurh. Grasping at straws when no one in that situation would have been more certain of their fate than he was. What he portrayed so powerfully was the
struggle to stay composed while desperately articulating a futile case for mercy. He was developed as a match for Chigurh, or the closest thing to it, and we see him at his knees, not being given an inch of hope while nonetheless trying to save himself with everything he's got. He wasn't yet physically dying, but rather he was
in dialog with death.
While recalling the Carson Wells character I've started thinking about his wardrobe. It stuck out quite a bit in the colorscape of the film. It was very light, as if to suggest he was a white knight coming to the rescue. But it was not white. At baby blue, it was a few, critical shades short of the heroic white that it needed to be.
Quote from: MacGuffin on November 20, 2007, 05:17:32 PM
Quote from: picolas on November 16, 2007, 06:29:52 PMthe moment there's a link for this, someone post it plz!
It's up now:
Quote from: ASmith on November 16, 2007, 03:27:44 PMhttp://www.charlierose.com/shows/2007/11/16/1/a-discussion-about-the-film-no-country-for-old-men
:kiss:
Quote from: ASmith on November 20, 2007, 10:14:53 PM
Quote from: RegularKarate on November 20, 2007, 04:50:37 PMI didn't really like Woody H. too much...
** Spoilers **
Sir, you simply MUST be shitting me. I will never forget the way he played Wells when facing death in the hotel room with Chigurh. Grasping at straws when no one in that situation would have been more certain of their fate than he was. What he portrayed so powerfully was the struggle to stay composed while desperately articulating a futile case for mercy. He was developed as a match for Chigurh, or the closest thing to it, and we see him at his knees, not being given an inch of hope while nonetheless trying to save himself with everything he's got. He wasn't yet physically dying, but rather he was in dialog with death.
While recalling the Carson Wells character I've started thinking about his wardrobe. It stuck out quite a bit in the colorscape of the film. It was very light, as if to suggest he was a white knight coming to the rescue. But it was not white. At baby blue, it was a few, critical shades short of the heroic white that it needed to be.
spoils!well, well said. i loved how smart and unafraid and vaguely charming and cocky he was and how it melted away so quickly.. in fact this may be my fav Woody performance.
i had a slight fear in the back of my head that this movie would lose something second time around without the suspense but i knew there was more to it.. it seems to suggest that good is behind the times and can't be as clever as/overcome evil. the editing/form of it suggests it's almost a foregone conclusion. this is just barely skimming the surface.. there's a shitload to think about. i love the character of anton and his curiousity about the workings of all the characters around him and his genuine disturbance regarding lewelynn's wife's coin comment so much. this may be their most overtly philosophical movie. i'd really like to know if they consciously thought about more than just characters and story this time around. it would fit with their need to do something different from what they've just done every time "for the sake of variety." i realize it's an adaptation and all this stuff may be a biproduct of that, but it's too well made to not consciously be about something grander than just these people and their stories.. maybe they talk about how their process has changed in the charlie rose interview... more later. i can't believe a lukewarm review for this movie. it's a masterpiece.
edit: i keep forgetting to mention the insert of the wrapper in the gas station is the front-runner for insert of the year.
Quote from: RegularKarate on November 20, 2007, 04:50:37 PM
which is why your version of the film woudn't have been as good.
Maybe. Like, I said, just my general thoughts. I don't mean that I view myself as a better film-maker than the Coens, just trying to point out what I felt didn't work, and what my opinions were of how it could be improved.
Quote from: picolas on November 21, 2007, 03:54:24 AM
it's a masterpiece.
No way. It's a good film, certainly. I definately enjoyed it when I saw it. But the more I think about it the more I'm disappointed. I dunno... I just kinda feel really mediocre about it. Shame. Definately not in my top 5 of 2007.
SPOILERS!
Quote from: bigideas on November 18, 2007, 11:51:52 PM
how do you interpret the editing of the return of tommy lee to the hotel after brolin died - that whole scene? simply that the killer was in the other room?
I wondered about this too, if it was meant to be that he was in the other room than it didn't make it very clear and it never shows him again, like leaving or something. The way Brolin's death was revealed I found unremarkable, I was just too confused its not even made clear beforehand that was his hotel room he was laying dead in. I guess maybe its just me but for a lot of the scenes towards the end I was too busy trying to figure out everything and it took away from being able to enjoy the significance of what was happening.
Best film I've seen this year. Period.
I felt like the Coen brothers finally made a movie about the character that plays a supporting role in some of their other films. Goodman's character in Barton Fink. The baby Hunter in Raising Arizona. Peter Stormare in Fargo. A character who is his violence and insanity. There's nothing else to him. He's that thought, or deed, that'll fuck you up eventually.
Blah, blah, blah. It was great.
oh man. this tore me a new cinematic asshole. my neck hairs have never been so erect.
ok cwbb, your ball.
I'm probably the only person here that hasnt seen 'Blood' yet, and I got so fucking excited when they showed the trailer right before the start of the film, that it took me a little to concentrate and stop wishing I was seeing that one instead!
Anyways, I loved every minute of it... I loved how quiet most of the movie is, which has everyone paying so much attention cause any little insignificant noise means something. The motel scenes, all of them, are excellent and terrifying. Bardem surprised me in an amazing way. I knew he would be good, but with his acting and the ridiculous look of the character they accomplished creating something unique that will stand out forever.
I want to see this again and pay even more attention to little details. One of the best of the year for sure.
I loved that the CWBB trailer played right before the movie started. It set this film up perfectly. First i saw "Film by Paul Thomas Anderson" and i fucking squealed out loud and as soon as that was over it was "No Country for Old Men" with barely any credits
SPOILY (by the way to everyone who hasn't seen it: READ THE BOOK! DON'T WATCH A SINGLE TRAILER! AND ESPECIALLY DON'T WATCH THAT CHARLIE ROSE INTERVIEW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE)
There are two things that are different from the book to the movie but everything else is near perfect. Reading the book I imagined the first chapter (which is sherrif bell philosophizing about violence and such) being voice-over to a montage of a texas desert. The exact same thing they did in Blood Simple with M. emmet walsh's character and that's exactly what they did with the movie. Anyway, the two differences:
In the book, Chigurh and Moss have their gun battle in the hotel and out into the street as moss escapes to mexico. A woman in her apartment is hit in the head by a stray bullet. Carson wells comes onto the scene a day or so after the confrontation and notices bullet holes in a window above. Wells finds the woman who must've been so alone that the police didn't find her. I thought this scene maybe could've have been slipped in somewhere giving a little more weight to Woody's character.
Second, in the book the girl moss talks to in the scene right before his death is in the book for a lot longer. Moss is driving to el paso and he sees this girl hitchhiking on the side of the road, he picks her up, they have breakfast and talk on their way to a hotel. When Carla Jean finds out about Moss it seems that Moss was cheating on his wife (which he didn't) and it added more weight to the sadness carla jean must've been going through. Couple this with the death of her mother and the last scene with Chigurh and it becomes so much more traumatic.
But these are minor quarrels. The film is perfection. I was wondering how they were going to end it and that was really the only thing i was worried about. But god damn was that ending with Tommy Lee's sad eyes just incredible and haunting.
Some really memorable shots:
The peanut wrapper slowly unwrapping on the counter.
The boot scuffs on the floor from Chigurh's first victim.
The reflections of Chigurh and then Bell in Moss's tv.
The best movie i've seen in a while. I'm so happy the coen brothers are back.
spoilsQuote from: pozer on November 25, 2007, 05:14:30 PM
sleepless, you mustve been sleepless durning ncfom.
I never said I hated the film, but I certainly don't think it's worthy of the masterpiece status you want to bestow on it. I haven't read the book, I'm just looking at this as a stand-alone film. It is what it is. I try and do that with any film-adaptation, I believe it should stand alone as a piece of art and entertainment. From what other people have said this is a good adaptation, but I feel sometimes film-makers need to take certain liabilities with the source material in order to make a completely successful film, and I don't think that's the case here. But of course, just my opinion. Believe me, I want to like this film. Like probably everyone else here I own all the Coens movies (yes, even IC and TLK), I have books on the Coens, soundtracks.... I'm obviously not going to win any support for my feelings on this film right now. I know I need to see the film again. Basically, what it boils down to is that TLJ's character is not a big enough presence throughout the film to warrant taking his musings and emotions as significantly as we should AND THAT'S A WEAKNESS FOR THE MOVIE. Maybe it works in the book, I don't know. But film is a visual medium, and I think that Bell should have been more active in trying to overcome this evil rather than just idily track in in the newspaper. Otherwise, what qualifies him as a worthy narrator and expressor of emotions?
Don't worry Sleepless, you've more than explained yourself compared to the guys who are prodding you. No need to defend anything. The movie didn't come to my city which pissed me off, but I could have seen it during a recent road trip. I didn't because I was on valium at the time. I'm hanging on to slim hopes the film will expand beyond 800 theaters or just hit my city late.
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on November 26, 2007, 01:03:24 PM
I'm hanging on to slim hopes the film will expand beyond 800 theaters or just hit my city late.
yeah why do they do this? like how do they decide where to release it and why do they only do it for certain movies?
to build buzz and word of mouth so that a 'smaller' film doesn't open on the same number of screens as Enchanted and then disappear a week later.
** Spoilers **Quote from: RegularKarate on November 20, 2007, 04:50:37 PMI didn't really like Woody H. too much...
Quote from: ASmith on November 20, 2007, 10:14:53 PMSir, you simply MUST be shitting me. etc...
First, let me point out that I didn't HATE him in this... second, most of what you're talking about is how great the character is... yeah, it's a great character... I loved him in the book... I just didn't love Woody's take on him... he just didn't do it for me the way the others did.
Quote from: Sleepless on November 26, 2007, 09:30:28 AM
TLJ's character is not a big enough presence throughout the film to warrant taking his musings and emotions as significantly as we should AND THAT'S A WEAKNESS FOR THE MOVIE. Maybe it works in the book, I don't know. But film is a visual medium, and I think that Bell should have been more active in trying to overcome this evil rather than just idily track in in the newspaper. Otherwise, what qualifies him as a worthy narrator and expressor of emotions?
But why? We get to see the evil he's seeing... then we get to see his take on it... why do we need to go with him, following the case and learning about it throughout the whole movie when we're seeing most of it first hand? We get to see exactly enough of that to know what his involvement is in the case.
***spoilers***
for those who have read the book - are any of the unshown killings described in the book, i.e. especially Carla Jean. i'm wondering if she just sat there calmly and accepted it and also if they explain the wiping of his boot. i don't see the book just saying "he walked out of the house, wiped the bottom of his boot, and walked away."
SPOILERS (and a note that there's nothing in the past couple of pages of this thread worth reading if you haven't seen the movie or at least read the book, so I recommend staying out of this thread until you've seen it)
So after letting it sit in my mind for a day, I think that this is a good movie, but I don't understand the masterpiece status that people are flinging upon it. I'd like to read some more detailed thoughts from those who think it is a masterpiece. I could be convinced that it is, but I will need more than just that the movie kicked your ass or that the depiction of evil frightened you.
My experience of it was that I saw a lot of excellent filmmaking choices, and a lot of very interesting ideas both in the story and in the way that it was told. Personally, I think Tommy Lee Jones's level of involvement in the story was perfect--really one of the standout choices of this movie and/or the book. While this movie did gather its steam from multiple threads of tense, straight-forward narratives that kept you wanting to know (and dreading) what happens next, it is the parallel themes that hint at something grand. Each character practically IS their idea of what fate is, and there's a sense of watching different sorts of philosophies collide, either violently or, as with Jones's character, with a re-calibration of his philosophy. He is the one who is willing to consider that he might be wrong, that he might not belong, and this strikes me as both his salvation and his tragedy, because only he is armed to see the bigger, more haunting picture. That is what the beginning and ending is all about to me. And this, by the way, is why he is the only person qualified to be the narrator, and why his narration adds to the depth of this film.
One example of what I meant by the parallel thing (and there were plenty of examples that I noticed while watching it, but this is the one that comes to mind now) is when Llewelyn comes across those college kids who think he got in a car accident but still demand the money before handing him the coat, and that's very clearly contrasted with when Chigurh is in an actual car accident, and the boys are willing to help him out for nothing. It's as clear a parallel as any, though I don't think there's any "message" to it, and I think much of the power of this film comes from the ideas that these parallels can evoke.
The other powerful element of this film is how it plays with the audience's expectations. I think the story itself develops naturally enough that I don't feel cheated by the way it plays out, and I feel that the real intelligence of this film is in how it reveals that story to you. You're allowed to imagine and anticipate all sorts of paths that the story could go down, but it doesn't go down those paths, and I think that that's what a lot of audiences find frustrating about it. It's pretty clear in Woody Harrelson's case--you can imagine the role that this guy will play in the story, yet the way it plays out is not satisfying, but still realistic. I don't think the character is there just to jerk your expectations around. If audiences do stop to think about how it all plays out, then the ideas in the movie gain power and, hopefully, people don't feel jipped by the story.
So it's sort of these unexpected, unresolved things in the forward narrative alongside the parallel but more standstill Tommy Lee Jones thing that make it quite an interesting movie to think about.
That said, I don't think that it's a masterpiece status because, while it is an interesting film, and probably many steps forward again for the Coens (I haven't seen any of their stuff since O Brother, so I can't comment for sure on their quality), there are several parts that are not particularly spectacular about it. I was disappointed in much of the main narrative. I disagree that Javier Bardem gave any sort of an enlightening, surprising, or special performance. I think he was very good at carrying the brute force of the idea of that character, but I don't think that there's as much there as people are claiming. Again if someone can show me otherwise, I'm sure that my opinion could be changed. Brolin was very good, and to me more interesting than Bardem, because how a man like this deals with a brute force is more interesting than the brute force itself. He's a fairly simple man, simple character, but it's very impressive to carry so much of the movie entirely alone and with little dialogue, and still allow us to get to be inside this man's thinking process.
I like Kelly MacDonald but really here I think she was just Kelly MacDonald with a southern accent. I re-watched the new Lassie a few days ago and her five minutes in that movie felt surprisingly similar, performance-wise. I think that's because, beyond the accent, I don't think she has a deep understanding of a character like Carla Jean, or at least the movie doesn't give her much of an opportunity to really be that woman, just like how her five minutes in Lassie didn't really give her an opportunity to do much either. So she just came off like Kelly MacDonald with a southern accent... I daresay that a different actress with a deeper understanding of southern women would have more effortlessly exuded those qualities, and maybe would have fought and won the little battles that an actor can sometimes win to create a truly memorable performance.
I frankly would have liked to have seen a lot more of the women in this movie. Tommy Lee Jones's wife especially, I wish was not so peripheral.
So I have pretty much listed what I think is impressive about this movie, and also why I don't think it's a masterpiece. I also think the quality of the filmmaking was uneven. There are the standout moments of wonderful construction, but then also some lazy bits here and there, which I'm not gonna rail against but I would like to not have the filmmaking be hailed as something that it's not quite.
With all of that said, the best part of this movie was Stephen Root, because he's Stephen Root. Watching a whole bunch of episodes of Newsradio before watching this movie reminded me of the big bright shining light that he is. And that is the one thing that the book could never come close to touching.
Quote from: bigideas on November 26, 2007, 04:27:54 PM
***spoilers***
for those who have read the book - are any of the unshown killings described in the book...
Absolutely.
I don't want to ruin anything if you are actually considering reading the book (you should) but, if anything, the Coen's spare the audience from quite a bit. There's a quite a conclusion to it all.
SPOILERS still
Quote from: matt35mm on November 26, 2007, 07:21:12 PM
[Sheriff Bell] is the one who is willing to consider that he might be wrong, that he might not belong, and this strikes me as both his salvation and his tragedy, because only he is armed to see the bigger, more haunting picture. That is what the beginning and ending is all about to me.
I thought about this some more today and changed my mind. I now think that Bell has no particular salvation. He is no more "saved" than anyone for being able to see the sad, full picture.
Today I thought more about the scene when he almost encounters Chigurh, and my interpretation of the scene is not that Chigurh is in another room, but rather simply decides not to kill Bell, and my guess as to why that would be is due to luck. When Bell sits down and sees that the vent has been unscrewed with some coins that are still there, the coin has been established as a symbol of pure chance, and even though Chigurh probably didn't flip a coin just before Bell stepped in, I still formed that connection in my mind that it is by chance alone that Bell wasn't killed. Because clearly Chigurh has no qualms with killing anybody, including coppers.
So that Bell was even able to live on and have that dream was also just luck. It is the randomness--the manner in which Chigurh goes about his business of killing people, and even how Llyewlyn gets involved in all of this--that adds to the tragedy. And although Bell's eventual death will probably not be as violent as it could have been, it will in many ways be no less brutal. You could also argue that he already is dead by the last scene, whether literally or figuratively.
Anyway, I'll keep on-a thinkin' about it, and now I think I'd like to see the movie again, which I didn't want to do after I first saw it. Still not masterpiece status as a movie, but I'm getting more and more interested in reading the book and swimming around some more in these ideas.
SPOILERS
Matt, there is no room between the door and the wall for Chigurh to hide. When opened, the door is flush against the wall. I saw No Country for a second time last night, which confirmed this fact. As a result, the only way for me to interpret Chirgurh behind the door is that it is Ed Tom's imagination...I think the editing of Ed Tom's arrival, approach to the hotel room door, shot of Chigurh, then the light coming through the key hole, then Ed Tom's entry into the room support such an interpretation. The other possibility is that Chigurh is actually some sort of supernatural. Ed Tom calls him a ghost at one point, he is able to withstand incredible pain and punishment, and he is seemingly able to carry weapons pretty much anywhere. But if we're being literal, the first interpretation holds more water.
To tie your coin/chance theory into my interpretation above, I would say that Chigurh just left the room...similarly to when Ed Tom and his deputy just missed him at Moss' trailer. I think that sequence of events still works with your argument.
SPOILERS
I didn't think that Chigurh was behind the door because that's the first place I looked when the door opened, and I noticed immediately that there was no room for that sort of thing. But I'm sure there are more than a few things that I didn't catch.
I don't think that Chigurh was hiding, just because that seems very unusual given everything that we've seen of Chigurh.
And then I also don't think that the editing showed two different rooms or two different moments in time to simply suggest that they were both about to meet, because that idea doesn't hold much power beyond trickery.
So I don't take the scene literally. I read some things online that contrasted the book with the movie, and there is apparently a big change from the book for this scene. The way it plays out in the book (assuming that these online postings are accurate) would make more literal sense, and I think the change for the film was deliberately to give us this symbolic image of (I know that this will sound terribly lame but here it goes) Bell at Death's door, but without the cringe-worthiness of those words, rather just the power of that particular image.
So, to me, Bell and Chigurh are both there, separated by only a door, and then Chigurh (Death) is gone. Not hiding but gone. And you can sort of take that to mean what you will. I think that whether you think that Bell has literally faced death, as in Chigurh killed him then and there and the last scene does not take place in reality, or not, it makes sense to me that Bell, in one way or another, dies in that room. Personally I think of it as more the latter--that he doesn't physically die.
What I'm going to think about when I see it next time is whether or not EVERYTHING after the fade out and cut back in resides in a different world, and if I can find any clues to suggest that. I don't mean literally in a different world, but just that the whole plot stops right there, and then everything else when it cuts back in is different kinds of deaths and meanings of death playing out. The film becomes a different film. I do have to see it again because I can really discuss that idea in detail, though.
I just think that the Coens could easily have given a perfectly good explanation of everything if they wanted to, and the fact that this whole last part is confusing suggests to me that there is no perfectly good explanation. After the fade out and cut in, the movie either becomes greater than or less than everything that came before for the audience, the movie either loses itself or finds itself, etc. depending on how you've absorbed the ideas of the movie before the fade out. And I don't know, maybe it's a perfect great, tight chase movie ruined, or it's revealed that it was never a chase movie at all.
Anyway, at this point I'm really just giving myself things to consider when I go see the movie again, and I'm not really claiming anything about the movie yet. (except that I don't think it's quite a masterpiece and that Stephen Root is a big bright shining light) Thanks for responding to my thoughts, though, Sunrise.
A Ghost And A Dream: Notes on the final quarter of 'No Country For Old Men':
**SPOILER WARNING**
http://glennkenny.premiere.com/blog/2007/11/a-ghost-and-a-d.html
Good read, thanks mac.
Has anyone asked the Coens directly (or are they ones not to discuss meaning of their films)?
Last time we met for coffee the topic completely slipped my mind. Sorry.
Besides that, I really don't think they'd discuss it anyway. What would be the point of making something mysterious just to turn around and discuss it openly, revealing everything (or even a piece of everything)?
I wouldn't want them to, either.
Mac, thanks for posting that. Some really interesting ideas there. Particularly thought the response which interpreted the ending as optomistic was getting at some very novel thoughts. I do look forward to seeing this film again.
Quote from: The Perineum Falcon on November 28, 2007, 04:46:42 PM
Last time we met for coffee the topic completely slipped my mind. Sorry.
Besides that, I really don't think they'd discuss it anyway. What would be the point of making something mysterious just to turn around and discuss it openly, revealing everything (or even a piece of everything)?
I wouldn't want them to, either.
I meant in interviews and the like.
you don't wish kubrick would tell why the people are in period dress in the last scene of ACO?
i durrs. :yabbse-grin:
this is a pretty big scene in No Country though, whereas Hitchcock did it in Vertigo with the hotel scene and later said it was to inspire water cooler talk (but the Vertigo scene doesn't affect the final thoughts as much as this does, nor come so close to the end of the film).
I thought this movie could bring me to like a Coen brothers film, but I guess it wasn't meant to be between us. The original novel wasn't very good, but all the positives the novel had going for it is lost in this film adaptation.
The reason is simple. The Coen Brothers dedicate the majority of the film to making a thriller. In the novel, Tommy Lee Jones character is at the heart of the story. His commentary and experience guides everything. The mishap of misplaced money and a subsequent chase for it (while still prominent in the novel) doesn't take on such a large percentage of the story time as it does in the film. The only times we see Tommy Lee Jones is in small spurts where his character interaction provides better anecdotes than anything else. The Coen Brothers embrace the chance to take a killing spree and make it an elaborate noir spectacle. The composition and filmmaking has thriller written all over it. It marginalizes all chances for characterization.
Also, in the novel, Llewelyn Moss is much more human. He isn't an adversary of Anton Chigurh but a dumb guy who got in the wrong situation and never knew when to stop. The novel highlights his fear a lot greater and focuses more on his bad mistakes. The film tries to make up for what it doesn't acknowledge in the novel by showing his fateful mistakes later on, but his characterization is still pure grit, a kind of offset of Chigurh who can go toe to toe with him in deviousness. The final scene with Chigurh and Moss' wife is very annoying. He says her life can be saved if her husband chose her over himself, but the question of morality doesn't match the undertone of the characterization. It feels like a wrap up to give meaning to an out and out thriller that looks and feels like every other thriller.
The final 20 minutes feel like the novel. Jones' character takes prominence and it has a tone that feels like the novel, but it isn't satisfying. It feels tacked on like the film knows it has to make meaning out of all the ridiculousness of the rest of the story. The film could have made choices to make the film feel more realistic to life circumstances, but it just gravitated to the large number of deaths in the novel and exploited it. I'm not saying the film should have been a true dedication to the novel. Considering the novel was far from perfect, it shouldn't have. Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.
As a thriller, it's well made. Parts of the film are really well done, but the film needs to be looked at for its overall qualities. It doesn't just want to be a thriller but something more. This isn't like Fargo where the heightened accents made a stark drama a slight comedy, but instead a noir ode with greater dramatic intentions. The Coen Brothers film to the limits of their limited personality and infuse dated references (noir) and small quirks and details everywhere. Moss' wife is killed at the end and you only know it because Chigurh checks his boots on the porch for blood. That was a good touch, but those touches don't make a film. I think the Coen Brothers lost the larger scope of characterization that was needed.
My favorite line was, "You're going to have to ride bitch" when Chigurh had to ride in between two men in the pick up truck. I liked it for no more reason except that I hadn't heard that expression used since I was a kid. I come from a pick up truck world and it was once common.
Quote from: Cinephile on November 18, 2007, 07:07:51 PM
the chilling thing about this movie is that.. you end up agreeing with the killer and pointing the finger at Lewellyn.
I didn't agree with Chigurh. Moss' wife was correct for calling him out on the coin toss. Chigurh can't handle making the choice himself at all. Yes, the film is right to point a finger at Lewellyn, but it doesn't need to make it a big deal at that time. Lewellyn's choices beforehand should have already made it clear he was wrong. It's just his actions when he did them were presented as gritty and tough. A hollow personification.
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 06:53:07 PM
Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.
What parts would these be?
Quote from: squints on December 08, 2007, 07:07:07 PM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 06:53:07 PM
Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.
What parts would these be?
That line just refers back to everything I say in the review.
I thought the movie was really great also, great storytelling/filmmaking (I didn't read the novel and I had no idea what to expect. I Don't pay much attention to trailers so I was pretty much in the open walking in). But how many people witnessed the audience in the theater booing the film by the end?
The events of tonight, just seeing how many fucking ass clowns would show up to a movie like No Country, expecting some Die Hard action flick and then have the nerve to boo it... It makes me despise going to the theaters all together. Especially when there's talking and obscure laughter coming from certain people throughout the movie, it really just skews your attention away from the screen. I'm sure it's an experience that we've all had at one point or another but to have it happen at a movie like No Country, it really just... fucking...
*Insert Pesci rant*QuoteMoss' wife is killed at the end and you only know it because Chigurh checks his boots on the porch for blood. That was a good touch, but those touches don't make a film. I think the Coen Brothers lost the larger scope of characterization that was needed.
That was my favorite part. I hate to single out one particular scene but if I were to share the one scene that stood out for me it would be Chigurh walking out that door and checking his boots. To me, that was great filmmaking.
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 07:16:34 PM
Quote from: squints on December 08, 2007, 07:07:07 PM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 06:53:07 PM
Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.
What parts would these be?
That line just refers back to everything I say in the review.
i see what you're saying. the acting was so much better in the novel
Quote from: squints on December 11, 2007, 04:40:19 AM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 07:16:34 PM
Quote from: squints on December 08, 2007, 07:07:07 PM
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 06:53:07 PM
Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.
What parts would these be?
That line just refers back to everything I say in the review.
i see what you're saying. the acting was so much better in the novel
Haha, I guess I'm not going to go to you for an accurate summation.
awesome... GT and I back into massive disagreement territory...
What view-points were expressed by Bell in the book that were conveyed in the film? I think you're off on that point.
also, I think you're wrong about Moss being "just a dumb guy" in the book. I'm pretty sure he was just as clever and his motivations were just the same as in the film.
Quote from: RegularKarate on December 11, 2007, 03:29:43 PM
awesome... GT and I back into massive disagreement territory...
Haha, I think I just stopped posting as many reviews. The world is what it is. We will never see eye to eye, but it's not a big deal.
Quote from: RegularKarate on December 11, 2007, 03:29:43 PM
What view-points were expressed by Bell in the book that were conveyed in the film? I think you're off on that point.
Bell was a more prominent figure in the book. His story shaped much more of the beginning 2/3 of the story than it does in the film. It speaks to tone of the film and purpose of characterization. These are important elements. This isn't just about what is missing or what the Coens change. They prove, at the end, that they can relate to him well. It's just a greater presence of his character is meaningful in relating the themes to the audience.
Quote from: RegularKarate on December 11, 2007, 03:29:43 PM
also, I think you're wrong about Moss being "just a dumb guy" in the book. I'm pretty sure he was just as clever and his motivations were just the same as in the film.
Alright, I'll say he isn't "just a dumb guy", but he certainly is a misguided one who is driven by both greed and fear. The film paints him to be grit only. Squints low balled my argument by saying my basic point is that the acting wasn't as good as it was in the novel. That's not the case it all. It has everything to do with interpretation. It is a major element of any filmmaker adapting an original piece.
The Coen Brothers read the book and likely saw a chance to make another ode to noir. It's not a secret their films play out to encompass other genres, but this is the first film they did that was a pretty straightforward adaptation of another work. They made the novel encompass their personality, but the question has to be asked, are they elevating the original work by allowing it to play out as an elaborate thriller? I'm not someone strictly against stylization, but I am someone who believes the style choices the Coen brothers make are low grade ideas. They never seem to elevate the stories at all.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins puts the message in focus
The frequent Coen brothers collaborator is drawn to substance over spectacle.
By Cristy Lytal, Special to The Times
WHEN Roger Deakins applied to England's National Film and Television School for the first time, the man who has become one of the world's most respected cinematographers was informed that his stills weren't "filmic." Today, he sits in a sun-drenched beach cottage in Santa Monica and contemplates the concept.
"I had this big discussion with [the head of the school] the second time I applied," says Deakins, now 58 years old. "I said, 'The first time you said it wasn't filmic.' He said, 'That one's filmic.' It was a dog in midair that was blurred. I said, 'Why? That one's blurred, because it's got motion.' If that's filmic, I could have gone filmic!"
Since then, he has done precisely that. This year alone, he reteamed with Joel and Ethan Coen in a ninth effort, the widely acclaimed "No Country for Old Men," and showed his range with the grainy desolation of "In the Valley of Elah" and the fire-lighted palette of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." It's rare for any director of photography to have three films released within weeks of one another, let alone three with this level of artistry.
The projects have put Deakins, a five-time Oscar nominee, in hot contention for yet another nod. He credits much of his success to a philosophical approach favoring meaning over empty spectacle, substance over bombast.
"I'm not attracted to a film just because it's going to have great visuals," Deakins says. "In fact, I find that kind of boring. There's a line from 'Moby-Dick': There's nothing so interesting as staring into the eyes of a human face. And I think that's true. I mean, the most interesting thing is filming somebody's face."
For Deakins, a native of a small fishing town in England called Torquay, cinematography wasn't the most obvious career choice, and he calls his decision to go to art school "probably the most rebellious thing to do at that time for me." His father, who owned a construction company, wanted him to take over the family business, but Deakins' heart belonged to painting and photography.
After graduation, Deakins found work as a documentary filmmaker, a career that called him to question what it means to film reality. "The last documentary, we shot a group of patients in a mental hospital," he recalls. "We went to film this lady one day on the top of this high-rise. She'd been out of hospital for a couple of weeks. This woman was like in a hell of a state, absolutely drunk and being sick and screaming. There was no way I was going to film her. It really felt like being so voyeuristic. We cleaned her up, and we cooked her a meal and sat her down, and then we filmed her. But now we're not showing what she was like. I just found that such a dilemma."
Paradoxically, Deakins was able to discover a new kind of truth working on fiction films such as "The Shawshank Redemption," "Dead Man Walking," "Kundun," "A Beautiful Mind" and his nine collaborations with the Coen brothers. "Filming Tommy Lee Jones in Ellis' [actor Barry Corbin] cabin at the end of 'No Country,' it's like you get tingles down your spine, because it's got beauty and reality to it," he says. "It's the same shiver I used to get when I was shooting documentaries. It's when you've got something, and you know you're the first person to see it."
Writer-director Paul Haggis actively sought a realistic, documentary-style look for "In the Valley of Elah," the story of a father trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of his son, a young veteran home from Iraq. "Roger isn't worried about it being beautiful or being lit beautifully; he's very much serving the story," says Haggis, who asked Deakins to film "Elah" like a John Ford classic to evoke Americana and then desaturate and gray the negatives.
Of course, truth and beauty are not always mutually exclusive. For the highly stylized meditation on celebrity "The Assassination of Jesse James," Deakins lighted much of the film with hand-held, old-fashioned lanterns that were rigged with halogen bulbs. At the encouragement of director Andrew Dominik, Deakins went especially dramatic in the scene where Jesse and his gang rob a train. "You've got one lamp, and all you see is what that's lighting: five feet," says Deakins. "I had actually got some lights ready to hit the trees a little bit, so you get a sense of distance when Jesse was waiting for the train. And then at the last minute, a few hours before, I said, 'I think we should really go for it.' I put a little bit of atmosphere in the air, so when the train light comes, it blooms in smoke. It's almost this kind of mythical appearance of light."
Newfound synergy on the set
ILLUMINATING big nighttime exteriors was also a challenge on "No Country for Old Men," but Joel Coen calls Deakins "one of the world's great DPs in terms of how he lights." The Coen brothers started their collaboration with Deakins after their previous cinematographer -- Barry Sonnenfeld -- decided to pursue a directing career. "With Barry, we were often working in very small depth of field, and he lights with hard fixtures," Joel Coen says. "Barry was a very interesting and talented DP, but working with Roger was liberating in terms of what we were able to do in terms of blocking and moving the camera. And Roger doesn't vomit on the set like Barry does. Barry shares to a fault. Roger, less so."
It's a good thing Deakins has a strong stomach, because he's booked for the foreseeable future with high-profile projects such as Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road" and John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt." And while Deakins' chief visual hallmark may be his versatility, the films he works on do tend to have at least one unifying trait.
"Frankly, I would love it if everything I ever worked on had some social relevance," he says. "That's what I think it's really about. If you don't have something in the frame that's worth shooting, then I don't know why you would want to do it, really. That's why I feel so lucky to have worked on these ones this year."
'We've killed a lot of animals'
Joel and Ethan Coen have never shied away from death, and their latest film is one of their bloodiest - and best. They tell John Patterson about Texas, torture and a 'fantastic' haircut
Source: The Guardian
I'm framing up the Coen brothers as if they're appearing in one of their own movies. From where I'm seated, I can see Joel, the longer, skinnier, more languid of the pair, stretched out almost full-length in the foreground, his legs on a coffee table and his torso resting almost horizontal on a couch. He fills the lower half of my frame, looking vaguely reminiscent of Henry Fonda balancing on his chair outside the barbershop in My Darling Clementine. Brother Ethan meanwhile is more animated, providing a more compact, roving vertical in the middle distance to balance the supine Joel, and tittering where Joel is prone to drawl.
And yes, they do finish each other's sentences. Sort of. Like this, for instance, in answer to the question "How many animals have you killed in your movies?"
Joel: "Oh ... plenty."
Ethan: "Uh ... cows in O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Joel (pensively): "Couple of cows in that one. Blew up a rabbit and a lizard, another dog in this one ... "
Ethan (chuckling): "Yeah, we've killed a LOT of animals!"
In the next few weeks, expect to hear the phrase "return to form" used incessantly about the brothers Coen. Their searing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's most approachable, albeit most pulpy, novel, No Country for Old Men, has earned admiration and mainstream attention in America of an intensity which hasn't come the Coens' way since the Oscar success of Fargo or the rapturous cult that has coalesced around The Big Lebowski.
After two comedies - Intolerable Cruelty and a remake of Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers - generally deemed the least interesting outings of their career, the Coens have delivered a manhunt-thriller of mesmerising violence and remarkable narrative leanness, an almost academically precise exercise in the building and maintenance of unbearable tension and anxiety in the audience, and superficially reminiscent of the Texas noir of their debut, Blood Simple. Shot under merciless southwestern skies by their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and telling of the inexorable destruction of three men with utterly conflicting moral codes, it's the soberest movie they've yet made: arid, spare, and mercifully free of the self-defeating collegiate cynicism that sometimes mars even their best work. It has the starkness of Fargo (though it is yellow where Fargo was a symphony in white), the random viciousness of Miller's Crossing, and the ecstatic stylisation of The Man Who Wasn't There. No Country for Old Men proves that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors.
Peckinpah is the director whose themes and concerns - masculinity and self-preservation among them - sit foremost in the mind when reading the McCarthy novel and when seeing the movie, which is a faithful, almost verbatim adaptation. The brothers are amenable to the comparison. Ethan: "We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the south-west, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly." Joel: "Especially in the section of the movie where Woody Harrelson makes an appearance. He reminded us of a Peckinpah character in a certain way." Ethan: "Yeah, you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand."
No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, follows three men in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, out in the hostile desert borderlands. A man named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds $2m in cash among many corpses while out hunting antelope, and is subsequently pursued throughout the movie, across the border and back, by a terrifying freelance assassin named Anton Chigurh, whose literally unspeakable name is redolent of the evil he does - he murders two people in the first five minutes, garrotting the first with a pair of handcuffs, killing the second with a compressed-air slaughterhouse stun-gun. Chigurh is played by Javier Bardem in an extraordinary moptop haircut borrowed from ... well, Peter Tork maybe, or one of the Rutles. Meanwhile, local sheriff Tommy Lee Jones pursues them both, chastened by the killing he sees and realising that someone must save Moss from this incarnation of bottomless malevolence.
Is Tommy Lee Jones as scary as he looks, by the way? "Oh, he's a big pussycat!" laughs Ethan. But he sounds a little nervous. "He wants to pretend that he's scary," offers Joel, to which Ethan adds: "Let's just say he doesn't suffer fools gladly, but he's fine." But he's essential to the film's integrity, isn't he? "He grew up there. He's from San Saba, Texas, not far from where the movie takes place. He's the real thing regarding that region. There's a short list of people who could play that part at the basic level of the qualities you need: age, screen presence and the need to really inhabit that region and that landscape."
I have to ask about Bardem's hair, which manages to be simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous. "That bowl is fantastic," says Joel. "We saw that hair in a photograph of a guy in a bar in a Texas border town in 1979, and we just copied it." "Yeah," giggles Ethan, "Javier really embraced it enthusiastically!" Bardem himself spoke of the haircut to the LA Times: "You don't have to act the haircut; the haircut is acting by itself ... so you don't have to act weird if you have that weird haircut."
Rounding out the film's trio of protagonists is the relative newcomer Josh Brolin, who here steps into a new dimension, and one step closer to stardom. Ethan: "He came in late in the day, after Tommy and Javier. Since it's about three guys circling each other, what we were afraid of was two very compelling performers and then you cut to the dull guy. We were setting that bar kind of high."
"We were very unsatisfied with everyone we saw before he showed up," adds Joel. "We needed the same combination we had with Tommy: someone with equal weight who could authentically be part of that landscape. Those two things together ... we were surprised how difficult it was, and we weren't happy until he walked in. Without him the whole thing would have been out of whack."
This is not the first time the Coens have returned from an artistic impasse. There was speculation that they were tapped out when the exhaustingly zany The Hudsucker Proxy was poorly received a decade ago. Yet they soon sprang back with Fargo, their most famous movie, followed by Lebowski, their masterpiece.
But things in the early 2000s seemed a little more serious. For a start, the brothers were no longer directing scripts that had fermented and matured in the hothouse of their shared brain; they were adapting novels and rewriting other people's scripts. This seemed like a very bad sign. This more recent impasse started when a long-cherished project, an adaptation of To the White Sea by James "Deliverance" Dickey, fell apart. In retrospect, it seems like a signpost to No Country for Old Men. The White Sea project was about a American airman shot down in second world war Japan who witnesses the Tokyo firebombing and then, insanely, tries to make his way home to Alaska. It shares many things with No Country, particularly a fascination with processes, the mechanics of things, machismo, and lengthy sequences without dialogue or music.
"Yes," says Joel, "that's definitely true, something that we had both thought about to a certain extent. In fact we mentioned Dickey's book to Cormac a few times when we talked to him about anything relating to the book." "This one sort of displaced that project in a lot of ways," adds Ethan.
"Jeremy Thomas was producing it," Joel continues, "and Jeremy is the patron saint of lost causes in the cinema - he seems to make all these interesting movies that everyone thinks are impossible to get made. He got very close to getting the financing for it, which on the face of it is just an insane proposition - a movie with the firebombing of Tokyo in it that's very expensive and somewhat marginal. But he came close."
It sounds like Slaughterhouse-Five, minus the sci-fi, married to John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific. "That's exactly right," says Joel. "Hell in the Pacific is a good example of the same sorts of things we have here in No Country: almost no dialogue, a bizarre score, and guys fighting and doing lots of stuff with their hands." That was your first adaptation? "We have written things for other people that haven't got made," says Joel. "Actually, the Dickey book was the first adapted thing that almost rose to the level of getting produced."
Much of the dialogue in No Country is taken from the book almost word for word. Joel: "Ethan once described the way we worked together as: one of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat. That's why there needs to be two of us - otherwise he's gotta type one-handed. That's how you 'collaborate' with someone else." Ethan: "Paperback novels just won't lie open properly! They flip shut."
One wonders what a sci-fi movie by the Coens - who have done noir, screwball, a kind of western, even a musical of sorts - would look like. "Neither of us is drawn to that kind of fiction," says Ethan of sci-fi. "There are movies that we both like. I don't know that that would ever happen, and I don't quite know why." Joel knows: "I don't think we could get our minds around the whole spacesuit thing."
Instead, they have a script of their own that they'd like to film. "We've written a western," says Joel, "with a lot of violence in it. There's scalping and hanging ... it's good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off." Ethan: "It's a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken." And so, yet another innocent creature prepares to die for the Coen brothers' art.
Quote from: MacGuffin on December 22, 2007, 09:59:46 AM
One wonders what a sci-fi movie by the Coens - who have done noir, screwball, a kind of western, even a musical of sorts - would look like.
The Man Who Wasn't There.
Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment podcast. 28 min interview: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330616&s=143441&i=21470238
This has got to be the strangest book to film adaption ever, it is extremely similar, yet extremely different. On one hand the main plot and most of the dialogue were the exac same in the book as it is in the film, but the Coens eliminate about half the novel by making Tommy lee Jones' sheriff almost a side character. Basically they take the main plot where Josh Brolin's character finds the cash, heroin, blah, blah, blah, then gets chased around by Javier Bardem and create one of the most effective thrillers in recent years. The problem is without the sheriff's commentary, the whole thing lacks substance, and the character itself doesn't really go anywhere. I'm still not 100% on my opinion yet, and it will probably end up on my top ten, but no higher than six. All the best director wins are fine i guess, but its a pile of bullshit whenever this wins adapted screenplay. This is still the best thriller of 2007 (probably).
Also, I was unimpressed with Javier Bardem. Maybe if every review didn't mention him as best supporting actor, i would have enjoyed him more, but i was very underwhelmed. For me Josh Brolin had the best performance in the film, and probably of his career.
MILD SPOILERS
Yeah, I thought Josh Brolin was the key character in this movie to keep it together. Javier Bardem seemed to turn into the Terminator at the end, and it just got ridiculous (they even duplicated the "repair" scene from the movie). Again, Brolin was fantastic and really carried the movie. Javier Bardem got annoying. Tommy Lee Jones was useless. The message of "it ain't like it used to be" was repeated way too much. It was just a big, big disappointment.
I'll review more later.
'No Country for Old Men' Debate Available Online
Source: Cinematical
An eclectic group of online film notables, including former Times critic Elvis Mitchell, AICN's Harry Knowles, my colleague Glenn Kenny of Premiere.com, Roger Ebert's sidekick Jim Emerson and Jen Yamato of Rotten Tomatoes have gotten together to have a long, in-depth discussion about one of the year's top awards contenders, No Country for Old Men. A lot of topics are discussed during the free-floating talk, ranging from macro subjects like the film's much talked-about ending and the theme of old vs. young to minutiae like what happened to the coin that the gas station attendant won his life with and the significance of Javier Bardem's Prince Valiant haircut. There's also a lot of talk about the significance of feet in the film -- one character gets wounded in the foot and Bardem's character has a peculiar obsession with keeping his feet clean and there are lots of shots of walking feet in the film. What does it all mean?
It's the controversial ending that prompts the most debate, and Harry Knowles talks at one point about a screening of the film that took place in Austin with Josh Brolin in attendance: "A member of the audience stood up and [said] 'Why did they end it like that?!' and Brolin just looked at the guy and he looked angry." Kenny offers a unique interpretation of the last act, specifically referring to two events that happen in quick succession involving Bardem and another character. He believes Bergman's The Seventh Seal was an influence for the Coen Bros. on that. To hear the whole thing, just download the MP3 off the film's official website and enjoy.
http://www.nocountryforoldmen.com/podcast/
Traversing 'No Country's' tricky terrain
The Coen brothers' film is attracting acclaim and viewers, many of whom are saying 'Huh?' after its less-than-killer ending.
By Glenn Kenny, Los Angeles Times
**SPOILERS**
"YOU know how this is gonna turn out, don't you?"
"No."
"I think you do."
So goes an exchange, almost an hour and a half into "No Country for Old Men," between murderous tracker Anton Chigurh and affable Llewelyn Moss, his prey. They're the two main characters -- at least until the film's final half-hour.
What goes on in that last quarter makes the picture -- which is well on its way to becoming the top-grossing film from moviemaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen -- one of the most controversial thrillers to hit movie theaters in some time. Not, perhaps, since the "what-is-that-astronaut-doing-in-a-Louis-XIV-bedroom" finale of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" has a movie's ending so provoked and polarized viewers.
Still, "No Country" continues to gain in box-office sales (it's grossed roughly $45 million) and awards (it would appear to be a shoo-in for a score of Oscar nominations). However, one potential hurdle in that respect is convincing whichever skeptical parties still out there that the ending is a plus, not a minus.
To address what makes the ending "challenging" will involve getting into it a bit, so readers who haven't seen the film yet might want to set the paper down. The picture was adapted scrupulously -- although the Coens do some compressing and add one particularly provocative bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand -- from the 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.
The story's villain, Chigurh (indelibly portrayed by Javier Bardem), is a mysterious, merciless killer tracking down a couple of million dollars in drug-deal money. He's a wraith with an odd haircut, an odd way of killing (it involves a variant of a cattle gun) and an odd way of determining his victims (it frequently requires a coin toss).
Moss (an extremely appealing Josh Brolin) is a likable latter-day cowboy who stumbles upon the satchel containing that money and ill-advisedly engages the formidable Chigurh in a game of cat-and-mouse. The rules of genre moviemaking would seem to dictate that this story end with a showdown between the assassin and the good-guy underdog.
But the Coens' film, like the novel from which the film's adapted, follows the rules only so far; the showdown never happens. Instead, the story's emphasis shifts, concentrating on Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, in a magisterial turn), who's been trailing Moss and Chigurh from a distance. It's Bell's voice that is first heard at the movie's opening, talking about a crime he can't begin to "reckon."
Bell is a good man and a good cop, but he eventually decides to withdraw from the frightening chaos wrought by the Chigurhs and Mosses of the world, and the movie's very last scene depicts Bell, now retired, recounting a haunting dream to his wife (Tess Harper).
Because "No Country" contains some action/suspense sequences that honor not just the best of Hitchcock but the best of latter-day violent blockbusters (Chigurh's seeming indomitability sometimes brings to mind the first "Terminator" film), this contemplative and seemingly abrupt wrap-up inspires certain action-movie mavens to scratch their heads and shout obscenities at the screen -- and on the Internet, where so many movie conversations now take place. ("It's because there's no music," "No Country" producer Scott Rudin notes. "The norm in scenes like this is to provide some sort of emotional cue with the music.")
The message boards about the film on Yahoo are teeming with subject lines such as "The critics are on crack!" and observations such as "Yeah a lot of people get killed but the acting is terrible."
But, truth to tell, even more putatively thoughtful viewers have been thrown off by the road less traveled "No Country" takes. In the Nov. 26, 2007, issue of the New Yorker, writer-director Nora Ephron contributed a humorous piece in which a couple ponder, among other things, the fate of Brolin's Moss. Where he ends up, as it happens, is not unambiguous at all; it's just revealed in a way that's totally counter to audience expectations.
Ephron's piece, along with a good deal of other online speculation about the movie's ending -- including a couple of posts by this writer at the Premiere.com website -- is being collected at the movie's own official web- site, www.nocountryforoldmen-themovie.com, under the heading "Notes on the Ending."
"One of the things my partners and I decided early on it was to not try and dance around it," Rudin says. "To say, yes, there is this ending, it's this extraordinary thing, we love it, it requires work on the part of the audience, it's challenging, it's complicated, it's ambiguous. And that decision was a big part of how we tried to make it work for audiences."
The more one examines the differing parts of "No Country" -- starting from its title, which is from the Yeats poem "Sailing to Byzantium" -- the more its seemingly off-kilter ending makes sense, revealing itself as the only possible ending for the picture.
Not only that, but the more it relates to other Coen brothers' movies and to sources the Coens have cited as influences such as the Dashiell Hammett novel "The Glass Key" -- an uncredited inspiration for the Coens' "Miller's Crossing" -- which also ends with the recounting of a dream.
Mere moments before his own date with destiny, Moss tells a young lady who's chatting him up that he's just got an eye out "for what's coming." After Moss has met his fate, and Ed Tom Bell is grappling with a case that he could not, or would not, close, a trusted relative tells him: "You can't stop what's comin'. It ain't all waitin' on you. That's vanity."
The dream Bell recounts in the film's denouement is a place where safety and warmth are assured; that world, this movie understands, is not the one we're living in today. The actual nature of the killer Chigurh is . . . open to question. As is much else.
I don't understand why there's so much debate about the ending. Yeah, it's ambiguous. That's part of make it such a great ending. It's completely different to all the violence that has gone on throughout the rest of the film. The main problem, IMO is that Bell is not enough of a presence earlier in the film, when he clearly should have been.
in what ways should he have been more active in the story? just in more scenes?
Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on December 08, 2007, 06:53:07 PM
IIn the novel, Tommy Lee Jones character is at the heart of the story. His commentary and experience guides everything. The mishap of misplaced money and a subsequent chase for it (while still prominent in the novel) doesn't take on such a large percentage of the story time as it does in the film. The only times we see Tommy Lee Jones is in small spurts where his character interaction provides better anecdotes than anything else. The Coen Brothers embrace the chance to take a killing spree and make it an elaborate noir spectacle. The composition and filmmaking has thriller written all over it. It marginalizes all chances for characterization.
The final 20 minutes feel like the novel. Jones' character takes prominence and it has a tone that feels like the novel, but it isn't satisfying. It feels tacked on like the film knows it has to make meaning out of all the ridiculousness of the rest of the story. The film could have made choices to make the film feel more realistic to life circumstances, but it just gravitated to the large number of deaths in the novel and exploited it. I'm not saying the film should have been a true dedication to the novel. Considering the novel was far from perfect, it shouldn't have. Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away, it didn't need to throw away the best parts.
Josh Brolin On 'No Country' Ending: 'It Was Supposed To Piss You Off'
Source: MTV
"No Country For Old Men" might very well be a masterpiece. But, if so, it's certainly the most divisive modern classic in memory, with audiences bitterly conflicted over an ending which leaves much to the imagination.
Good, says "No Country" star Josh Brolin. That not only speaks to the movie's enduring quality, he said, but, if you were looking for a bloodbath, frankly serves you right.
"I love that people are talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News. "You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all. I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence."
Beware. Thar be spoilers in these waters.
After being chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).
If you were expecting something different, Brolin argues, that "says more about you than the movie."
"You wanted to see his death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked. "I would think that you are happy and it seems that you are happy because you're pissed off and you have something to talk about all day."
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Men of `No Country' discuss hit film
By JAKE COYLE, AP Entertainment Writer
The men of "No Country for Old Men" are having a smoke.
Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin each light up while, all dressed in dark suits, they gather in a back room at Manhattan restaurant Cipriani's for the National Board of Review Awards.
While Jones fiddles with the matches, Brolin rolls his eyes and alludes to Jones' Ivy League education: "Harvard," he says in disbelief.
The NBR Awards, which named the film the year's best picture, are just one of many to honor the Coen brothers' movie, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel. On Tuesday, "No Country" was nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture and best supporting actor for Bardem. Jones was also nominated for best actor for his performance in "In the Valley of Elah."
"No Country" has grossed more than any previous Coen film, an unlikely financial success for a violent, somber allegory of a movie.
Each character is symbolic. Bardem's Anton Chigurh is a prophet of destruction with the hair of Prince Valiant. Brolin's Llewlyn Moss is greed; he attempts to take a found suitcase of money for himself. And Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is justice; a wise, old man trying to make sense of a new violence.
Similarly, in person, they appear archetypes of masculinity. Among the trio, Brolin is the wry jokester; Bardem is the affable, sensitive one; and Jones is the dour, sarcastic elder statesman.
**SPOILERS**
___
AP: Though Joel Coen has said this is a film about three men, you're never seen together on screen. In fact, any two of you hardly appear together.
JONES: Not once.
BROLIN: Or once, but without any dialogue.
JONES: But we're a terrific ensemble, as you can see. (all laugh)
AP: Did you have that sense that you were an ensemble when making it, even if you didn't have dialogue together?
JONES: Albuquerque is a really hard place to work. It's very noisy. There are crows there, planes, trucks, people working on their cars. It's just a noisy place to shoot. It's a little quieter in West Texas. That's about all we dealt with, is trying to do the best we could and work around the noise of Albuquerque and the topographical features of West Texas. I suppose that made us an ensemble, but it's not as if we walked around a drawing room exchanging witticisms.
AP: It's ironic that it was noisy while making it, considering the film is exceptionally quiet, with barely any music at all. When did you know that there would essentially be no music?
BROLIN: Not until we saw it. We had no idea.
JONES: There was no music? (all laugh)
BROLIN: There's a bit. There's ambiance. And it's kind of good; I don't know of any movie that's done that — kind of accentuated the ambiance of the wind, the footsteps, the rustling. So it kind of has a natural soundtrack, but a soundtrack nonetheless.
AP: Is that nerve-racking to hear that there isn't music? Maybe you're more naked on screen that way?
BROLIN: Well, we didn't know beforehand. I think if we had been told that there was going to be nothing on the screen but your breathing, at a certain point we probably would have imploded.
BARDEM: I was really hoping for them to cover my whole voice, my terrible English, with some tension, some music. But they didn't.
BROLIN: Heavy metal or something.
AP: It's been interesting to see how ongoing the discussion is about this film. Critics and moviegoers seem to still be turning over the ending, the hair, the meaning of Chigurh.
JONES: That's good. It's a good thing if it causes conversations.
BROLIN: I know that some of these critics have seen the movie more than once, and from what I've heard, up to four times. ... It's not your typical structure of film. You rape the audience of a protagonist, and suddenly they go, `We don't like that.' But of course you don't like that because you're not supposed to like that.
AP: Javier, your character is the instigator of these questions. How do you prepare for a character like this, who's less a normal person and more an embodiment of violence?
BARDEM: The only difference that I had in approaching the character is not really worrying about the backstory of the character: where he's coming from, if his mommy fed him well when he was 10. It was about how to bring this iconic and symbolic idea of what violence represents into human fear — which was a difficult task because it's very easy to get lost in the machine, in the Terminator side of it.
AP: Many have also been unsure of how to react to the ending (a scene in which Jones' character gives a long soliloquy). How did you approach that scene?
JONES: I worked at it every day, several times a day, because it was poetic and you wanted to get the rhythms right and try to embody in the performance all that it might imply as a work of literature and hopefully cinema. And worked at it real hard. Are you asking me what it meant?
AP: No.
JONES: Good. (all laugh) Because it means what it means. It says what it says. It's pretty straightforward.
AP: Is it something that you believe? Once we're no longer saying "sir" and "ma'am" is all lost?
JONES: No, not all is lost. What I think is the book and the movie, in general, is a contemplation of morality. And the character of Ed Tom feels somewhat overwhelmed by a new character of evil and says so to his wiser and older uncle, and his uncle tells him that that's vanity, that evil doesn't change and that you, Ed Tom, do not live in the center of the universe. You can't be overwhelmed. It's the same old deal. Then he tells the story about these Indians who ride up to another uncle's house maybe a hundred years ago, kill him on his front porch. And when he recounts the story, if you look at it on the face of it, it seems like a recounting of a scene from a grade-B Western, but somehow you get the feeling that if you were there on that day, you would have seen real evil. And it would have impressed you; it would have been real. And I think that's important to this movie's outlook. No matter how overwhelmed you might feel, it's not about you. ... And like all considerations of Cormac, the questions are far more important than the answers. The question that arises there is that wonderful dream of riding ahead and reuniting with your father in the warm fire place in the cold, in the dark, hostile country. And if it is a dream, does the dream have any efficacy at all? If you wake up from a dream, what have you woken up from? Have you woken up from reality? So these get to be pretty sophisticated questions and I really appreciate the Coen brothers' careful reading of Cormac's moral thinking. Finally we're left with the really good questions, which are better than any simple answers. Did that make any sense?
BARDEM & BROLIN: Mm-hmm. (applauding)
Quote from: Josh Brolin
You rape the audience of a protagonist, and suddenly they go, `We don't like that.' But of course you don't like that because you're not supposed to like that.
That's a very good way of putting it. Next time someone I know bitches about the third act, this is what I'll tell them.
Okay, we have some official details for you on Buena Vista's No Country for Old Men. As we reported yesterday, look for the DVD and Blu-ray to hit stores on 3/11. The DVD (SRP $29.99) will include 3 behind-the-scenes documentaries (Working with the Coens: Reflections of Cast and Crew, The Making of No Country for Old Men and Diary of a Country Sheriff). The Blu-ray Disc (SRP $34.99) will include the same extras as the DVD.
cover art: http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/no-country-for-old-men.html
its not horrible but it makes me fear for Blood (miramax/parvantage). i hope paul still has some control over this.
why are they putting the names in random order so they don't line up with the actor's heads? they aren't even alphabetical. are they trying to trick people into believing tommy-lee isn't an old man?
wouldn't paul have that kind of cover control in his contract? otherwise i don't know how he was able to get away with something like pdl, which i'm sure the money-wanters would've tried to make look like a sandler-com.
This is good.... there are spoilers
I want this guy's jacket.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdPC7fAuDyw
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Q&A: Double Oscar Nominee Deakins
Veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins is competing against himself at the Academy Awards this year, with nominations for "No Country for Old Men" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."
These are his sixth and seventh Oscar nominations he's never won. And in his typically self-effacing, dry British manner, he says he truly doesn't believe he's going to win this year, either.
Deakins, 58, is probably best known as the longtime director of photography for the Coen brothers. He's shot all nine of their movies since 1991's "Barton Fink," creating the signature imagery for films including "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and their latest, "No Country."
He grew up in Devon, England, and began as a still photographer before going to film school and making documentaries. Besides his work with the Coens, he's shot "A Beautiful Mind," "House of Sand and Fog" and "Jarhead," to name a few, and received Oscar nominations for "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Kundun."
(Multiple nominations for one person in the same Oscar category are not unheard of: Steven Soderbergh, for example, got best-director nods for 2000's "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich." This is the first time a cinematographer has been up against himself since Robert Surtees, with the 1971 films "The Last Picture Show" and "Summer of '42.")
Later this year, Deakins has Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road," starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and he's currently shooting "Doubt" with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.
AP: What was your reaction to the two nominations?
Deakins: It was a real surprise. I thought "No Country" had a chance but, you know, "Jesse James" didn't really get much of a release. When the nominations came out, the most pleased I was, was for Casey (Affleck, for supporting actor in "Jesse James") and ... Tommy Lee Jones (for best actor in "In the Valley of Elah," which Deakins also shot). And I thought he'd been so overlooked.
AP: With the writers strike going on, what's it like for you to think there may not be any Oscars?
Deakins: It's a hard one 'cause, I mean, they've got a point. It just seems absurd to me that we can't all come together and talk about it like adults. But on the other hand, most of it is a business, isn't it? And people have to work out their contracts. So it's quite understandable, what's going on. It's just a pity.
AP: How did you hook up with Joel and Ethan Coen?
Deakins: I'd done a few pictures by then. I think they'd seen, like, "Sid and Nancy" on the one hand and seen "1984" on the other. It was just, I kind of guess, the range of what I do I suppose that attracted them. I was a bit nervous when I met them 'cause I thought, well, two of them, how do they work together? But we hit it off. We met in London, actually, in Notting Hill. And they're well, you know what they're like they're really sort of low-key and matter-of-fact and totally unpretentious and we hit it off straight away, really.
AP: What is it about your working relationship that's been a good fit?
Deakins: Maybe it's that we've got a similar sense of humor or something. They've got this very sort of dry, laconic, almost English sense of humor. We see the world quite similarly, I suppose.
AP: Can you pick a favorite movie you've done with them?
Deakins: I like them for different reasons because most of them are very, very different. I would probably have to say "The Man Who Wasn't There." I love that movie there's something about it that is, I think, it kind of works as a piece more than any of the other films we've done.
AP: That's one of my favorites of theirs and I think it's underappreciated. But again, that's a tough sell because it's in black and white.
Deakins: Yeah, tough sell, absolutely. But that's the thing with them I've had such opportunities to work on films like that with different kind of looks, different kind of feels.
AP: You've been a still photographer for a long time, but how challenging was it to shoot a whole film in black and white?
Deakins: Technically, there were a few challenges just to get the sort of purity of the black and white, but in terms of lighting and feel, I think I kind of light in black and white anyway, really I light for light and shade, I don't light for color so much. I find a lot of the time that color is sort of a distraction and it's easy on the eye. It's easy to make something attractive by putting in pretty colors but it's not necessarily right for the content of the piece.
AP: Do you still shoot photographs?
Deakins: When I get some time off. I love it it's my favorite thing to do. That and fishing.
AP: Do you ever do both at the same time?
Deakins: Well, I take my camera out. I've got a little boat in south Devon. I go out fishing and I take the camera with me sometimes. ... I'm trying to do a series about the English seaside in the southwest and I spend most of my time wandering around with my camera in the odd seaside resort, trying to find photographs. I like observing people, I suppose.
AP: Would you want to direct a feature of your own someday?
Deakins: I kind of looked into it a few years ago and it's like, everybody in Hollywood has got a script. I've got a script. It's set in Africa in World War I that's not going to go down very well, is it? It's a comedy, but it's also about colonialism. I enjoyed writing it it was a few years ago, now, and I sort of took it 'round to a few people. But I love what I do so why would I change that? I love being on the set, I love the contact.
AP: Do you ever get so drawn into what's happening that you forget ...
Deakins: To turn on the camera?
AP: No, just get lost in what you're doing and forget that you're at work.
Deakins: Well you do. You get totally drawn into the characters and the piece and that's what's amazing. That's why I love it. ... There are scenes in "No Country" when we were shooting them like in Ellis' cabin in the end just watching that through the lens, you get a tingle up the spine.
Coen brothers' road less traveled leads this time to 'No Country for Old Men'
By Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times
AS "No Country for Old Men" star Josh Brolin said in accepting the Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble cast, "The Coen brothers are freaky little people, you know, and we did a freaky little movie."
Indeed, sitting down with the notoriously press-shy, iconoclastic auteurs in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills with the only light coming from the rapidly dimming, overcast sky, is a little bit freaky.
Joel, the older and taller Coen, a cross between Tim Burton and Frank Zappa, wears inscrutable sunglasses in the unlighted room and barely moves. He does most of the talking, and that in a measured baritone, although the two often complete or enhance each other's thoughts. Ethan, the slighter Coen, paces nervously and smiles sardonically throughout. The conversation is dotted with clarifications of questions, denials delivered with a smile and long pauses, cones of silence.
When told that, in an earlier interview, "No Country" costar Javier Bardem described them as characteristically American filmmakers ("They do these very deeply American movies; there is always a deep America within their movies," the Spanish actor said), Joel shrugs off the notion that their work might shape international filmgoers' impressions of this country.
"Our movies are too outside of the mainstream," he says. "This is the biggest-grossing movie we've ever had. And even at that, it doesn't approach the kind of business and influence, in terms of people's perception of American culture, that big, Hollywood studio movies do."
Whatever the influence of their films is, says Ethan, "it would be very marginal."
Since their 1984 debut with the nouveau noir "Blood Simple," which grossed an underwhelming $2.2 million domestically on its initial release, the impact of the brothers' work would certainly be considered "marginal" if box-office figures were the only standard. Until "No Country's" $55 million take, their releases had averaged just over $19 million domestically and considerably less abroad, although surprisingly, their coolly received 2003 screwball outing with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, "Intolerable Cruelty," picked up $35 million at home -- and $85 million internationally.
But if critical acclaim and awards are more indicative of directors' legacies, the Coens would unquestionably rank among the top American filmmakers of the last 25 years, with forests of laurels for their quirky visions, including multiple wins for direction at Cannes and a Palme d'Or for 1991's "Barton Fink."
Dark, complex works such as "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing" and "Fargo" gave birth to an entire subgenre of violent, low-budget crime movies with clever dialogue, creative camera moves and morally unsettled universes. Their earliest works, viewed today, seem to make more cinematic sense than they did at the time -- because they have been more influential and timeless than the behemoths then dominating the box office ("Three Men and a Baby") and Oscars of the time ("Chariots of Fire," etc.). They didn't receive an Oscar nomination, however, until 1996's "Fargo," for which they took home the screenwriting prize and Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen) won for her lead performance.
But even now, the brothers reject their status as leaders of American cinema:
"We ain't leadin' anything, buddy," says Ethan with that wry grin.
Odds stacked against it
TO most decision-makers in those "big, Hollywood studios," "No Country" must have sounded like a spectacularly losing proposition. It's a dark, brutal tale, in part about what Joel calls "how aging changes your perception of the world," and what Bardem had once called "this huge wave of violence that the world has been taken by." It's based on a book by Cormac McCarthy, a Pulitzer-Prize winner whose only previous film adaptation, "All the Pretty Horses," tanked despite an A-list cast.
"For Cormac McCarthy, it's a much pulpier novel than he usually writes," says Joel, 53, of the quirks in "No Country" that hooked him and his brother. "It's a crime story but it doesn't unfold in a conventional way."
He seems to dig in, even removing his shades, as he gets into the geography of the novel, both figurative and literal: "In certain ways, it can't be told without an emphasis on the landscape it takes place in. It's important to understanding the story, to the telling of the story, making it specific in the right ways as far as the characters are concerned. I think [McCarthy] once described it as natural history, which is sort of interesting . . . "
"He's a natural historian," interjects Ethan, 50.
"That is, he's interested in the natural history of that region," Joel says, "and the people who inhabit it are in a sense the flora and fauna and you have to understand them in the context of the region -- even though what I think the story's about in many ways is universal and not limited to that. So that was interesting," he says, adding, "and we knew that area a little bit, which was part of what drew us to the story."
"No Country" is not only the first of the brothers' efforts to cross the $50-million mark domestically; it's cleaning up on the awards circuit, especially for the Coens' writing and direction and Bardem's chilling turn as the cold-eyed, alarmingly coiffed hit man. Wins at the SAG and DGA awards and at the Golden Globes (for Bardem and the screenplay) make the film a front-runner in all three categories at the Oscars.
"It's very strange," says Ethan of the film's success. "You never know."
"I have to say that there were other people who saw early versions and predicted it," says Joel, corroborated by Ethan. "So the reasons may be transparent to some people but they're certainly not to us. We don't understand it."
This, from filmmakers who tried for some time to adapt James Dickey's World War II novel, "To the White Sea," into what they described to Time magazine as "this expensive movie about the firebombing of Tokyo in which there's no dialogue," and which would have starred Brad Pitt.
They're often called "The Two-Headed Director" because they work together so closely, although until 2004's "The Ladykillers" they were compelled by DGA rules to list only one brother (Joel) as director until they acquired a waiver permitting the dual credit. It took them only 20 years and 11 films to apply for it. They don't talk about how they work on set but by all accounts it is a pleasant experience. Clooney, who just completed the upcoming "Burn After Reading," his third film with the directors, says there is lots of laughter as filming progresses. "You can hear them . . . it'll actually screw takes up," the actor says.
Built from the actors up
IF anyone needs further evidence that the brothers Coen continue to think outside the box (office), consider how they arrived at "Burn After Reading."
"We wrote down a bunch of actors we wanted to work with," says Ethan: " 'What kind of story would these people be in?' "
They wrote parts for Clooney, Pitt, McDormand and John Malkovich, all of whom are in the film along with Tilda Swinton. But those roles aren't exactly star turns.
"All the characters in 'Burn After Reading' are numskulls," says Joel, "which Malkovich had no problem with; Clooney has never had a problem with . . . " Both laugh. "Brad was initially taken aback. He's very funny in the movie. He grew to love it as much as George does. Each character is dumber than the next. But they're all lovable.
"The original idea was sort of a spy story and does still have the residue of that, in that Malkovich's character is an analyst at the CIA who is fired in the first scene and starts writing a memoir. His story intersects with Fran and Brad, who are, respectively, the assistant manager and trainer at a gym in suburban Washington. So it's about the CIA and physical fitness."
And what of the long-rumored but as-yet only mythical "Hail Caesar"? They allow it would star Clooney as a matinee idol making a biblical epic, then go on to poke at their supposed leading man.
" 'Hail Caesar' is a movie that George Clooney keeps announcing to the press every couple of years, and it doesn't even exist as a script; it's only an idea," says Joel. "We kind of teased George with the opportunity to play another numskull. He was totally up for it. Part of the 'Numskull Trilogy' with George [with 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and 'Intolerable Cruelty'].
"After we finished shooting 'Burn After Reading,' I think on the last day, George said, 'OK, that's it, I've played my last idiot.' So we said, 'I guess you won't be working with us again.' " They laugh for a while.
Putting the dimwits in the drawer for now, the Coens' next actual project, union unrest allowing, is expected to be "A Serious Man."
"That's about a Jewish community in the Midwest in 1967, which is sort of reflective of the place we grew up in," says Joel. ". . . That's a hard movie to kind of synopsize."
They laugh again, raising suspicion, and Joel pronounces, "It's a 'domestic drama.' "
The thought of what a Coen brothers domestic drama would look like might intrigue or worry fans, considering their history of bold genre-bending with mixed results. But that they continue to make pretty much whatever they want, wordless World War II epics notwithstanding, is heartening. They're buoyed by the current creative environment, in which unconventional movies they admire, such as "Margot at the Wedding," "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" and "There Will Be Blood," receive significant support.
"Any time you see great stuff, it's heartening," says Joel. "It makes me feel much better about the state of the industry and the possibilities that exist out there both for seeing more stuff like that from other people, and being able to do interesting work yourself. I actually think it's an indication of how healthy the business is."
"In a totally selfish way," adds Ethan, "forgetting about them, that there's an audience for that -- that Julian [Schnabel] gets money for a blinking movie about a blinking guy's locked-in syndrome, that's kind of great, you know?"
"Because it can be very depressing," says Joel, "when you start to feel like the only things that get made are sequels to action pictures which have established a huge potential for box office, or adaptations of comic books or things like that. Not to say that some of those aren't really interesting, great movies too, but that's the stock-in-trade of Hollywood. And it's good that, despite that, the business is bigger than that."
just the other day i realized that Josh Brolin was older brother, Brand, in The Goonies.
Quote from: bigideas on February 10, 2008, 10:26:41 PM
just the other day i realized that Josh Brolin was older brother, Brand, in The Goonies.
that's fucking crazy man
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I don't have much to add here, the film is quite great. Not a masterpiece in my book, but a good example of how the majority of films should be.
It's a film to think about long after it's over. I loved the ending for the simple fact that it fucks with people's heads. Audiences are so used to get everything chewed up and digested for them that any attemp to think about something for at least two minutes pisses them off. "What? So does this means that I have to think for a second? Fuck that..."
I wouldn't compare a film to a book cause those are two different planets. But they should enrich one another. Is this something that happens in this case?
Quote from: Alexandro on February 11, 2008, 10:30:33 AM
I wouldn't compare a film to a book cause those are two different planets. But they should enrich one another. Is this something that happens in this case?
Not even close. If No Country for Old Men is the height of book adaptations, it means that films should diminish the major theme of the novel and just relate the story back to its nearest genre (in this case, a thriller). The one good thing the film does is make the story cinematic, but because that is to make a pure thriller, the cinematic translation becomes null and void. The end tries to give context to the rest of the story, but the film needed to make those themes and ideas its primary interest through out (which it didn't).
A cinematic experience can be rendered with the themes of the novel in tact. Filmmakers like the Dardennes are excellent for dramatics that entail philosophical relevance within the story. Sam Peckinpah also made violent westerns that had huge themes. It is nowhere near impossible to make a film that would have done the same for No Country the Old Men the novel, but the Coens were more interested in the layout of a shoot out that went the lengths of a full feature film.
I kind of agree with you about how the ending tries to give things that weren't there before. It's a very obvious shift, actually, right after the action goes to El Paso; it almost felt like the start of the third act in A.I., when sudddenly the so far standard linear narrative in which everything was clear turned to the philosophical in more abstract non literal ways. However I've only seen No Country once and the thing is it's having the effect of not wanting to leave my mind, so I gues it will take a few more viewings to see if, for real:
a) There was no context before the third act in the movie
b) I'm interpreting eveything wrong
c) The film has more to offer than one great sequence after another. (Just to name one thing)
I do think Josh Brolin is great in this, altohugh he never seemed too dumb to me, or at least not prominently so.
Quote from: Alexandro on February 11, 2008, 02:13:19 PM
I kind of agree with you about how the ending tries to give things that weren't there before. It's a very obvious shift, actually, right after the action goes to El Paso...I've only seen No Country once and the thing is it's having the effect of not wanting to leave my mind, so I gues it will take a few more viewings to see if, for real:
a) There was no context before the third act in the movie
b) I'm interpreting eveything wrong
c) The film has more to offer than one great sequence after another. (Just to name one thing)
I've seen it twice, and I would have to say:
a) there is very little, if any.
c) yes.
I would also agree about how the ending tries to address those themes whereas the whole of the film does not. But I enjoy how the third act stands out. Having not read the book, I wasn't sure what I was in for. They crafted an engaging thriller, and I was convinced that a thriller was all that I was going to see. I was pleasantly surprised once the themes in question started to make an appearance. It worked for me, but I can see how this opinion could be peculiar to those of us who haven't read the book.
Quote from: Pedro the Alpaca on February 11, 2008, 04:03:03 PM
I would also agree about how the ending tries to address those themes whereas the whole of the film does not. But I enjoy how the third act stands out. Having not read the book, I wasn't sure what I was in for. They crafted an engaging thriller, and I was convinced that a thriller was all that I was going to see. I was pleasantly surprised once the themes in question started to make an appearance. It worked for me, but I can see how this opinion could be peculiar to those of us who haven't read the book.
This film isn't just riding on being a thriller. It is said the Coens have made a masterpiece and that this film is a modern western. Both bullshit. I can admire the film as a thriller, but this film is wrapping up so much critical and award kudos that it just doesn't deserve. If the concessions the film makes to the themes are accepted then it just shows people are willing to treat film as a second tier art. In no way do large themes and literature go hand in hand. Film can take on subjects and operate in its own way. We honor old hollywood a little too much by considering genre the territory of high art. Enter childrenwithangels.....
spoilers i guess if you still haven't seen it..
i don't know gt. what about the people who haven't read the book? i had no preconceptions of theme or genre, and mostly everything worked for me. this question might be addressed in your blood review, but does that movie fail because it doesn't accurately represent the themes presented in oil? it doesn't want to! you acknowledge that the movie doesn't need to be totally true to the book, but you still point out that the coen bros. omitted some of the best scenes. i didn't know that, so it didn't hinder my viewing experience. i don't think it should matter. i know a lot of of the no country praise comes from it being a "true" adaptation, but what if we approach it as 'no country: the movie' and not 'no country: the adaptation' and then try and derive meaning from that?
i wouldn't deny most of what you said in your initial review. most of the movie is an excellent thriller interspersed with seemingly anecdotal moments with tommy lee jones' character, but i think the importance of those scenes are made clear by the end. i don't know, does he literally do more to affect the main story in the novel? his inability to alter circumstance - his lack of "presence" - was what made the ending so sad for me. i thought this to be similar to zodiac in the way the themes slowly present themselves through the subtext, except no country goes a little bit further in illuminating the meaning by the film's end.
what do you consider to be the main themes anyway? i guess that's worth clarifying..
Quote from: JG on February 11, 2008, 05:47:24 PM
spoilers i guess if you still haven't seen it..
i don't know gt. what about the people who haven't read the book? i had no preconceptions of theme or genre, and mostly everything worked for me. this question might be addressed in your blood review, but does that movie fail because it doesn't accurately represent the themes presented in oil? it doesn't want to! you acknowledge that the movie doesn't need to be totally true to the book, but you still point out that the coen bros. omitted some of the best scenes. i didn't know that, so it didn't hinder my viewing experience. i don't think it should matter. i know a lot of of the no country praise comes from it being a "true" adaptation, but what if we approach it as 'no country: the movie' and not 'no country: the adaptation' and then try and derive meaning from that?
i wouldn't deny most of what you said in your initial review. most of the movie is an excellent thriller interspersed with seemingly anecdotal moments with tommy lee jones' character, but i think the importance of those scenes are made clear by the end. i don't know, does he literally do more to affect the main story in the novel? his inability to alter circumstance - his lack of "presence" - was what made the ending so sad for me. i thought this to be similar to zodiac in the way the themes slowly present themselves through the subtext, except no country goes a little bit further in illuminating the meaning by the film's end.
what do you consider to be the main themes anyway? i guess that's worth clarifying..
I'll put it in a different way. It's like if someone adapted Hamlet and made it into a standard horror film because of the ghost and murders at the end. The adaptation could still have scenes at the end that paid lip service to themes in the original work, but people would balk because a great play was marginalized to fit a genre molding.
The reason they would balk isn't because the atmosphere of the play was changed, but because the characterization, the great meat of the play, was dropped to cater a substandard story. The subsequent film would lose all importance we associated with the play. Since No Country for Old Men isn't a great novel, it can be improved. The Coen Brothers could have improved the characterization. Doing so would have involved a lot of differences and new concepts, but they were completely off try to make a super thriller. It really marginalized the original concepts. The point is that film should be different, but it shouldn't concentrate on storytelling of lesser importance.
People don't need to read the novel to see a great part of the film is an out and out thriller. Looking above, I can tell other people already spotted it anyways.
Also, I haven't read Oil and resent your assumptions. That film is incompetent by itself. I also don't need to clarify themes. They are paid lip service to at the end. The point of the criticisms is in which how those themes are applied to the film. If it worked for you, good. It seems like a subjective point is made so I can't do much about that.
Quote from: brockly on February 11, 2008, 06:30:44 AM
Quote from: bigideas on February 10, 2008, 10:26:41 PM
just the other day i realized that Josh Brolin was older brother, Brand, in The Goonies.
that's fucking crazy man
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i don't get the pullman reference.
I think it's obvious that he says that line in some movie. Judging from the grab, maybe Lost Highway? I've never seen it, but whatever.
it's actually from Casper...
Quote from: Gamblour. on February 20, 2008, 02:59:05 PM
I think it's obvious that he says that line in some movie. Judging from the grab, maybe Lost Highway? I've never seen it, but whatever.
That's correct. It's a response to something the Robert Blake character says.
The Coen brothers in the garden of good and evil
A turn to gravitas results in their most tragic, heartfelt work -- it's no country for the easy wisecrack.
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
Afamous dead white male, Horace Walpole, once observed, "Life is a comedy for those who think . . . and a tragedy for those who feel."
Since they first hit the big screen big-time two decades ago with the neo-noir thriller "Blood Simple," Ethan and Joel Coen have earned a reputation as thinking persons' comic entertainers, cockeyed observers of American life, with its ritualistic violence and heroic failures, its conflicted morals and bizarre regional folkways.
Over the course of a dozen movies, they've tended to make us laugh (and think) first and feel second; to crack deadpan jokes and paint gorgeous images while raising cosmic questions about the nature of good and evil and the devil's bargain that each man inevitably makes with his own soul.
But as last week's best picture Oscar confirmed, the Coens finally may have scored their long-awaited masterpiece with "No Country for Old Men," the brothers' most tragic, least humorous and, not coincidentally, most heartfelt work.
That powerful combination stems in large measure from "No Country's" source material, an existential-borderlands thriller by Cormac McCarthy. It was the Coens' good fortune, at a crucial juncture of their careers after two so-so movies ("The Man Who Wasn't There," "Intolerable Cruelty") and one major misfire ("The Ladykillers"), to have partnered with a kindred creative spirit. In McCarthy, the brothers found an artist equally as fascinated as themselves with the metaphysics of bloodshed and the everyday yet epic struggle between our inner angels and demons.
Though "No Country" is unmistakably a Coen brothers movie, it's also in some ways their least characteristic film. Yes, it exhibits their typically extra-dry sense of humor, often pitched at an odd upper register, like a dog whistle. Think of that scene in which the battered, bleeding Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), on the run from a relentless assassin (Javier Bardem) who wants some waylaid drug money back, wakes up in a Mexican border town to find himself surrounded by curious mariachi musicians.
Throughout their careers, the brothers have used such screwball touches to put a twist on their newfangled genre pastiches and to soften the sharp edges of the various mobsters, hit men, suburban desperadoes and chain-gang fugitives who wander across their mythic American landscapes. Their erudite wisecracking took the sting out of their penchant for jocular moral fables bathed in blood.
But it also removed some of the emotional bite from their movies. Even admirers sometimes wondered whether the brothers' distancing irony made it hard to take their movies seriously as statements about the human condition.
It was as if the Coens were constantly slipping a whoopee cushion between their art and their audience's emotional reactions to what was on the screen. Even the warmly humanizing presence of Frances McDormand (Joel Coen's wife), playing the tough- but-maternal police chief in "Fargo," couldn't fully thaw out the brothers' icy-black humor.
(After winning the lead actress Oscar for "Fargo," appearing backstage with her husband and brother-in-law to face the media, McDormand chimed in sympathetically and said something to the effect that she'd been trying to get a straight answer out of these guys for years.)
But in the desert wilderness that McCarthy's prose and Roger Deakins' cinematography so lyrically evoke, there is no oasis of sophomoric sight gags, no place to take refuge in smarty-pants references to old movies.
A biblical connection
"NO Country" (which will come out on DVD March 11) is a stark but richly poetic allegory about a Western garden of original sin in which a world-weary authority figure, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), and a satanic predator (Bardem) fight over a naive young Adam who falls into temptation and drags his Eve down with him.
Measured in body counts, McCarthy's book is far gorier, to the point of macabre. But with "No Country," the brothers have reined in both their inner joker and their inner sadist and set free their inner humanist. We wince watching Llewelyn pluck those cactus spines (or whatever they are) out of his bleeding body. We shiver along with the gas station owner who saves his own life simply by calling "heads" when Bardem's blank-faced killer engages him in a high-stakes coin flip.
The Coens allow the story's full horror to register, while resisting emotional cheap shots. For example, they pass up McCarthy's description of a dead woman slumped in a rocking chair after being caught in the crossfire between Bardem's character and a group of rival bad guys. In their younger years, the Coens would've filmed that image with glee, maybe even have added a dead pet cat, plugged with a ricocheting bullet.
Now solidly into middle age, the Coens have entered their mature phase, more attuned to the perspective that comes with getting older, the understanding that mortality (even the cinematic illusion of mortality) should mean something more than beautifully photographed pools of blood.
That perspective suffuses McCarthy's novel, and it's the vision that lies behind the 1927 poem that gave title to his book, William Butler Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." In Yeats' poem, an old man, dismayed at his physical decline, rhapsodizes about transmuting himself into a work of art, presumably through the very verses he is reciting to us.
His lyrical inspiration is the exquisite, eternal city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul), which is "no country for old men" because its sensual vitality is tailor-made for the young. Yeats' narrator muses about the immortality that a work of art can attain. "Gather me / Into the artifice of eternity," he pleads, striking a note that's simultaneously heroic and despairing.
The moral backbone
THE "old man" of the book and the film is craggy, humane Sheriff Bell. Like the narrator's lament in Yeats' poem, the sheriff's somber, wryly bemused reflections about the deteriorating ethical state of the world provide the narrative and moral framework of "No Country." But whereas Yeats' narrator comforts himself with the idea that he can use art to transcend death, Sheriff Bell knows that he can't save the world any more than he can stave off his own decline.
"No Country" ends with the sheriff telling his wife about a dream, a conclusion that many viewers apparently found baffling or unsatisfying because it wasn't a conventional Hollywood shoot-'em-up finale. But the ending, besides being true to the letter and spirit of McCarthy's book, also reflects the Coens' deepening artistry.
The chain-gang musical "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000) was the Coens' adaptation of Homer's "Odyssey," considered the original comedic work of Western literature because it ends in renewal and regeneration. "No Country" may be the Coens' gruesome "Iliad," the cornerstone text of Western tragedy, because it offers a fatalistic vision of life in which character is destiny and action is fate.
No Country for DP's
We chat with legendary cinematographer, Roger Deakins.
With No Country for Old Men making its way to DVD, we recently had the opportunity to sit down with legendary cinematography and frequent Coen-collaborator, Roger Deakins, to discuss his life-long body of classic work.
IGN: How did you originally get your start as a cinematographer?
DEAKINS: I went to the National Film School and whilst there I made some documentaries which I used to get work as a cameraman. It was mostly industrial training films at first but then I got a job covering the war in Rhodesia for the ANC and then a documentary about what life was like on a yacht in the Whitbread Round the World Race. I spent 9 months sailing and making a 90 min. film which was shown on ITV. That was my start and after about 7 years of doing documentaries and TV work I started getting offers for feature work.
IGN: What sort of creative partnerships work best for you - ones where the director has a very clear idea what he wants and you are responsible for realizing it (say, creating a storyboard on set, etc.), or ones where you are asked to create or compose a shot yourself (you are responsible for the cameras while he or she handles the actors)?
DEAKINS: It is really impossible to make a film that has a 'personality' unless the director has a clear idea of what he/she wants. That is not to say that as the Cinematographer I might not create and compose the shots myself, it's just that I need a point of view to work from. There are many times that I will create a shot list whilst watching a rehearsal and be totally responsible for the way something is shot but that is not to say the director, in such a case, has not a clear idea of what he wants. There are so many ways you can shoot a film. You could shoot everything wide with a static camera or you could shoot everything on a 100mm and extremely close. Neither is 'right' as there is no 'right' way to make a film, just an infinite set of possibilities.
IGN: Are there certain types of movies - dramas, effects-laden action films, etc. - that you respond most strongly to or enjoy most? Or least?
DEAKINS: I really have not done any action films or effects driven work. I am only really interested in seeing films that are about characters and about the world we live in. Those are the kinds of films I want to work on.
IGN: Describe your collaboration with the Coen brothers, who are very strongly visual directors and have always seemed to be very specific about what they want on screen.
DEAKINS: There scripts are very specific in the kind of world they are set in and therefore very visual. The Brothers are always very prepared. They storyboard everything and that is why they can be so efficient on smaller budgets. That is not to say everything is fixed on the day of shooting because it's not. Things can vary on the day depending on circumstances and ideas that crop up but they always have a plan.
IGN: How does that compare with someone like, say, Scorsese for M. Night Shyamalan? Why do you think you have found these lasting collaborations that have worked so effectively?
DEAKINS: From my own experience Scorsese is also very prepared. Whilst he didn't do storyboards on 'Kundun' he did do diagrams and we would always go through these ideas before the day we were scheduled to shoot them. M. Night storyboards everything and, again purely from my own experience, very little will change when you shoot. His films seem to be created at the storyboard stage.
IGN: How do you achieve shots like the one where a bolt of lightning cracks in the background as Josh Brolin's character is running? is it just a matter of using CGI or other visual effects, or is there still that David Lean mentality of "Let's wait as long as it takes for the skies to look right?"
DEAKINS: That lightning bolt was real. We were shooting with a storm around us and hoping for the lightning to happen in frame. We couldn't do too many takes as Josh was having to run so much. I still like to get as much on the negative as possible but, obviously, CGI is a great tool.
IGN: How has HD photography, CGI and/or the ability to change colors and images in post-production affected the way that you work? Does that mean you don't always have to have the perfect image in the camera, for example? Has it sped up the process or made it more technically challenging?
DEAKINS: The advent of Digital timing (DI) has changed what I do quite a bit. It's not that the end product will be so different but that I can save time on the set knowing I can do some things later - changing saturation, flagging a wall, matching day exteriors etc.. Of course, the kind of imagery we did on "O Brother Where Art Thou" could not have been done photochemically but most of the films I do are less of an extreme 'look'.
IGN: Do you have specific points of reference or influence when you work on the look of certain movies? The Assassination of Jesse James evokes Terence Malick, for example, but The Man Who Wasn't There is obviously designed to be more stylistically like a 40s or 50s movie. How much of that is the director's vision, and how much is finding the right visual template for the story for yourself?
DEAKINS: It is all driven by the script. For 'Jesse James..' Andrew had a large body of visual references that we based the 'look' of the picture on. They were from all sorts of sources: old polaroids, fashion magazines, paintings other films etc etc. but the 'look' really comes from the script and is obviously a blend of the director's and the cinematographer's personal attitude to it. Sometimes a director can be quite specific. On 'The Man Who...' for instance, the Coens wanted the theatrical spot light effect for the one jail scene but other than that I don't remember any lighting notes. On 'Hudsucker Proxy' we were on the last day of prep before they realized we had never discussed the lighting of the film but by then we had been pre-lighting for weeks.
IGN: What work (if there's any one) in your filmography are you most proud of? Are there any that if you could maybe excise from the "Roger Deakins canon," you might exclude?
DEAKINS: 'Jarhead' maybe, because it was such a challenge to create that 'look' and yes.
IGN: You've spent a long time moving between bigger and smaller projects. Does the scale of the movie affect the way that you work or matter at all?
DEAKINS: The scale of the film doesn't affect anything in terms of the way I work but I prefer working on smaller films as a bigger budget usually means more politics.
IGN: Was directing ever your ultimate goal, or is it still?
DEAKINS: I guess it might have been at one time.
IGN: What challenges (if any) haven't you tackled as a cinematographer or just filmmaker in general?
DEAKINS: Every film is different and so every new film poses a new challenge. I just want to keep working on good projects, experiencing and discovering what visual imagery can do.
IGN:What's next for you?
DEAKINS: Nothing, as far as work goes right now. I think I am due for a break.
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Tommy Lee Jones sues Paramount
Actor seeks $10 million for 'Country'
Source: Variety
SAN ANTONIO (AP) Tommy Lee Jones is suing the makers of "No Country for Old Men" for more than $10 million that the Oscar-winning actor claims he is owed for starring in the 2007 hit crime thriller.
The lawsuit against Paramount Pictures claims that Jones was promised "significant box-office bonuses" and other compensation depending on the success of the film, which went on to make more than $160 million.
The movie, which is set in Texas and based on a critically acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel, garnered four Academy Awards, including "Best Picture."
A message left for Paramount Pictures on Saturday was not immediately returned. Jones declined to comment through his publicist, Jennifer Allen, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
"The paperwork stands for itself," Allen said.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday in Bexar County in San Antonio. N.M. Classics, Inc., a Paramount subsidiary, is also named in the lawsuit.
Jones, who played Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the film, claims he was not paid promised bonuses and had expenses wrongly deducted. The suit says Jones was paid a reduced upfront fee in joining the film, and that his contract had known errors not corrected before the movie was made.
Jones, 61, is asking that an auditor be named to review financial records to determine how much he should be paid.
Double dip alert!!!
Buena Vista has just announced No Country for Old Men: Collector's Edition from Miramax on both DVD and Blu-ray on 4/7. The DVD will be 3-disc (SRP $32.98) while the Blu-ray is 2-disc (SRP $39.98). Both will include the 3 featurettes on the current DVD/Blu-ray editions (The Making of No Country for Old Men, Working with the Coens and The Diary of a Country Sheriff) along with substantial new material - 5 hours worth in all. You'll get Josh Brolin's Unauthorized Behind-the-Scenes, Q & A with Joel and Ethan Coen, Roger Deakins and the sound and production design teams, a Charlie Rose interview with the Coens, Brolin and Javier Bardem, EW.com's Just a Minute... with Javier Bardem, a Q & A from the Variety Screening series, footage of an in-store appearance with Bardem and Brolin, ABC's Popcorn video, a Channel 4 News appearance with the Coens, a Lunch with David Poland interview with Bardem and Brolin, a WNBC Reel Talk interview with Brolin, a WGA West Q & A panel and 6 additional interviews. Both versions will also include a Digital Copy of the film.
holy fock. glad i have an excuse to buy the blu now.
Does anybody think we need it? I don't but maybe if its cheap in a couple of months...MAYBE I'll pick it up.
Kinda bullshit they started double dipping Blu's... I'm calling the studio and demanding that I get the new release for free. I'll let you guys know how that goes.
Quote from: MacGuffin on February 02, 2009, 07:37:33 PM
Both versions will also include a Digital Copy of the film.
I'm guessing this adds a disc to each?
I wonder how much more the mark up for the extra disc with digital copy?
I have no need for it.