Ingmar Bergman — Fannie & Alexander
Robert Altman — McCabe & Mrs Miller
Andrei Tarkovsky — The Sacrifice
Stanley Kubrick – Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying about the bomb
Joel & Ethan Coen — The Big Lebowski
Alfred Hitchcock — North By Northwest
Akira Kurosawa – Seven Samurai
Bill Forsyth — Local Hero
Park Chan-Wook — Old Boy
Wes Anderson — Rushmore
The Coen’s have been reframing and rebutting the conventions of movie genres since “Blood Simple” which was a take on “Double Indemnity” (Right?) Or think what they did with Chandler’s Marlowe in “The Big Lebowski”. In “No Country…” it’s not just the genre that’s topsy turvey, it’s the world. They are playing for much higher stakes.
The sheriff’s opening monologue bemoans a new type of criminal: remorseless, insane, pure evil. The implied rupture in the order of things and the befuddled mourning of a western/cowboy code of moral order and justice is played in voice over against a routine traffic stop and arrest which turns to be anything but ordinary.
The sociopathic hitman is a force of nature. You can’t reason with him, appeal to him, bargain with him, any more than you can negotiate with a tsunami. He is inevitable as death. He exists outside the law, outside of human commerce. But what created him? What made him, if you will, necessary? Drugs. The ultimate triumph of Capitalism. A product so irresistible is requires zero marketing, zero packaging, and instantly creates Brand Loyalty. It instantly grows its own distribution network by turning everyone it touches into consumers and salespeople. The ultimate degradation of the human soul. Unearned pleasure. Pleasure so irresistible it has created a monstrous brutal economy. Know anybody whose life has been touched by hard drugs? Then you know the awful consequences of addiction. In short it steals everything human from everyone it touches.
So what we have is a confrontation with a modern phenomenon: A vicious economy that crunches everything it touches with betrayal, exploitation, degradation, and death. The new anti-human. No one is prepared to deal with his coin toss. There is no justice, no victory—there is only luck and escape. Or death.
The law of this territory is that there is no law. Enter into the circle of the betrayal and you are swept into a hunt. The whole movie is a hunt. One could say a chase scene. But it is the quietest (and most disquieting) chase scene ever. Recall the first time we meet our hero is when he is hunting deer. He misses a shot. This does not bode well. This self-made man—who, we learn later, can weld anything—cannot for all his dogged, cagey survival skills, triumph. He cannot put together a plan that can save him or his wife. He is Way out of his league. As outclassed as that deer. Because, for all his rugged individualism, like the deer, he is a still a member of a herd. He becomes the hunted. By a man who uses the weapon of the slaughterhouse.
The carnage he stumbles upon is like a modern, grotesque retelling of a famous western shootout. Only: nobody wins. They’re all dead or dying. The loot and the booty are left for whoever can scavenge them.
I love that Lewellyn’s one stupid act of charity is what dooms him. He knows it’s stupid yet he does it anyway—he brings water to a thirsty dying man. Had he not done this he might have lived the American Dream. Struck Gold, Won the Lottery, Beat the Bank in Vegas. But he, as much as he is a rebel on the margins of society, is a decent human. That’s why we root for him and that’s why ultimately he is doomed. You play with this demon, and you lose.
So the whole movie is about the modern decay of values. Lewellyn is the myth outdated. The self made frontier man. Tommy Lee Jones is the Lawman who can do nothing to restore the moral order when a force of this magnitude is unleashed.
There is some tang of satisfaction when the hitman is t-boned and has to walk away from the money. Even he can’t escape unscathed the randomness of death.
But If there is a triumph, or redemption to this bleak bleak tale, it is in the smallest moments. Where we have to remind ourselves that life is not a genre. That what matters is not who gets the money, or who gets away, or gets even, it’s who retains their heart in this tidal wave of darkness. The moment when Lewellyn wakes up in the middle of the night saying, “All right,” as if he were finally conceding after a long sleepless argument. Knowing he is doomed to do the right thing.
Or the moment a Vet gives another vet a break.
It’s even the sheriff getting out of a rigged game at the end. Taking his losses and folding his hand and stepping back from the table, knowing sometimes, that’s a close to a jackpot as life allows.
But the real quiet heart of the film is when the wife confronts the lunatic at the end and retains her dignity in the face of absolute terror and certain death by not playing his coin toss game. “It’s not in the coin,” she says with contempt, “It’s in you.”
The Coen Bros. -- Best film about 3 years ago
Love the Coens. But dislike many of their films.
Best:
1. The Big Lebowski
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Fargo
4. O Brother Where Art Thou?
5. Raising Arizona
6. Burn After Reading
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The Coen Bros. -- Best film about 3 years ago
Love the Coens. But dislike many of their films, which, when not leavened by comedy,
often seem to me to be empty exercises virtuoso style.
Best:
1. The Big Lebowski
2. No Country For Old Men
3. Fargo
4. O Brother Where Art Thou?
5. Burn After Reading
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10 directors 1 movie about 3 years ago
Ingmar Bergman — Fannie & Alexander
Robert Altman — McCabe & Mrs Miller
Andrei Tarkovsky — The Sacrifice
Stanley Kubrick – Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying about the bomb
Joel & Ethan Coen — The Big Lebowski
Alfred Hitchcock — North By Northwest
Akira Kurosawa – Seven Samurai
Bill Forsyth — Local Hero
Park Chan-Wook — Old Boy
Wes Anderson — Rushmore
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What is No Country actually about? over 2 years ago
What’s “No Country For Old Men” about?The Coen’s have been reframing and rebutting the conventions of movie genres since “Blood Simple” which was a take on “Double Indemnity” (Right?) Or think what they did with Chandler’s Marlowe in “The Big Lebowski”. In “No Country…” it’s not just the genre that’s topsy turvey, it’s the world. They are playing for much higher stakes.
The sheriff’s opening monologue bemoans a new type of criminal: remorseless, insane, pure evil. The implied rupture in the order of things and the befuddled mourning of a western/cowboy code of moral order and justice is played in voice over against a routine traffic stop and arrest which turns to be anything but ordinary.
The sociopathic hitman is a force of nature. You can’t reason with him, appeal to him, bargain with him, any more than you can negotiate with a tsunami. He is inevitable as death. He exists outside the law, outside of human commerce. But what created him? What made him, if you will, necessary? Drugs. The ultimate triumph of Capitalism. A product so irresistible is requires zero marketing, zero packaging, and instantly creates Brand Loyalty. It instantly grows its own distribution network by turning everyone it touches into consumers and salespeople. The ultimate degradation of the human soul. Unearned pleasure. Pleasure so irresistible it has created a monstrous brutal economy. Know anybody whose life has been touched by hard drugs? Then you know the awful consequences of addiction. In short it steals everything human from everyone it touches.
So what we have is a confrontation with a modern phenomenon: A vicious economy that crunches everything it touches with betrayal, exploitation, degradation, and death. The new anti-human. No one is prepared to deal with his coin toss. There is no justice, no victory—there is only luck and escape. Or death.
The law of this territory is that there is no law. Enter into the circle of the betrayal and you are swept into a hunt. The whole movie is a hunt. One could say a chase scene. But it is the quietest (and most disquieting) chase scene ever. Recall the first time we meet our hero is when he is hunting deer. He misses a shot. This does not bode well. This self-made man—who, we learn later, can weld anything—cannot for all his dogged, cagey survival skills, triumph. He cannot put together a plan that can save him or his wife. He is Way out of his league. As outclassed as that deer. Because, for all his rugged individualism, like the deer, he is a still a member of a herd. He becomes the hunted. By a man who uses the weapon of the slaughterhouse.
The carnage he stumbles upon is like a modern, grotesque retelling of a famous western shootout. Only: nobody wins. They’re all dead or dying. The loot and the booty are left for whoever can scavenge them.
I love that Lewellyn’s one stupid act of charity is what dooms him. He knows it’s stupid yet he does it anyway—he brings water to a thirsty dying man. Had he not done this he might have lived the American Dream. Struck Gold, Won the Lottery, Beat the Bank in Vegas. But he, as much as he is a rebel on the margins of society, is a decent human. That’s why we root for him and that’s why ultimately he is doomed. You play with this demon, and you lose.
So the whole movie is about the modern decay of values. Lewellyn is the myth outdated. The self made frontier man. Tommy Lee Jones is the Lawman who can do nothing to restore the moral order when a force of this magnitude is unleashed.
There is some tang of satisfaction when the hitman is t-boned and has to walk away from the money. Even he can’t escape unscathed the randomness of death.
But If there is a triumph, or redemption to this bleak bleak tale, it is in the smallest moments. Where we have to remind ourselves that life is not a genre. That what matters is not who gets the money, or who gets away, or gets even, it’s who retains their heart in this tidal wave of darkness. The moment when Lewellyn wakes up in the middle of the night saying, “All right,” as if he were finally conceding after a long sleepless argument. Knowing he is doomed to do the right thing.
Or the moment a Vet gives another vet a break.
It’s even the sheriff getting out of a rigged game at the end. Taking his losses and folding his hand and stepping back from the table, knowing sometimes, that’s a close to a jackpot as life allows.
But the real quiet heart of the film is when the wife confronts the lunatic at the end and retains her dignity in the face of absolute terror and certain death by not playing his coin toss game. “It’s not in the coin,” she says with contempt, “It’s in you.”
What a film.
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