Viewed: No Country For Old Men and Beowulf

Sometimes, ignorance is a good thing. For example, I enjoyed No Country For Old Men a lot more than Narraptor did. I haven't read the novel yet, and was blissfully unaware of any health problems among the audience. About the only thing troubling me was the fact that the concession stand was selling obviously bootlegged DVDs, right next to the drink machine.

No Country For Old Men itself is a combination of all things Cohen. The film primarily harkens back to the bleakness of the Cohen's earlier films. Despite this, there are random moments of levity that burst in, transport the story back to the happy wordplay obsessed films the Cohens have been making as of late. A generous viewer can assume that the latter bits help to camouflage the despair that would otherwise be grinding down in every scene. However, an alternate explanation is that the directors just felt like parachuting in a character or two from Oh Brother Where Art Thou, no matter what got broken in the proccess.

This isn't meant to imply that you'll just get what you expect out of the film, or that its quality cannot be objectively judged so you should just give up. But the fact remains that while I enjoyed the film, I'm now concerned that I'll like it a lot less once I read the book.

Lately, I've been a sucker for films that jarringly switch tonal gears with no rhyme or reason. As a further example of this, I left Beowulf feeling strangely satisfied.

If you've seen the previews for Beowulf, you've probably wondered when exactly our hero says "I-Am-Beowulf!" in that strangely halting cadence, and if he kicks a Persian down a well immediately afterwards. I'll inform you that whenever Beowulf or the all-star Beowulf singers announce his name, you must take a drink. Make sure you have a designated driver.

During the inexplicably rocking opening to the film, the credits alone inform the viewer that if they didn't spring for the 3-D version, they wasted their money. During the full IMAX experience, the left projector is displays Neil Gaiman's Beowulf, while the right projector shows Robert Zemicks' Beowulf. When wearing polarized goggles, the two films combine to create a down-to-earth story of xtreme heroes, and the corrupting effects being so awesome has on them.

Its a neat trick. Not many films can get away with feeling respectful to centuries-old source material, even during a ten minute fight scene where numerous foreground objects conspire to hide Beowulf's Beowang from the viewer, while a rotting Crispin Glover Muppet indulges in some wire-fu.

The CGI characters continue the theme of schizophrenia. Many of the male characters are very well done, with only their strange eyes letting you know that they hail from the Uncanny Valley. The women are immigrants from Shrektopia, and exist free of pores, body language, and a human soul. Beowulf himself stands somewhere in between these two extremes. Sometimes he's a real little boy, sometimes he's a Lord Of the Rings NoodleElf, and every once in a while he becomes an animatronic model.

All of this should end up being a mess, but all of the contradictions somehow cancel each other out, leaving behind an enjoyable film. Still, I already know that its the kind of movie that I'll either lover or hate a month from now, and there's no telling which it will be.

Read/Viewed: No Country For Old Men

Just got back from No Country For Old Men. Well, just got back, then took a long walk down the road to think about it, then answered all my wife's questions about plot holes and contrivances based on my book learning, then re-read some reviews, then thought about grinding my way towards the good songs in Guitar Hero III, then looked up the latter and learned there are none. Then I decided to post instead.

I'm going to break, as I often do, from our spoiler policy and split this into two parts. The non-spoiler review follows. The spoiler review follows that.

No Spoilers For Old Men

While I don't think I could stomach reading No Country For Old Men, the audiobook version read by Tom Stechschulte is pretty damn gripping. It's edge of the driver's seat listening, and thematically it's a prequel to the bleak world depicted in The Road. I don't know whether the movie succeeds on both of those levels or not, because a late development in the story may have caused someone in the audience to have a heart attack. The theater neglected to turn the lights on and shut off the film, so the audience was left to grapple with whether they were supposed to ignore the EMTs and watch the denouement, or sit in the dark for 10 minutes and wait to find out if someone had died. Afterwards, another moral dilemma: Is it wrong to complain that your movie-going experience was ruined when someone's life is on the line? I can't say for sure, but as long as you aren't the asshole who leaves the theater saying, "No Country For OLD MEN! Hahahaha!", you're probably in the clear. Yay, date night.

Old Men Who Like It In The Spoiler #18
Seriously! Spoilery spoilers below!
Yo! My gangsta flow! Yo! Yo-ho-ho.
Also...spoilers.

Maybe the book is too fresh in my mind, but even without knowing how the movie ended, I'm almost kinda pretty pissed off. The Coen brothers got the suspense parts right, but they botched the message. My wife's a smart woman, and she wouldn't be asking me, "Why did this happen?", "Why would this person do something stupid?", "How could this be possible?", etc., if the film hadn't skipped over or altered plot points from the source material. While I understand nervous laughter, and that the fragility of human existence is part of the point, we shouldn't be laughing when Chigurh is sitting naked on a toilet picking bullets out of his flesh. He's supposed to be a symbol of unknowable, unstoppable violence spreading in modern times, damn it!

Succintly put, I resent them for turning Cormac McCarthy's thesis on escalating, inevitable chaos into Fargo.

Two things really ruined it for me. One, I could be wrong, but I don't remember Chigurh killing Jimmy James in the book. I'm pretty sure he brought JJ the money for no reason other than to prove he was good at his job. Two, the shocking, unexpected death of the protagonist is fully justified by the circumstances, but the movie rushes it, and cuts out the most heartbreaking part. It's just not the same if he's not shot to death in a hotel room he rented for a female hitchhiker, after renting a separate room for himself. Couple that with the edited down final confrontation between Llewelyn's wife and Chigurh, and the movie just isn't unfair enough.