Reel of Fish V
This is an important edition of Reel of Fish, and it comes only a week late.
Five is a seminal number. A crucial one. A 5 is 2 and 3. A 5 is a hand, a foot, the senses, the circlepoints along the Revealed Man, the mystic pentacle and the dire Pentagon, the eerie Silent E, the elements, vast and mighty Jupiter, and enough weeks spent on a pointless activity to justify some sort of dramatic introduction, with bold text and blatant references to the Principia Discordia.
Five is significant. Five means you're committed. Five is, in this case, just about a tenth of the way there. That's good. That's a round number, and round numbers are heavy. They have weight. Yes. Quitting now would leave a bruise to my vast ego. Not the contusion I would get if I quit at 25 or the crippling neuro-agony I'd get at 40, but certainly a bruise. Five means you've got a whole poker hand in, by gumbo, and you're gonna sit there with yer belly on the felt until the last chip is tossed. Are these poker metaphors working for you? Well, I hate them.
Five. Yes. Mach 5. Five easy pieces. Golden rings.
And what better movie to review than one that has been nominated for five* Academy Awards?
Week 5 of 51 - No Country for Old Men
Directors: Award-winning auteurs the Brothers Coen
Starring: Award-winning cowboy hat enthusiast Tommy lee Jones, award-winning rugbyist Javier Bardem, award-winning Goonie Josh Brolin, award-winning cannabis consumer Woody Harrelson, and award-winning 34B-23-36 Peter Pan Kelly Macdonald.
What It Is: Llewelyn Moss, the Welshiest cowboy in five counties, is out hunting antelope or some damn thing out in the vast endless flat Mordorlands of Texas, strolling across infinite plains under roiling emotional skies when he finds a little circle of trucks and a big heap of dead Mexicans and pitbulls, an imperial ton of movie-grade heroin, and a sinister and moderately-priced black briefcase filled with cash. This leads him on a run away from his rural Rio Grande trailer park to the big shining suburbs, where he hides in a series of crummy motels while his hot Scottish wife goes into hiding with her mom, who looks vaguely like Carol Burnett dressed up as a comical old hag. Llewelyn is fleeing the relentless attentions of hired killer Anton Chigurh, although he doesn't realize that right away, and it's also not terribly clear who's paying Chigurh, if anyone, since he seems to kill everyone he comes into contact with, including his Mob boss/evil corporate/seedy druglord employers. Llewelyn isn't just some weedy clerk, though; he's a gen-yoo-wine cowpoke, with a bunch of guns (although no silenced supersonic shotgun like Chigurh's) and a dead eye, so the game becomes a bit more interesting and a lot of colorful Texans get gunned down in the crossfire as hangdog Sheriff Ed Tom Bell mournfully surveys the various piles of corpses and makes like Sheriff Andy Taylor in a Tarantino flick.
Comment il Rouler: The Coens are clearly taking their shot at the Academy with this one. After a string of offbeat stoner favorites and IFC fodder and the careful construction of a cult of cinematic fame, they're engaged in Serious Business. All cinematic stops are pulled out; vast trackless wastes in the heartland of America, thunderous skies, the crushing realities of the modern world, frighteningly memorable villains and stalwart heroes working an amoral grey area, hyper-consequential violence, philosophies about the transience of life and the significance of death, old men in ruined homes, a script that seems to build to a hugely cinematic climax and then wanders off into meandering no-man's-land, and people enjoying milk. Nothing is held back. The Coens' implication is clear; if they don't walk away with several significant Oscars for this picture, Anton Chigurh will personally limp into the palatial homes of every member of the Academy and murder them in their beds.
The movie is good enough to merit the attentions it has received. Absolutely it is. It's brilliantly shot and framed like Remington art and holds your attention like a rivet to the forehead from the opening sequence. I barely managed to finish my popcorn since I was so busy staring at the silvery phantom genius unreeling in front of me that I could hardly scoop up a handful of greasy golden kernels and shovel them in. Some movies manage to do that, to reach through your skull and seize a handful of your brain, twisting it like a horse's reins to keep your focus on every frame. These movies are the ones that become the immortals, the ones that easily secure a spot in the AFI lists and leave the rest scrabbling in the contender's dirt. There is no doubt in my mind that No Country for Old Men will get a Criterion Master's edition and a shower of the laurels and moistened panties of a thousand critics and accolades in Paris and comparisons to every film about quietly insane hitmen and greedy noble-hearted cowboys that might be shot in the future. It's good. You should see it.
It is not, however, a lot of fun.
This is not to say there were not laffs, even amidst all the gunplay and exploding cars you remember from the trailers. The audience we saw the movie with in the Regal 18 was mostly older folks in nice going-out clothes and a few dating couples, and even they enjoyed the darksome gags about drinking the milk the killer had left out and Moss and "Sugar"'s snarky banter over a Mexican payphone and the half-naked and wounded cowboy staggering into the store where he had earlier bought a pair of Larry boots, clad now only in those boots and a hospital gown, only to be asked by the polite old salesman "How are those Larrys workin' out?".
The Coens' particular genius is creating absurd situations and eccentric, endearing characters and then combining the them in surprising and dramatic ways. They do that here, undoubtedly. From the sad-eyed one-man Greek chorus of Sheriff Bell with his Hamlet-in-the-Mayberry-graveyard wit to the hawk-eyed fierce independence of the desperate Llewelyn Moss to the maddening deadman's smile and relentless guns of the lunatic Chigurh, even the teary-eyed spunk of little Carla Moss and the shit-eating grin of Woody Harrelson's day trader/bounty hunter, these are characters that will stand the test of time. Their situation is unique and perilous and compelling, and the use of plain motels and quiet suburban streets as settings for dire, explosive action is inspired. They put their bold and dangerous and quietly-quipping characters together in these unique settings, and then ...
... they kill them all. Everyone seems to die a tragic and vain death in the final reel. I guess that's what passes for Academy material these days; you can't have a movie where the heroes triumph. That's expected, and cinema is supposed to be a surprise now. People have seen the heroes triumph for a hundred years. They want a new drug.
Now to be fair, lots of movies have tried this "Surprise, everyone's dead!" technique with a minimal amount of success. They just end up coming off pointless and depressing, like The Mist, or confusing as all hell, like Aliens 3. No Country for Old Men has the distinction of being an extremely good movie where everyone dies for no reason, but this creates a unique kind of cognitive dissonance as you leave the theater. You know you've just seen a genuinely excellent movie, but as you leave the theater it's with the faintly glass-eyed look of someone who's just watch a bus go off a cliff. You find yourself wondering how the hell that just happened. You might wonder why. And if you're a certain kind of person, you'll certainly plan to go again.
In lesser details, the movie is set in 1980, which is nice in that it allows for a certain vintage look without getting in the way of the narrative (although a few minor anachronisms stood out, mostly in the forms of sign and logo designs for Wendy's, Wells-Fargo and such that weren't in use back then, they were really only noticeable to people like me who banked at Wells-Fargo and eat at Wendy's all the damn time). The clothing is all non-descript Western wear, the props all quiet background material except for Chigurh's ridiculously huge gun which is as distinctive as Death's scythe. Brolin's Burt Reynolds mustache and Bardem's Starsky and Hutch haircut fit the chronological illusion nicely, and the cars are all properly old-fashioned long flat 1980s rectangles. The embroidery is as cunning as the whole cloth.
It's just that the whole thing is a bit of a shroud.
Endgame: There is no doubt in my mind that you should see No Country for Old Men, just as you should see The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Casablanca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wizard of Oz, The Muppet Movie, Duck Soup, and A Fistful of Dollars. You can't be a proper cinephile without it. Just don't walk in expecting to see the Dude drinking White Russians and George Clooney pattering about Dapper Dan. This movie is Serious Business, and it leaves scars.
But it's worth it.
*Actually, 8, but who's counting?
Five is a seminal number. A crucial one. A 5 is 2 and 3. A 5 is a hand, a foot, the senses, the circlepoints along the Revealed Man, the mystic pentacle and the dire Pentagon, the eerie Silent E, the elements, vast and mighty Jupiter, and enough weeks spent on a pointless activity to justify some sort of dramatic introduction, with bold text and blatant references to the Principia Discordia.
Five is significant. Five means you're committed. Five is, in this case, just about a tenth of the way there. That's good. That's a round number, and round numbers are heavy. They have weight. Yes. Quitting now would leave a bruise to my vast ego. Not the contusion I would get if I quit at 25 or the crippling neuro-agony I'd get at 40, but certainly a bruise. Five means you've got a whole poker hand in, by gumbo, and you're gonna sit there with yer belly on the felt until the last chip is tossed. Are these poker metaphors working for you? Well, I hate them.
Five. Yes. Mach 5. Five easy pieces. Golden rings.
And what better movie to review than one that has been nominated for five* Academy Awards?
Week 5 of 51 - No Country for Old Men
Directors: Award-winning auteurs the Brothers Coen
Starring: Award-winning cowboy hat enthusiast Tommy lee Jones, award-winning rugbyist Javier Bardem, award-winning Goonie Josh Brolin, award-winning cannabis consumer Woody Harrelson, and award-winning 34B-23-36 Peter Pan Kelly Macdonald.
What It Is: Llewelyn Moss, the Welshiest cowboy in five counties, is out hunting antelope or some damn thing out in the vast endless flat Mordorlands of Texas, strolling across infinite plains under roiling emotional skies when he finds a little circle of trucks and a big heap of dead Mexicans and pitbulls, an imperial ton of movie-grade heroin, and a sinister and moderately-priced black briefcase filled with cash. This leads him on a run away from his rural Rio Grande trailer park to the big shining suburbs, where he hides in a series of crummy motels while his hot Scottish wife goes into hiding with her mom, who looks vaguely like Carol Burnett dressed up as a comical old hag. Llewelyn is fleeing the relentless attentions of hired killer Anton Chigurh, although he doesn't realize that right away, and it's also not terribly clear who's paying Chigurh, if anyone, since he seems to kill everyone he comes into contact with, including his Mob boss/evil corporate/seedy druglord employers. Llewelyn isn't just some weedy clerk, though; he's a gen-yoo-wine cowpoke, with a bunch of guns (although no silenced supersonic shotgun like Chigurh's) and a dead eye, so the game becomes a bit more interesting and a lot of colorful Texans get gunned down in the crossfire as hangdog Sheriff Ed Tom Bell mournfully surveys the various piles of corpses and makes like Sheriff Andy Taylor in a Tarantino flick.
Comment il Rouler: The Coens are clearly taking their shot at the Academy with this one. After a string of offbeat stoner favorites and IFC fodder and the careful construction of a cult of cinematic fame, they're engaged in Serious Business. All cinematic stops are pulled out; vast trackless wastes in the heartland of America, thunderous skies, the crushing realities of the modern world, frighteningly memorable villains and stalwart heroes working an amoral grey area, hyper-consequential violence, philosophies about the transience of life and the significance of death, old men in ruined homes, a script that seems to build to a hugely cinematic climax and then wanders off into meandering no-man's-land, and people enjoying milk. Nothing is held back. The Coens' implication is clear; if they don't walk away with several significant Oscars for this picture, Anton Chigurh will personally limp into the palatial homes of every member of the Academy and murder them in their beds.
The movie is good enough to merit the attentions it has received. Absolutely it is. It's brilliantly shot and framed like Remington art and holds your attention like a rivet to the forehead from the opening sequence. I barely managed to finish my popcorn since I was so busy staring at the silvery phantom genius unreeling in front of me that I could hardly scoop up a handful of greasy golden kernels and shovel them in. Some movies manage to do that, to reach through your skull and seize a handful of your brain, twisting it like a horse's reins to keep your focus on every frame. These movies are the ones that become the immortals, the ones that easily secure a spot in the AFI lists and leave the rest scrabbling in the contender's dirt. There is no doubt in my mind that No Country for Old Men will get a Criterion Master's edition and a shower of the laurels and moistened panties of a thousand critics and accolades in Paris and comparisons to every film about quietly insane hitmen and greedy noble-hearted cowboys that might be shot in the future. It's good. You should see it.
It is not, however, a lot of fun.
This is not to say there were not laffs, even amidst all the gunplay and exploding cars you remember from the trailers. The audience we saw the movie with in the Regal 18 was mostly older folks in nice going-out clothes and a few dating couples, and even they enjoyed the darksome gags about drinking the milk the killer had left out and Moss and "Sugar"'s snarky banter over a Mexican payphone and the half-naked and wounded cowboy staggering into the store where he had earlier bought a pair of Larry boots, clad now only in those boots and a hospital gown, only to be asked by the polite old salesman "How are those Larrys workin' out?".
The Coens' particular genius is creating absurd situations and eccentric, endearing characters and then combining the them in surprising and dramatic ways. They do that here, undoubtedly. From the sad-eyed one-man Greek chorus of Sheriff Bell with his Hamlet-in-the-Mayberry-graveyard wit to the hawk-eyed fierce independence of the desperate Llewelyn Moss to the maddening deadman's smile and relentless guns of the lunatic Chigurh, even the teary-eyed spunk of little Carla Moss and the shit-eating grin of Woody Harrelson's day trader/bounty hunter, these are characters that will stand the test of time. Their situation is unique and perilous and compelling, and the use of plain motels and quiet suburban streets as settings for dire, explosive action is inspired. They put their bold and dangerous and quietly-quipping characters together in these unique settings, and then ...
... they kill them all. Everyone seems to die a tragic and vain death in the final reel. I guess that's what passes for Academy material these days; you can't have a movie where the heroes triumph. That's expected, and cinema is supposed to be a surprise now. People have seen the heroes triumph for a hundred years. They want a new drug.
Now to be fair, lots of movies have tried this "Surprise, everyone's dead!" technique with a minimal amount of success. They just end up coming off pointless and depressing, like The Mist, or confusing as all hell, like Aliens 3. No Country for Old Men has the distinction of being an extremely good movie where everyone dies for no reason, but this creates a unique kind of cognitive dissonance as you leave the theater. You know you've just seen a genuinely excellent movie, but as you leave the theater it's with the faintly glass-eyed look of someone who's just watch a bus go off a cliff. You find yourself wondering how the hell that just happened. You might wonder why. And if you're a certain kind of person, you'll certainly plan to go again.
In lesser details, the movie is set in 1980, which is nice in that it allows for a certain vintage look without getting in the way of the narrative (although a few minor anachronisms stood out, mostly in the forms of sign and logo designs for Wendy's, Wells-Fargo and such that weren't in use back then, they were really only noticeable to people like me who banked at Wells-Fargo and eat at Wendy's all the damn time). The clothing is all non-descript Western wear, the props all quiet background material except for Chigurh's ridiculously huge gun which is as distinctive as Death's scythe. Brolin's Burt Reynolds mustache and Bardem's Starsky and Hutch haircut fit the chronological illusion nicely, and the cars are all properly old-fashioned long flat 1980s rectangles. The embroidery is as cunning as the whole cloth.
It's just that the whole thing is a bit of a shroud.
Endgame: There is no doubt in my mind that you should see No Country for Old Men, just as you should see The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Casablanca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wizard of Oz, The Muppet Movie, Duck Soup, and A Fistful of Dollars. You can't be a proper cinephile without it. Just don't walk in expecting to see the Dude drinking White Russians and George Clooney pattering about Dapper Dan. This movie is Serious Business, and it leaves scars.
But it's worth it.
*Actually, 8, but who's counting?