The MoFo Movie Club Discussion - No Country For Old Men

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I am burdened with glorious purpose
I don't know why I fight against this notion that Chirugh and the Joker are human, but I do. It seems to me there is nothing left of their humanity; both characters have lost any sense of it. Seems to me the authors of these characters are making a statement, instead of creating a human character. And in both films, they are surrounded by very human characters that have both good and bad sides. But these guys are totally devoid of the good side.

(On a side note, I like how in TDK, the people of Gotham prove their humanity much to the Joker's chagrin.)

I guess it doesn't really matter. But hey, what wonderful performances by both Bardem and Ledger!



The People's Republic of Clogher
Hate to break into this thread when the conversation is still very much half-alive but I feel compelled to say that a new Movie Club poll will be going up at the weekend.

All being well.
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Mr.Paul at your service!
I thought this was a pretty good movie love the action and the thrill.
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I don't know why I fight against this notion that Chirugh and the Joker are human, but I do. It seems to me there is nothing left of their humanity; both characters have lost any sense of it. Seems to me the authors of these characters are making a statement, instead of creating a human character. And in both films, they are surrounded by very human characters that have both good and bad sides. But these guys are totally devoid of the good side.

(On a side note, I like how in TDK, the people of Gotham prove their humanity much to the Joker's chagrin.)

I guess it doesn't really matter. But hey, what wonderful performances by both Bardem and Ledger!
I understand where you're coming from on this--who can say what's in an author's mind when he creates a character like Chirugh? It can be as simple as the author just doesn't bother to give him a background or it may be a more complicated symbol of something entirely different.

Look at Moby Dick--is Ahab pursuing just a whale or is he Man confronting Nature or the Cosmos or Fate? Is he really seeking revenge on a whale or is he fighting back against God?

How about Frankenstein's monster? In the book, the monster is human. It talks and thinks, and one can only wonder what sort of memories it might have from beyond the grave. And it is motivated by revenge to bring down Frankenstein. In the Karloff film, however, the monster is recycled, patched together from various parts and brought to life in a process that even Frankenstein doesn't fully understand (remember he thinks at one point he's failed to bring the monster to life). In the movie, the monster is essentially a blank page with no knowledge of the world, no motivations, and so whatever he does is what he learns from the people he ecounters. In short, he's what society makes him, a mirror of our own evil.

Or look at the alien creature in the original Alien. We don't even know for sure what it is because at the first encounter with a human it looks like a plant of some kind, and its pod bursts to scatter pollen or a seed of some sort that then becomes animal after incubating in the host's body. We can surmise that the alien is "motivated" to reproduce, to feed, to survive but those are instincts and not what I think of as a motivation where the creature makes a choice to act one way and not the other.

I haven't seen The Dark Knight and therefore can't speak about that character. Chirugh, on the other hand, seems to come out of nowhere and makes no explanation of his action--much like the Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars. At least we know Chirugh has a name and that he arrives on the scene in the company of two gangsters who we assume are part of a narcotics gang getting narcotics into the US from Mexico. We don't know why he then kills the two men, but it's evident from that and other actions and conversations that he's carrying out an assignment from someone, which does give him motivation--he's just doing his job. But can we judge from his actions if he's human, in that he shares some of our common humanity, or is he inhuman--sort of a punishment from God who strikes unexpectedly and indifferently like the plague?

Most of his murders occur in the process of trying to complete his job of regaining that suitcase full of money, so he is motivated by that assignment which he takes very seriously, almost as a point of honor in that he makes a point of observing certain standards. He's been given a job and he will complete it; he promised to kill a woman if her husband didn't comply with his demands and he sticks to that promise even though the husband was dead by then and would never know; and most telling of all, he allows certain victims, those on the fringes of his primary assignment, to live or die on the luck of a coin toss. That to me is the last vestige of Chirugh's humanity and he holds tight to it because otherwise he becomes a mindless monster killing anything that crosses his path. In his mind, the coin toss relieves him of all responsibility. If the victim losses the toss, it's the victim's bad luck, a whim of fate, because Chirugh would have let him go if the coin toss had gone the other way. If he wins the toss, Chirugh let's him live because in his own mind Chirugh honors his commitments. That's all that is left of his "good side."



I love this movie. I've seen it only 2 times, but I loved it each time.



i think it's one of the stupidest,most idiotic,overated,and worst movie made in 10 years.just a complete waste of time.that daniel day lewis movie,"there will be blood" s a close second to all time worst movie ever made.
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That's a bold statement, calling this movie the absolute worst movie ever made (or in 10 years). There have been a lot of bad movies in the past 10 years alone. Even if you didn't like No Country for Old Men, it's impossible to deny that there have been many worse films in the last 10 years and even of all-time.



,"there will be blood" s a close second to all time worst movie ever made.
Which is?
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Loved the movie, and in my opinion it was better than the book, which is a rare feat. And I'm always liking the Coen's, even when they fail, which is also rare.
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Finally saw this a second time the other night. I liked it quite a bit the first time, but wasn't sure what I thought of the second half after the initial viewing. After the second viewing, I'm completely sold on pretty much the entire movie.

Noticed a few things that either didn't occurr to me in the theater, or did, but have since faded. Namely, the tremendous number of criss-crossing parallels about hunting and tracking. In the beginning of the film, Llewelyn shoots a deer, but doesn't kill it right away, and starts to track it by following the trail of its blood (though he quickly gets sidetracked). The same thing happens later, when he injures Chigurh and follows a trail of his blood (but, of course, doesn't find him).

And, of course, after hunting deer, Llewelyn spends the rest of the film being hunted by Chigurh. And Chigurh, in turn, spends the entire film being hunted by Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). There are more, but I can't recall them now. I think I'll have to watch it again.



The thing that really makes the film interesting, to me, is that it's co concerned with the things that happen in-between events and confrontations. Before Chigurh takes out the three Mexicans in Llewelyn's first motel room, for example, he rents his own room, tests his time coming into the door, checks the bathroom wall to see if he can shoot someone through it, etc. Llewelyn doesn't rush up to the "ultimo hombre" under the shade tree in the beginning...he sits back for awhile to see if he moves at all. We spend far more time watching each person prepare and plan than we do watching them act.



The first I saw the film I was, like many others I'm sure, rather struck by Llewelyn's somewhat anticlimatic death. After some thinking, and a second viewing, I find myself almost completely indifferent to it. I don't feel like seeing the death would change my opinion of the film at all, really. It's an odd choice, to my mind, but it doesn't bother me in the least. If anyone has any theories as to why the Coen Brothers chose to do things this way, I'd be interested to hear them.



The Coen Brothers enjoy ice skating up hill is why.
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You're a Genius all the time
Llewelyn's death occured "offscreen" in the book, too.

I think McCarthy wrote it that way because the book focused more on the Bell character, with Moss as a kind of temporary protagonist. It was a running theme of sorts that Bell was observing all this new carnage and he was always a step behind it. So it's appropriate that McCarthy made him too late to see Llewelyn actually get shot; instead letting him eventually catch up with the trail of violence he'd been following since page one.



Just rewatched this movie and enjoyed it even more than my previous couple of viewings when it first came out.

There's lots of great comments on the movie in this thread (I didn't read them all); on the superb quality of the cinematography, sound, acting, directing and dialogue - pretty much every aspect of the film - and I totally agree.

No Country for Old Men - it's never a country for old men, we'll always be looking back to the good old days and wondering how things got so complicated, so overwhelming, so brutal, so impersonal, so impolite, etc. Just as the sheriff reminisces in the opening monologue about how some sheriffs before him didn't even carry guns.

And so random. The theme of randomness features heavily in Coen brothers movies, but perhaps nowhere as dramatically, viscerally and violently as it does in this film. Llewelyn goes hunting and randomly finds 2 million bucks. Chigurh drops out of nowhere; there is no history, no back story offered. His killing is on a whim and at the flip of a coin. And when Llwelyn - the character we've most come to root for - gets killed, we don't even witness it. We come across his body almost as we would any old murder - emphasizing the randomness.

Randomness, to Chigurh, is not just a whimsy to add spice to his killing, it is an existential philosophy, as displayed by this most sublime of exchanges towards the end of the film:

Carla Jean Moss: The coin don't have no say. It's just you.
Anton Chigurh: I got here the same way the coin did.

Chigurh not only has a philosophy, but, as Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) says, also principles. As do Llwelyn - going back to the desert to give the dying man water - and of course the sheriff. And they all have a perfectly wry sense of humor (as do minor characters like Llwelyn's wife, Carla Jean and Carson Wells (Woody H), which elicits an inner smile amid the most excruciating tension and horror.

All three major characters unfold so strongly, so neatly and with such precision - separate from each other and with practically no interaction between them - and provide a hugely powerful triangular force among which the movie's beauty, action and horror play out. And then the movie folds up again, just as neatly and with just as much precision. Until the open-endedness of the sheriff relating his dream, which parallels the open-ended panoramic splendor of the southwestern scrubland in the opening shot.

9.6/10