Saturday 16 November 2013

No Country for Old Men Review

Well, it's been a while.  i haven't been watching a lot of movies lately because I have been engrossed in Breaking Bad and want to get through them before someone spoils the ending for me.  but when you're on a plane from Toronto to Regina, there's not a whole lot else to do and I had wanted to see this one for a long time.

It starts out really well.  It's a tremendously well acted movie with superior performances from Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem.  While it seems to move a bit slow, you don't seem to mind because the story is quite gripping and very well shot.  I can see why it won best directing.  But I don't quite understand why it won best picture.  It's moving a long quite well for most of it and then it just derails to an ending that really doesn't make a lot of sense.  It does have a philosophical air to it throughout so I can see what the Cohen brothers were going for.  But it was almost as if they realized they had two hours with no resolution so they just ended with some non-sensical soliloquy from one of the characters and fade to black.  After all, the Academy eats up that artsy crap; and it worked.  Not having read the novel, I can also only assume that is what they had to work with for the source material and probably stayed true to it.  Unfortunately, that works better in the written word than it does in film and I'm not sure why.

The bottom line is that I'm of two mids for this one.  On the one hand, the acting is great and the directing is superb.  On the other hand, a couple of twists send it spiralling into something they desperately try to save and, in my mind, fall short of doing so.  But, all in all, it isn't a waste of two hours.  See it.

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