No Country for Old Men

[DMann2003 0]

This is definetely one of the best films I've seen from 2007, and the ending works

to me it says that there are some men, some things that are uncapable of grasping or understanding, there is a presence of evil that even the best of men (like Bell) with the nobelest of intentions can't confront or comprehend

, was planning on seeing "There Will Be Blood" tonight too, still might, but the one theater showing it has such a small screen, I'd rather wait till the weekend, when I think it'll expand.

[Ripper 0]

I felt this was an excellent film with the cat and mouse game between Moss and Chigurh being the clear highlight, although I definitely felt that the ending was unsatisfying, anti-climactic and different for the sake of being different, and Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good enough actor to hold my interest with long-winded speeches.

 

 

Holy fucking shit dude. never again question me liking good writing or acting. Shit.

 

 

Anyway, Just saw this the other day and this is just as close to a perfect film as I have seen in a LONG time.

 

Every complaint that most have about the movie, I find to be perfect. The ending, while I can understand people getting upset, was perfect.

 

 

[Jericho2000Mark 0]

I felt this was an excellent film with the cat and mouse game between Moss and Chigurh being the clear highlight, although I definitely felt that the ending was unsatisfying, anti-climactic and different for the sake of being different, and Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good enough actor to hold my interest with long-winded speeches.

 

 

Holy fucking shit dude. never again question me liking good writing or acting. Shit.

 

Why? Because you won't be able to tell me what good acting is...

[Jingus 0]

I loved most of it, but mark me down as another one who just didn't get the ending. I watched it on my computer, and when the movie ended I literally thought I'd gotten a bad stream. It wasn't until I did a little research that I discovered, yes, that WAS the real ending. Whatever the antonym of "satisfying" is, that describes my reaction to the movie from the point when

Josh Brolin got killed off-screen

through the oddly abrupt ending. Also didn't like that they seemed to completely forget about

the case of money

, since it was treated as being so important for the rest of the movie, but we never find out what ultimately happened to it.

[The Fett 0]

I loved most of it, but mark me down as another one who just didn't get the ending. I watched it on my computer, and when the movie ended I literally thought I'd gotten a bad stream. It wasn't until I did a little research that I discovered, yes, that WAS the real ending. Whatever the antonym of "satisfying" is, that describes my reaction to the movie from the point when

Josh Brolin got killed off-screen

through the oddly abrupt ending. Also didn't like that they seemed to completely forget about

the case of money

, since it was treated as being so important for the rest of the movie, but we never find out what ultimately happened to it.

 

Pretty sure the truck full of men that stormed out of the hotel took the money from Brolin. One of the guys found out where Brolin was staying from his mother-in-law, they found him and killed him, and stole the case.

[cabbageboy 0]

Fett, I don't think that is the case.

 

I was somewhat frustrated by the treatment of the briefcase as a MacGuffin of sorts, since unlike the briefcase in Pulp Fiction (just throwing out an example) it has serious ramifications on the plot. Everyone is after the money in NCFOM, it's not a meaningless object. Anyway I am fairly sure Chigurh gets the money since he hands the kid $100 near the end, and in the book I have heard he turned it in to a boss type character and took out his expense money. They should have added that scene, since Chigurh's fate is quite puzzling and unsatisfying in the film. He just gets hurt in the car wreck, then staggers away. It's a WTF type end for a character.

 

I've thought more about this film since my initial post, though I really haven't gotten up the nerve to see it again in a theater. I can't bring myself to do it, it's too tough of an experience. I'll see it again on DVD though. Quite a few people have said this film has no real resolution, but I think what they mean is that there's simply a deep seeded desire to see Chigurh get his ass blown away. A character as vicious and evil as this guy simply needs to die at the end of a movie. He's not a cool anti hero badass type that we can get behind on some level, he's just a flat out killer villain.

 

Chigurh living in this I think is what upset people the most in the theater I was in. It would be like Rutger Hauer living in The Hitcher or something....and to be honest NCFOM reminds me of The Hitcher quite a bit, minus motive.

 

[Dandy 0]

Moss his the money in the air duct at the first hotel. Chigurh figured that out but was just a moment too late to get the money before Moss took it out. The Mexicans killed Moss (I am of the belief that the girl at poolside was a plant to distract Moss and set him up for the Mexicans), but did not grab the money since it was not obvious where it was, and it was broad daylight and they needed to make a quick getaway. Chigurh heads to the scene after Moss was killed to retrieve the money. He has no reason to kill Bell, and he leaves with the money.

 

I also do not believe he had the money with him in the car crash at the end, that he had returned the money (but to who if he killed the boss), or simply did not have it on him. A man can have a couple of hundred dollars on him and not have ALL of the money with him. I did think the bloody $100 was from the money, though.

[Ripper 0]

Chigurh obviously got the money. When Jones sits on the bed he looks over and sees the vent has been opened with a coin which they established earlier in the film as his method to open the vent.

 

 

I felt this was an excellent film with the cat and mouse game between Moss and Chigurh being the clear highlight, although I definitely felt that the ending was unsatisfying, anti-climactic and different for the sake of being different, and Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good enough actor to hold my interest with long-winded speeches.

 

 

Holy fucking shit dude. never again question me liking good writing or acting. Shit.

 

Why? Because you won't be able to tell me what good acting is...

 

Because you questioned my taste in acting because I didn't care for a movie starring Pam Grier and then go on to say that Tommy Lee Jones isn't that good of an actor. Yes, your questioning my taste in acting rights are revoked.

 

[Coffin Surfer 0]

Wow, Tommy Lee Jones' delivery of the closing monolouge might be the finest acting in the movie which is certainly saying something.

[Guest Warriorfan]

When Bell has that discussion with his Uncle who tells the story about their relative who was a Sheriff and what happened to him; it feels like a pure foreshadowing of what is going to happen at the end of the film. When that specific confrontation doesn't take place I can see how some viewers may feel it is too much of a swerve.

 

I personally think that the ending cements the movie as an all-time classic.

[cabbageboy 0]

See, I took that scene with the uncle as something else, almost like a bizarre pep talk of sorts. As in "Hell, this stuff was awful and happened back in 1909....so don't let it get you down and do your job, dammit!"

 

As far as the money goes, in the book Chigurh turns it in to a boss....but I wonder who is this boss? He already killed the one guy, so who exactly is he working for? At various points I was baffled by Chigurh as a character since he's such an enigma beyond his basic motivation to acquire the money. I was never sure why he killed the two other guys at the drug deal site, why he killed Woody Harrelson, or the Boss. Or why he killed various innocent civilians, like the guy he pulls over while in the cop car, or the guy who picks him up (the one with the boat).

 

Who the hell would hire such a nutjob loose cannon? And how would a guy go around the countryside killed everyone in sight and not attract any attention to himself?

 

There are some people who feel this film has no resolution. I don't feel that way exactly. It DOES have a resolution, but it's one that is so grim that quite a few people refuse to accept it. Basically Moss dies, his wife dies, Chigurh gets the money, and Bell retires and is haunted by the whole affair. The End. A wrist slasher of an ending to be sure.

[Jericho2000Mark 0]

Chigurh obviously got the money. When Jones sits on the bed he looks over and sees the vent has been opened with a coin which they established earlier in the film as his method to open the vent.

 

 

I felt this was an excellent film with the cat and mouse game between Moss and Chigurh being the clear highlight, although I definitely felt that the ending was unsatisfying, anti-climactic and different for the sake of being different, and Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good enough actor to hold my interest with long-winded speeches.

 

 

Holy fucking shit dude. never again question me liking good writing or acting. Shit.

 

Why? Because you won't be able to tell me what good acting is...

 

Because you questioned my taste in acting because I didn't care for a movie starring Pam Grier and then go on to say that Tommy Lee Jones isn't that good of an actor. Yes, your questioning my taste in acting rights are revoked.

 

Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good actor and I've never been impressed with anything he's ever done. I also felt he dragged down JFK with his horrid portrayal of a gay man, and then there's his role as Two-Face... But I guess it's somehow written in stone that Tommy Lee Jones is a good actor without any explanation as to why, and that stating otherwise revokes your right to an educated opinion.

 

Pam Grier's performance in Jackie Brown is better than anything I've seen from Tommy Lee Jones. Just because she starred in low-budget exploitation films doesn't make her a bad actress. Jack Nicholson starred in low-budget "trashy" films for a number of years, but he's not a real thespian like Tommy Lee Jones, right?

 

And to whoever thought Jones performance was the finest acting clinic ever captured on motion picture cinema film in the last 85 years or something, did you even understand everything he said without having to look up the quote on IMDB?

[Jingus 0]

Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good actor

 

[Coffin Surfer 0]

"And to whoever thought Jones performance was the finest acting clinic ever captured on motion picture cinema film in the last 85 years or something, did you even understand everything he said without having to look up the quote on IMDB?"

 

Well, I suppose your talking to me. I do have a username and badly misquoting my post doesn't really make it absurd; it just means your reaching.

 

Obviously, Tommy Lee Jones has done his share of shit over the years but dwelling on the dreadful "JFK" and "Batman Forever" doesn't mean he didn't give fine performances in "Rolling Thunder", "The Executioner's Song", "The Fugitive" ,"Cobb", and the film in question.

[Dandy 0]

TLJ was great in Blown Away, and I enjoyed him in the Men in Black movies, as well.

[Ravenbomb 0]

I also liked him in The Hunted.

[Dandy 0]

Yeah, I did too, but I couldn't help but think he was playing Sam Gerard butadding a tweak of survival trainer. I know the characters were plenty different, but I got that vibe, you know?

[Jericho2000Mark 0]

Tommy Lee Jones isn't a good actor

 

 

That's funny, it's even funnier when you remember that you posted this not too long ago:

 

subjective

Shhh! Don't remind people that there's no way to objectively prove if a work of art is good in a concrete manner, then they get mad!

 

But it is subjective, because there's always dissenting opinions. .

 

Oh, right, I forgot that a person's opinion is only subjective if it agrees with yours. What a hypocritical troll.

 

Coffin Surfer, I wasn't reaching so much as my eyes were reaching into the back of my head when I read your statement. Seriously, aren't you supposed to understand someone when they are delivering a line in a film? Last I checked, that was an important component of "delivery."

 

I didn't care for him in Cobb. It just boils down to the simple fact that I don't believe in his characters when he's acting (except in maybe Men in Black and The Fugitive). And as annoying as Natural Born Killers was, he was certainly no help in that either.

[cabbageboy 0]

What's with all the hate for JFK on here? Tommy Lee Jones at least kinda looked like the real Clay Shaw in it. Does JFK have its share of crazed, crackpot theories? Of course. But as a film it is utterly amazing and is the fastest 3 hour movie I've ever seen.

 

While I didn't think TLJ was the best thing about NCFOM, he's certainly a good actor. How about him in Lonesome Dove with Robert Duvall, or his breakout role in Coal Miner's Daughter?

[godthedog 0]

jfk feels like it goes by fast because it was all edited in 4 days by an army of small chain-smoking rodents working in shifts. and it kind of sucks.

 

oliver stone is not a very good director. his sensibilities are too exploitative to really be a "great" director (like renoir or altman), and he's too obsessed with making you think he's important to be a good exploitative director (like tony scott, or even michael bay). what you get with a stone movie is essentially michael bay thinking he's orson welles.

 

back to tommy lee jones: i had no problems understanding what he was saying, and he has some really fine acting moments in it.

i think what really makes the payoff of moss's death work is the look on jones's face when he looks at the body and knows that he was too late, and didn't keep his word to moss's wife. that sort of regret in his face is subtle, but it's there, and it gives moss's death the kind of emotional release it needs when the death itself was so anticlimactic.

 

i do have a different problem with the ending, and i'm curious to see what other people think about this:

 

chigurh's last scene, from walking out of the house onward, feels redundant. it seems to be fulfilling 2 functions, both of which have already been done in different scenes:

 

1) chigurh is vulnerable, and not indestructible, and subject to bodily harm & death just as much as anyone else: this was already made painstakingly clear in the long process he had to go through to fix himself up after getting shot. limping with a bloody leg, getting painkillers, digging hot metal out of his leg...we get it, he can be wounded. there's no surprise to see him with a gashing wound a second time.

 

2) setting up a parallel between chigurh and moss, being in the same situation having to bribe a stranger for help: this was made clear right from the beginning in the echoing of the "hold still" line, and from then on we get it that these men are strangely akin to each other, sharing a certain mentality. going to almost-implausible lengths just to reinforce the parallel again, in a much less subtle way this time, sort of makes me roll my eyes and say "okay, yes, i get it." the scene just doesn't do anything for me: it doesn't resolve anything, and it doesn't reveal anything about his character that we don't already know.

[Jericho2000Mark 0]

JFK was a very good movie (despite Jones' performance) and Oliver Stone was at least a talented director at some point, and a lot better than Michael fucking Bay. I'd say those are more ridiculous statements than thinking the great Tommy Lee Jones isn't all that great...

 

Maybe Jones is capable of better work, but I haven't seen Lonesome Dove or Coal Miner's Daughter so I'm just rating him based on what I have (which is actually quite a bit). If he is capable of better performances then that just makes him an inconsistent actor, leaning towards average.

[vivalaultra 0]

If you were disappointed at the lack of clean resolution to this movie, I can't wait to see how pissed off you get at the lack of resolution to the movie version of "Blood Meridian" (presuming it gets faithfully directed, which it might or might not considering the crew in charge of it). Much like NCFOM, "Blood Meridian"

has the 'main' character getting ambiguously killed 'off-screen' and an ending that's left pretty open-ended and ambigious. Judge Holden from "Blood Meridian" is like Chigurh amped up to 11, with his random acts of violence and seemingly ambivalently philosophical nature about violence and how the world works.

 

Most of McCarthy's books are concerned with violence and the random nature of violence and the lack of catharsis. In my reading and viewing of NCFOM, I think that the lack of clean resolution is because McCarthy's saying that violence is random and present in the world and oftentimes in the world, there isn't a resolution to the violence. It's just something that happens. If there had been a resolution or some catharsis, whether Chigurh would've been caught or he would've been seen escaping off to commit more acts of violence, the story would've been turned into some type of morality play, and that's not what it was about. This was a story that didn't take sides on the actions, it just told the story as it happened and left it up to the viewer/reader to determine what, if any, moral was in the story.

 

By the by, I think Tommy Lee Jones is a fabulous actor, especially in the last decade or so. One movie that I haven't seen mentioned in the thread that he was in is "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada", which he also directed. He was great in that wonderful, weird, slightly creepy movie.

[godthedog 0]

JFK was a very good movie (despite Jones' performance) and Oliver Stone was at least a talented director at some point, and a lot better than Michael fucking Bay. I'd say those are more ridiculous statements than thinking the great Tommy Lee Jones isn't all that great...

 

what i'm saying is that bay doesn't have any pretensions about what kind of filmmaker he is. he makes shit blow up, and he makes it blow up good. he makes sensationalist movies, and it takes some major effort & a special kind of talent to distinguish yourself that way in a sea of directors who make essentially the same kind of sensationalist movies.

 

stone makes sensationalist movies that deal with big important political issues, and would have you believe that those issues somehow make the movies more important or thought-provoking than they really are. it's a sickening sort of hubris that isn't earned at all. what are you really "saying" about vietnam in 'platoon' when the last 20 minutes are one big action scene? he treats the jfk assassination in the same basic way michael bay would approach it: lots of quick cutting, lots of music, lots of melodrama, lots of twists to keep you wondering what exactly is going on. there's no extra thought or content behind it: it's one big empty dramatic gesture. that's why i walk away from 'transformers' more satisfied than 'jfk' or 'born on the 4th of july'.

[Coffin Surfer 0]

"Coffin Surfer, I wasn't reaching so much as my eyes were reaching into the back of my head when I read your statement. Seriously, aren't you supposed to understand someone when they are delivering a line in a film? Last I checked, that was an important component of "delivery." "

 

Bah, this is hopeless. Nobody but you seemed to have a problem hearing what he was saying and please don't delude yourself into thinking your the only one honest enough to admit it. I would also think it was a powerful scene if I couldn't understand a word he was saying, his performance is written all over his face and the weary sound of his voice.

 

 

And Oliver Stone sucks! Even when on the rare occassion he manages to get great performances out of his actors in something like "Platoon," he is quick to crush the impact with the excessive weight of his over the top mellowdramatic theatrics. The famous death scene that starts off reasonablly moving ends up being a self parody as he absurdly drags it out with every cliche in the book.

 

And Jones has done some serious shit that I won't deny but he also has many, many acclaimed performances that are hard to discredit. Nonsense like "I can't hear him" is indeed reaching. Everyone sucked in Natural Born Killers outside of Sizemore, everyone sucked in Batman Forever, both Jones and Pesci were horribly miscast in JFK; so it is hard to single him out in those films nor is it fair to toss these stinkers out as evidence that he sucks.

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

I watched this on DVD last night..

 

I wasn't as impressed with it as everyone else, but it was a decent movie. One plus I had was that I like ambiguous endings for the most part in this type of movie, as its better than what usually happens (killer is dead, happy ending for everyone! yay!)

[cabbageboy 0]

I actually liked it better watching a 2nd time on DVD. Maybe it's because I knew more of what was coming this time so I was able to just go with it.

 

While I certainly agree that Tommy Lee Jones sucked as Two Face, I do think he's good in JFK. I blame Schumacher more for that crap though, since Jones was actually a good casting choice for Harvey Dent. The script and direction were the problem.

 

Having seen a few interviews with the real Clay Shaw though Jones did a good job with that role. As far as Pesci goes, I have no idea what the real David Ferrie was like but from the few pics I've seen of Ferrie he looked like a total psycho.

[godthedog 0]

it seems like this wouldn't hold up on the small screen very well. those empty quiet spaces wouldn't be as hypnotic.