Cynical Cinema

I have already gone on at length about No Country For Old Men.  Without a doubt in my mind, it was the best movie of last year.  For the full review:  http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/10/no-country-for-old-men-best-movie-of-the-millenium-1010/  Now, Alliance Films is releasing it again, along with The Man Who Wasn’t There in a two-disc set.  A two-disc set everyone should buy.  Not only is No Country For Old Men the best film of the past ten years, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a very underrated classic.  Since I have already reviewed No Country, I’ll talk about that one here instead.

Billy Bob Thornton plays a barber who hates his life.  He tries to do something, anything, to relieve his boredom, and that something is blackmail.  He blackmails James Gandolfini, his wife’s boss, who is having an affair with his wife (Frances McDormand).  A fairly innocent, one-time plan at first, the whole thing, as with all film noir, spirals out of control, and before long, Thornton is involved with murder.  And then things get really weird.  The film is shot in black and white, set in the forties, and feels just like 1940s film noir.  It captures the tone, the feeling, and the pacing of great noir, and there are some great performances by Thornton, McDormand, Gandolfini, and Tony Shaloub as a high-priced lawyer.  Also terrific is Scarlett Johannson, who appears as a young ingenue piano player, and looks even hotter in black and white with a 40s hairdo.  And then there is the whole alien abduction thing.  Insane, but this movie is terrific.

The Coen Brothers have done some of the best movies of the past twenty years.  And two of them are packaged together today by Alliance Films.  Well worth picking them both up.

I remember, as a kid, going to the library and checking out the giant French Lucky Luke comic books. I read every single one the library had, and so began my infatuation with Western culture. Luke, the fastest gun in the West, and his adventures in continuously catching the notorious Dalton gang proved to be a terrific way to entertain myself over the course of a weekend, and also a great way to learn French. Now, the comic book series comes to DVD in the movie Lucky Luke: Go West, The Movie, out Tuesday August 26th from Alliance Films.

The movie is available in both French and English, and hilariously there is a third language available on the DVD - Quebecois. So you can watch in either French, or Quebecois, depending on your preference. I couldn’t tell the difference, so I chose “French”. The movie is much like the comic books. Silly, over-the-top, and yet somehow still steeped in Western lore. Luke, escorting a group of settlers from New York to California, has the Dalton gang in tow and in captivity. The Daltons, obeying their own code of the West, resent the attempts of the evil guy to break them out and set them free. They’ll free themselves, you see. They don’t need any help. Some funny pop culture references are thrown in throughout the film - an Indian attack on the caravan is represented from overhead like an old-fashioned musical dance number. Luke, after delivering the Daltons to the New York City courthouse in a suit, ducks into a phone booth to quickly change into his cowboy outfit. And the Indian smoke signals are represented, for the modern audience, as emoticons.

Watching this DVD brought back a lot of pleasant childhood memories for me, and I recommend this film as a terrific way to teach French to your kids. Full of ridiculous humour and endless silly action, Lucky Luke: Go West is a throroughly worthwhile way to entertain yourself for a weekend. Or even two.

All Hat is a movie that seems to be strangely unsure of itself. When I picked it up, I was fairly excited. Everyone on the cover was wearing cowboy hats and carrying guns. Shotguns and pistols and so forth. However, the movie is not a western. Not really, anyway. And it doesn’t involve that many guns. In fact, there are guns in only one scene, and they are both pistols, and the shotgun on the cover of the DVD box never makes an appearance. The whole movie, I was looking for that shotgun. When is it going to show up? Does someone get their head blown off? Or will they just be scared away by the cocking sound the shotgun makes? It never materialized. I was so desperate to see a shotgun by the time it was over that I watched all the special features. Was it left on the cutting-room floor? Did the editors deprive me of the chance to see someone blasted in the chest? It turns out no. The shotgun existed only to be photographed for the DVD cover, and nothing else.

Also, throughout the film, I was wondering where the title came from. All Hat? What does that mean? Why would you name a movie All Hat? How is that going to get people to watch, for starters, and what focus group came up with that gem? Well, it turns out that this Canadian movie was based on a book by Canadian author Brad Smith (a celebrated fiction writer, he also wrote One-Eyed Jacks, which is not to be confused with the very under-rated western directed by and starring Marlon Brando). And his book was named All Hat. And it comes from a bizarre line in the book and the film: “you’re all hat and no cattle, son”. What does that mean? Why do they think that’s a bad-ass line? Why did Keith Carradine deliver it like he was John Wayne? Why am I still watching this? Oh right, the shotgun.

There are other reasons to watch All Hat, besides the non-existent shotgun. First of all, Lisa Ray is very hot. (Her most famous role was in Deepa Mehta’s terrific Canadian-Indian film, Water.) And secondly, it is pretty short. So you won’t waste a large portion of your day. The movie begins with Ray (Luke Kirby) being released from prison and picked up by Pete (Carradine). Then there is some horse racing. We don’t know what Ray’s done to be put into prison, and it becomes pretty clear that we’re going to be told, slowly, in pieces, over the course of the film. Like it’s some kind of big revelation. But when we find out what that revelation actually is, it is…very disappointing. Also disappointing are the characters. Rachel Leigh Cook plays a jockey who is sassy and bitter and kind of a jerk. But we’re supposed to LIKE her for that! She’s a free-spirit! The bad guy, Sonny, is an absolute cartoon. He may as well spend much of the movie stroking a cat and enter each scene to the strains of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

And the big sting at the end, to nab the bad guy? Painfully unsatisfying, unless you’re really into those simplistic after-school-special movie endings. Imagine for a moment that the big gag at the end of The Sting was that Doyle Lonnegan gets a pie in the face. That’s about the level of clever we’re dealing with here. But I think it has more to do with shoddy direction than with an actual lack of cleverness to the premise. Lots of other strange stuff happens in All Hat. Every single character, almost at all times, is drinking. Beer, whiskey, from a flask, from the bar. Always. Like the Trailer Park Boys, only…serious. They all (men, and women, at convenient times) hang out at the local strip club. Small-town strip club, eh? Why would that be in the movie? Especially since there is NO nudity. Why have everyone hang out at a strip club all the time, unnecessarily, unless it’s a cheap excuse for cheap nudity? Maybe in this case it’s a cheap excuse for that expensive hooker bit.

Graham Greene shows up, just to let us know for sure that this movie is Canadian. And then - out of nowhere - there is a gross-out comedy scene, clumsily handled, as though it were out of Epic Movie or the crappier version of the Farrely Brothers. A guy gets sprayed, head to toe - with horse semen! What? Where did that come from? What movie IS this? What’s going on? Well, the answer is, not much of anything. A guy gets out of jail, his enemy is evil, Lisa Ray is gorgeous, there are horses that race, a sting is set up for the bad guy, the payoff is weak, you’re all hat and no cattle, the end. All Hat comes out May 27th, tomorrow, from Alliance Films. It’s worth skipping. You see, it’s all hat and no cattle. I think.

I am starting to think one of the reasons for the rise in gun violence in the world is the dumbing down of TV shows. When I was a kid, and the A-Team fired three thousand bullets at people, none of them hit anyone, and certainly didn’t kill them. Yet in the old days, guns killed people. And killing people came with consequences. Take Gunsmoke, the longest-running Western series of all time. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s a show where guns are a way of life and Western frontier justice is doled out one bullet at a time. And the thing is - this show was actually very good! Marshal Matt Dillon has become something of a pop cultural icon in the years since Gunsmoke.

Also iconic are Dodge City and the bizarrely detached attitude the marshal and others have toward human life. There is an episode in Season 2 where the “suits” from the big city come out to check on the practices of the cops in this town. They make an ordinance that forbids anyone from carrying a gun in Dodge. Of course, guns are not only essential to these people, they are the “air they breathe and the water they drink”. Dillon, of course, being a good, loyal NRA member, wants to show this suit that taking peoples’ guns is a bad idea, so he lets a bunch of people get killed to prove his point. Then there is the episode where a guy yells “I’m going to kill you” and then gets shot, and the man who shot him hangs. Two episodes later, a man yells “I’m going to kill you”, and gets shot by a woman, and the marshal escorts her out of town and says it was self-defense. Frontier justice is certainly not blind, like the kind we have today. Allegedly.

But frontier justice IS entertaining. And so is Gunsmoke. Considering how long this show ran, and how popular it was in it’s day, I was initially amazed that it doesn’t show up too often in reruns on TV. But then it occurred to me - perhaps that is because when the 80s rolled around, and censors and silly anti-violence monitors abounded, perhaps this show was kept off TV, what with the occasional killing and so forth. And what was left? MacGyver and the A-Team. Gunsmoke makes me happy, in that it hearkens back to a better day for television, the type of TV we are only recently beginning to get again. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th, and is worth it.

The best reason to watch Rawhide, the TV series, is that it is good. The second-best reason is to watch Clint Eastwood in the TV show he did before he was CLINT EASTWOOD. As Rowdy Yates, his TV persona is just about as powerful as his Man With No Name persona (the one he filmed while on a summer hiatus from Rawhide during Season Five). Season Three, Volume One is on DVD May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it is well worth it. The other major star of the series was Eric Fleming, whose deep voice and stoic character are perfectly suited to his role as Trail Boss Gil Favor. There are some irritating characters, the ones you would expect from a Western TV series in the 60s. Like, the cook always has to be an eccentric and crotchety old coot with a beard. And his assistant has to be a man with the brain of a child but lots of brawn. But Rawhide rises above these stereotypes, and succeeds at being a very good show. Sadly, Eric Fleming didn’t continue on to a Eastwood-calibre career after this show, he was drowned in Peru during the filming of an adventure series called High Jungle in 1966. But he could have been big.

Another huge reason (for the movie buff, anyway) to watch Season Three of Rawhide, is that this will be the only chance you ever have to see Clint Eastwood share the screen with Peter Lorre! Lorre, on the downside of his career, and looking about as fat and bloated as Orson Welles, was as creepy and glib as ever in Episode 5, called Incident Of The Slave Master. (All the episodes are called the Incident of something or other.) He is running a slave operation in the west, and the cattle-driving gang put a stop to it. With, of course, gunfire and horses. Lorre died in 1964, before Eastwood released A Fistful of Dollars later that same year, and it’s not like the two would have been cast in similar movies. A small moment of trivia for the rabid film fans.

Also for the rabid fans in Season 3 - the only on-screen pairing of Eastwood and Lorre’s Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor, in an episode called The Incident Near The Promised Land. Astor retired in 1964. And Mercedes McCambridge, who lit up Hollywood with her screen debut in All The Kings’ Men in 1949, appears in Incident Of The Captive. McCambridge guest starred often on Rawhide and other TV shows like Gunsmoke and Laverne and Shirley and Bonanza. But she is likely best-known now as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist. Too bad - she really had a great career that added up to much more than that.

And the last reason I can think of is that theme song. One of the best theme songs in TV history - load ‘em up! Move ‘em out! I think most of us under the age of 50 are mostly familiar with the song because it’s the one Ackroyd and Belushi sang at that country and western bar in The Blues Brothers. And that’s how I know it too, and it always brings back fond memories. Rawhide is a solid Western TV show from the 60s, it involves Clint Eastwood, and that’s a good enough reason for a Western nut like me to want to pick it up. I love them cattle drivers. It isn’t Red River (the all-time best cattle driving movie…yes, there is an all-time best cattle driving movie, thanks to the Duke), but it gives me my western fix in the meantime.

Humphrey Bogart might now be considered the greatest actor of all time, but there was a time where he was considering giving up movies for good. Two starring roles convinced him to stick around. The Petrified Forest and High Sierra. High Sierra was a gangster movie in an era where gangster movies reigned supreme. James Cagney was the biggest star in Hollywood thanks to gangster roles in the Public Enemy and The Roaring Twenties. And Bogart had been his second fiddle for a while. As the lead in High Sierra, Bogart showed he was a legitimate star in his own right. He’s the leader of a gang looking to knock off a hotel, and Ida Lupino is terrific as the girl who complicates things.

Things progress toward a you’ll-never-take-me-alive-copper ending where Bogart is at his very best, holed up in his mountain hideout, with Lupino and a bad-luck dog coming to find him.

High Sierra is dark, intense and, for it’s time, fairly bad-ass.

That’s eight out of ten on my randomly-decided-upon measuring stick for movies. The box for the Russell Crowe - Christian Bale remake of 3:10 to Yuma says “The Best Western Since Unforgiven!” This is not true. It is, however, the SECOND best western since Unforgiven. The best one was a little-seen film called The Proposition, starring Guy Pearce, and it was a phenomenal film. What 3:10 to Yuma understands very, very well is the western hero. The greatest westerns all had heroes cut from one of two cloths. Either they were generally decent people who didn’t want to use guns but were forced into it, like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Or, they were tough, rugged frontier men who did not fear death, who were perfectly happy using a pistol, but they had a dark side and were not all good. Like Clint Eastwood in The Good The Bad and the Ugly, William Holden in the Wild Bunch, John Wayne in The Searchers, or Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. True western heroes are never the type that are happy, upstanding citizens who also are great gunfighters who don’t fear death and are dangerous to bad guys but perfectly safe to good guys. That hero is the mark of a less interesting western movie. One that can still be good, but never great.

Another thing 3:10 to Yuma gets right is the villain. Yes. I hate it in movies when the bad guy whoots his own man just to prove what a bad guy he really is. And yes, Russell Crowe shoots his own man in the very first scene he’s in. But this time, it is with a purpose. It is not an attempt to make him into the personification of evil, he actually has a reason. Both Crowe and Christian Bale are absolutely fantastic in the movie, both playing the western “heroes” with shades of grey. Peter Fonda is fantastic as well, as a grizzled old Pinkerton detective, a standard character in the old westerns - the lawman charged with upholding the law who may actually be more evil than the man he is bringing to justice.

And that is what makes 3:10 to Yuma fantastic. This film really is a throwback to the western tradition of the 1950s when the original was made. That is one reason this is not a classic western. Really, there is nothing new here. This is just a revitalization and a masterful rendition of an old genre. There are two other things (two characters, in fact) that hold the movie back from being truly great - but it isn’t really the movie’s fault. You see, at the time in the 1950s, these two characters were in many of the westerns. But since then, these characters have become standard in countless movies, and so they seem like cliches. The one character is Crowe’s right-hand man, played by Ben Foster. He is the psychotic killer we see all too often in movies, the man who will kill anyone without compunction, but who looks upon his mentor with a kind of respect that borders on worship. The other character is Bale’s young son, who is almost cartoonish at the beginning of the film with his bitterness at his father and his lack of respect for his toughness. Of course we know he will respect his father by the end of the film, so it seems like overkill with so much of it at the beginning.

But the best part of 3:10 to Yuma is Russell Crowe. He is magnificent as the outlaw with ambiguous motives, he’s absolutely captivating whenever he is on the screen. He is able to walk a fine line between charm and menace, and it’s such a magnetic performance that we never lose sight of who he is. A killer and a bandit with some kind of conscience. He makes every scene he’s in come to life, and that’s almost the entire movie. The gunfights are great - realistic and gritty, if a little stylized. The final gun battle is also the second best since Unforgiven (number two is that final gun fight in Open Range.)

This is definitely the best well-publicized western since Unforgiven, but there have been quite a few good ones in the last few years, for all you western fans - Seraphim Falls was terrific, Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson turned in some great performances. The Proposition was criminally overlooked. Dead Man also, although that may well be because it is just so weird. But definitely worth seeing. And Open Range was a pretty good representation of the genre. It’s a genre that has been called dead many times, but with films like 3:10 to Yuma, one can only hope that the next resurrection of the western is coming soon.

It was the mother of Jesse James, in real life, who would select the words for his epitaph. “In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here”. The new movie, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, feels that Robert Ford’s name IS worthy to appear in their title alongside that of James. That the two men were equally important parts to the same story. It’s a story that has been told many times, in books, music, and of course movies. Jesse James has been played by Tyrone Power, Red Barry, Roy Rogers, Clayton Moore, Audie Murphy, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson and Rob Lowe. Among others. The worst portrayal of James was Colin Farrell’s in American Outlaws - mostly because that movie was so very very terrible. The best may well be Brad Pitt in this film. Whose title I won’t keep typing for fear of developing carpal tunnel syndrome.

But Brad Pitt is outdone considerably in this movie by Casey Affleck. Yes, Casey Affleck, the kid brother of Ben, who has never appeared in any significant role in his life and yet all of a sudden finds himself in two of the biggest roles in two of the best movies of the year! And he is good. In both - it isn’t just his brother’s direction that makes him great, he is just legitimately an excellent actor. Robert Ford has been played by John Carradine, whose four sons became actors. Son David was later killed by Uma Thurman. He has also been played by John Ireland, and some guy on an episode of Little House on the Prairie. But the best protrayal is without a doubt Affleck’s in this movie, and he richly deserved his Academy Award nomination as best supporting actor. Although Brad Pitt is a Movie Star, and his public persona dwarfs his talent, people forget that he is an outstanding actor. Outdoing him in a movie is a considerable achievement.

Pitt at his very best reminds me a little of Paul Newman, and watching this movie reminded me of Paul Newman’s portrayal of Billy The Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). He’s an outlaw on the edge of sanity, paranoid and almost childish in his outlook. He seems to be the kind of guy who has reached the end of his rope, and almost welcomes his own death. Death is his deliverance, and I think the title of the movie makes it pretty clear it happens, and as such this is not much of a spoiler. Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Mary-Louise Parker, and Sam Shephard are all excellent in supporting roles, and James Carville makes a bizarre appearance as the governor. Nick Cave shows up as a saloon singer, and Hugh Ross lends just the right tone to keep the story moving as the narrator.

Jesse James, in his day, was about the most famous person in America, outside the president, because his exploits were followed in the papers. He was a celebrity simply because he was someone that people had heard of, and there were not many of those around at the time. Even at the time, he was considered a hero in the west, because the papers protrayed him as an anti-establishment fighter on the side of good. But of course, he was really just a bandit and a murderer who happened to get good press. Che Guevara he was not. This movie captures the tone perfectly, Robert Ford being an idol-worshipping sycophant to James and his gang at first. He has been a die-hard Jesse James fan since he was a small boy, and now that he comes face to face with the reality of the outlaw, he becomes completely torn between his hero-worship and his desire for self-preservation. And the film has a surprisingly un-dramatic conclusion, given the subject matter contained so succinctly in the title. Like the best westerns of all time (and this is among the top 200 ever made) death is just something that happens as a natural course of living, whether it be because of the elements, sickness, or at the hand of other men.

Westerns have gone through many ups and downs in movie history. John Ford’s Stagecoach, in 1939, was the first movie to suggest that westerns could be real feature films, A-list movies, rather than continuing as it was in B-movie, black-and-white serials and the like. That was the golden age of the western, when John Wayne and John Ford were kings, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart were major stars, and films like The Searchers, High Noon, Shane, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were among some of the best ever made. There was a big resurgence in the western genre during the 70s, when the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood breathed some life back into the genre. Then it died again, until the 90s, when Unforgiven in 1992 became one of the greatest movies of all time, and quite possibly the best western. This resurgence led mostly to B-grade fluff, like Bad Girls and The Quick And The Dead, and nothing of substance. I sincerely hope now that films like 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford mark a more substantial return to significance in the history of the western, and that more movies like this one can be made. But even if not, the fact that this particular movie was made is reason enough to be happy.

The Coen Brothers have collaborated on twelve films in their illustrious career. There have been some interesting misses (The Ladykillers, The Man Who Wasn’t There) and some terrific movies (The Hudsucker Proxy, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?) And there have been three absolute classics. They are Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and now No Country For Old Men. This is an absolutely brilliant film, taken very literally from Cormac McCarthy’s absolutely brilliant novel. This may well be the best movie the Coens have done, and that’s saying a lot - Fargo was the best film of the 1990s.

Tommy Lee Jones plays sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a backwoods country sheriff who is smart and determined, but he is long on wisdom and short on solutions. There is a slight echo of Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo, an officer of the law who would seem less than brilliant to those around them, yet we the audience get to see inside their head a little more and we can see that their outward appearance is deceptive, and that they are in fact very intelligent. He is the centre of the movie, but, this movie is not about Jones. Javier Bardem gives one of the creepiest performances in recent memory as a maniacal killer named Anton Chigurh. He has a strange, Beatles-type moptop haircut, and he is cold, emotionless, and single-minded. His performance in this movie is as scary as any turned in by the other masters of the creepy of this generation - the Christopher Walkens and John Malkoviches of the world. But this movie is not about Bardem.
Josh Brolin is the main character in the movie, Llewellyn Moss, a man who stumbles across the aftermath of a bloody shootout in the desert. There are bodies everywhere, and two trucks still sitting in the middle of the desert. Brolin finds massive amounts of heroin, which he leaves there, dozens of guns, some of which he takes, and two million dollars. He takes all of that. His performance is also single-minded in the film, he is a good ol’ boy, a tough Vietnam veteran who believes he can take on anyone and anything. His undoing proves to be a seemingly unnecessary act of kindness - he goes back to the site of the carnage to bring water to the one man who is still clinging to life. Why he does this is simply an extension of his character. He is that determined, that headstrong, and that committed to whatever it is he is doing. And in this case, he is doing what he believes is the right thing. But, this movie is also not about him.

This movie is about No Country For Old Men. That is, it is about the country. The end of the country and world that we all know, and the presentation to us of a world that is completely alien to us. You could call the film a western, in that it takes place in the west. Desert scenes and cowboy hats and gunfights and strong characters who come to a head with each other at various points in the movie. You could call it a thriller, in that the bad guy might get the good guys, the good guys might get away, there are chases and battles and guns and violence and tense moment after tense moment. It could almost be considered a black comedy, with certain scenes having a bizarre comic effectiveness. I’m not even sure if it was intentional or not, but in particular one scene where Bardem blows up a car outside the pharmacy. You may have seen it in the trailers. The car blows up, and the glass window outside shatters, the pharmacy descends into chaos, and people begin running everywhere in a panic. Bardem, on the other hand, just keeps walking. Straight toward the back, no reaction at all, totally unconcerned with the chaos, and determined to complete his task. It comes off as something out of Buster Keaton, the stone-faced man who doesn’t know he should be ducking for cover because he is too preoccupied with whatever is going on in his head. And in many ways, No Country For Old Men could qualify as a horror movie as well, thanks mostly to Bardem. He moves slowly, purposefully, and relentlessly toward the man he means to kill, almost like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees.

Bardem’s portrayal of the psychopathic killer is bone-chilling and fantastic, but the movie doesn’t really delve into him at all. It’s treatment of Chigurh is almost clinical, in that we watch his evil acts with more of a sense of dispassionate astonishment than a sense of moral outrage. We are just amazed that someone like this could exist in our world. His scene with an old man in a gas station is one of the most tense in recent memory, and contains some of the best dialogue in the Coen’s repertoire. Woody Harrelson makes a brief appearance as a man sent after Chigurh by his bosses, and his time on screen is almost anecdotal as well. In the end, we don’t really get to know any of the characters, even Brolin. There is no character development to speak of, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. And the one character we do get to know a little, Tommy Lee Jones, is pretty well the same man at the end of the film that he was in the beginning. His voice-over to open the movie is one of the best I’ve heard since Morgan Freeman’s in the Shawshank Redemption.

Also anecdotal are Stephen Root as a crime boss, Ana Reader as a woman by a pool in a hotel, and Kelly MacDonald as Brolin’s wife. In the book, Reader’s character has a much larger part, but the end for her is the same. MacDonald is great in her small amount of screen time, and her final confrontation with Chigurh is as chilling a moment as any I’ve seen. The photography of the country is unbelievable, making that scenery itself a character in the film, just like the Coen’s previous best work, Fargo. The movie deals with many moral questions without delivering answers. The choices men make, the questionable morality of each character, the inevitability of fate, and ruminates endlessly on human nature. Sometimes this rumination comes directly from Jones’ words, other times out of the camera as we are left to ponder the consequences of the previous scene while the next one begins to play out. No Country For Old Men is bleak, entertaining, and virtually flawless. Cormac McCarthy wrote a tremendous novel, which was translated into a brilliant screenplay, which was then transformed into an absolute genius movie. To say something is as good as Fargo is something I might have considered ridiculous five years ago. No Country For Old Men is as good as Fargo. And therefore it is better than any other movie of the past ten years. Rent it, buy it, whatever. Just do it now.