Feb 25
Really? No Country For Old Men is the Best Picture of the year? Really?
Questions for my readership:
1. Did any of you see the movie…?
2. Did you actually like it?
3. Have any of you read the book?
4. If so, did YOU like the movie?
I have to be honest with you here, I watched No Country on my computer last week and I almost turned it off five or six times. I toughed it out, though, and managed to keep watching, if only in the foolish hope that it, “might start getting good” in a little bit.
I kept waiting for the movie to get good all the way until the credits started rolling.
Admittedly I might be biased here, and that is why I am asking for your opinions. See, I took my time reading the book by Cormac McCarthy, and then, not until I had finished the novel, watched the film. I suppose that will always color your judgment. But the thing is this: I didn’t really even like the book that much. Like The Road, No Country For Old Men is merely a mildly interesting story told in a mildly interesting way. Equal parts boring and… not boring (I can’t go so far as to say ‘exciting’). A few individual scenes in the book had a very powerful effect, but reading the rest felt like homework. The movie was the exact same way.
And if that is goal, then yes, the movie is brilliant! The Coen brothers managed to perfectly capture the stark contrast of boredom and excitement. It is just too bad that the movie, like the book, decided to use 95% boring and 5% excitement… instead of the other way around. Tommy Lee Jones walks around the countryside for thirty minutes in silence… and then somebody gets shot in the face.
And speaking of silence, I actually laughed when I saw that No Country was nominated for Best Sound and Best Sound Editing. Although, to be fair, I suppose that the complete lack of sound in the movie was impressive. It takes a particular variety of genius to loop the “Footsteps on gravel” track for two hours and then throw in a gunshot every twenty minutes. Give that dude an Oscar!! I don’t remember exactly but I think that the sample clip they used in the Academy Awards broadcast was literally a guy closing the door to his truck. Maybe it was my Bose speakers, but it was like that truck door was closing inside my living room. Bravo, sound technicians! You truly are Hollywood wizards.
And finally, because this post already feels incredibly bitter, I can’t let this post end without mentioning that the Coen brothers’ Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay is the biggest crock of shit, well, maybe ever. Again, my opinion may be biased because I finished reading the novel literally hours before watching the movie, but so far as I could tell the novel already WAS a screenplay. This is something that you can’t really understand unless you read the book yourselves, but Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country in a way that it is very seriously only a few punctuation marks short of being a workable script. The Coen brothers had to do even less work than the sound technician. It is an injustice of the most criminal sort to compare the Coens’ task with, oh, let’s say that of Peter Jackson.
And maybe this goes to the heart of why I didn’t like the movie. Having read the book there was absolutely no point in ever seeing the movie. The movie version adds absolutely nothing to the story (aside from taking the badass killer that I had pictured in my mind and giving him a seriously brutal haircut). The movie just took the screenplay/novel and made it visual… adding nothing, but somehow actually removing several crucial plot points. Having just read the book the movie actually didn’t even make much sense to me. Did it actually make sense to you? I don’t want to give spoilers here for those that haven’t seen the movie (go out and watch it right away!!), but there are MAJOR pieces of the plot that are left unexplained and unshown, and I really can’t help but feel that their absence changes the message of the story. I am really not even sure if there IS a message to the movie.
I dunno, maybe this is just a case of me disliking a movie for being based on a book. But like I said before, I didn’t really even like the book. The novel has a decent overall message, conveyed through two or three brilliant scenes, but the movie, to me, is almost completely irredeemable. Yet it is high on a lot of peoples’ Top Movies of the Year list, and now it has gone and taken down Best Picture. I feel like I have completely missed the point somewhere along the way. I feel like I was watching an entirely different movie than everyone else.
Can anybody explain it to me?
(relevant side note: Fargo is among my least favorite movies of all time… )