Grumpy old man's comment

Rating: 6/10 (14 March 2008)

This viewpoint contains spoilers.
The day before the Oscars, we went see No Country for Old Men against my instinct to see There Will be Blood first.
The first half of the film was so slow that I was incredibly bored. The outcomes of each situation were treated with such meticulous care that they were obvious long before they happened. Then the film shifted into unpredictability and some obscurity.
The acting was fine, although the businessman? bounty hunter/ DEA agent, (No one is sure who he was) and the wife's mother were played for satire rather than seriousness.
The feel of the eighties in that place (South Texas) were excellent, the cinematography was excellent, the absence of any mood music handled well, (although, as an opera fan and a believer that films inherit more from opera than drama, I found it contributed to first my boredom and then to my emotional detachment), and the editing both in the particular sequences and the way in which sequences were alternated was very good.
The music-less sound, frequently creating mood with the sound of breathing should win an Oscar by itself.
I disliked the film. I was never surprised by it. Unlike my wife, who jumped a few times, I found myself as detached as the psychopath, although reminded at times of the gorier aspects of my work.
God damn-it! I like to be moved by a movie. To laugh and cry and feel an aching sorrow where I cannot control my emotions. A movie should be cathartic in some way, even if by the ridiculous as in Dumb and Dumber.
What a bummer that Saturday was. And then after-wards we had planned to see Juno, but the time was all wrong and we went to a bookshop next door instead, where I skimmed through the novel of the film, which was just as bad, but pretentious as well.
I know it's the film of the book, but I said the opposite as a sort of expression of crankiness.
The film's popularity expands from the notion of moderns that there is no room for we ancients.
The only parts I really enjoyed were with Tommy Lee Jones and Tess Harper and there was not much of them. The wife, Kelly something was also very watchable.
I thought Bardem over hyped, vivid, but not daring and Brolin was just a cypher.
Just one more note about the film: It was memorable.
A feeling of grumpiness about two film makers that I really admire still annoys me. Fargo is an incomparably better film on similar themes.