Or, How can you not love a movie that uses the phrase "colossal goatfuck"?
the brothers coen make me happy and joyful. they can never go wrong. proof of this is how they turned javier bardem, who was god damned fucking awful on cien años de soledad, and squeezed a wonderful performance out of him. they turned him into hollywood gold, i say! out with the fucking awful spicglish accent, out with the fucking awful pantomime; in with the fixed, unblinking stare and hair so perfect that it's possibly the scariest thing in the whole film.
where to begin, where to begin... i say no country for old men is sweeney todd the demon barber of fleet street's evil twin. evil in that it is the complete opposite, twin in that it is exactly the same. no country for old men is just as violent, but it is so much more elegant, even coy, about it. whereas sweeney todd glorifies and celebrates every slashed throat (and by jove, what a good job of celebrating it does!), no country wallows in violence's aftermath(s): from the beautiful bootheel skidmarks on linoleum flooring to the piles of dusty, dead mexicans (evil, evil mexicans), to Javier Bardem casually checking his soles on his way out of Kelly Macdonald's suburban heaven. Gore never looked so pacifying. Perhaps thiss just a ploy to avoid the dreaded nc-17 rating, but it was one that tickled me in all the right places. did anyone keep a head count during either movie? i'd love to see which one scored the most murders. really.
Todd is so gray and gloomy it makes you wish for night-vision goggles, Country is so colorful and luminous it makes you wish for sunglasses. And while each second of Todd is chockfull of glorious sound both vocal and instrumental, Country almost qualifies as a silent film: a painfully sound-produced silent film. There really is no soundtrack, is there? It may be my generous imagination, but i don't think Bardem gets a word in for the first 45 minutes or so. But when he does, you just can't help but fall in love with him (even if it's only out of fear that he take his cattle execution airgun to your temple). Just like you can't help but fall in love with every other character in the film. Especially helpless Kelly Macdonald (then again i've loved her ever since gosford park, but that's a whole other issue). I was horribly horribly disappointed when Woody Harrelson pulled a Janet Leigh on us all and got killed on his third scene, just when you thought that evil, evil Javier Bardem had met his match. It hurt, but it was for our own good, remember. The Coens know, the Coens care.
The tagline of this movie should be survival of the fittest, or hierba mala nunca muere. And just when you think the film can't get any better, in roll the credits, and (spoiler alert) they are in Trajan Pro, the best typeface like ever! G-d is in the details, indeed.
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