I think pretty much everyone saw it before me so I won’t spend a ton of time explaining the finer points.
- First and foremost, the dialogue was just plain great. It was so simple and yet so powerful. There were actually one or two times I had to pause the movie to grasp the weight of the dialogue… and it wasn’t like they were written as purposeful epiphanies.
- Josh Brolin and Kelly Macdonald were extremely convincing and the interaction between them provided the measured amount of comic release necessary to break things up. Brolin’s character was just plain badass and I would have never thought Macdonald was a native Scot with a thick, thick accent (clip from Trainspotting; I was obsessed with it in college and didn’t recognize her). I’m looking forward to seeing her in the big screen adaptation of Palahniuk’s Choke.
- I’m going to disagree with Mike about the ending. While it was most definitely atypical, I’m not sure it was detrimental to the film. I don’t know the reasons he didn’t like it but I do know that sometimes I like being left to wonder what happened. I appreciated the unanswered questions and I can’t even think how it could be different without ending up as a cliche.
To be honest, I’m not sure what I expected of No Country for Old Men… but it wasn’t what I expected. I liked it, a lot. I thought it was funny, dramatic, crazy, poetic and artistic all in one. Often movies are too smart for their own good but that wasn’t the case here. The Coen Brothers had just the right balance of brains and brawn to make the movie work. One of the better ones I’ve seen in awhile.
I read Choke on my trip, and wasn’t super impressed. The weird sex stuff kept it afloat, and of course the twists and turns are akin to Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Hopefully the movie turns out good.
If you’ve read Fight Club, it’s actually a lot like it. It’s decent but without the deeper, effed-up characters there really wouldn’t anything of substance. I’d consider Palahniuk one of my more favored writers but his books never really “get there” it seems.
FWIW, I think the Fight Club movie was actually better than the book but a large part of that was Pitt.