No Country For Old Men

The new film from the Coen Brothers 'No Country For Old Men', is an adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy. It is a perfect choice for them. I am sure they must have chosen his novel because it is so close to their usual style.

Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out hunting somewhere near the Mexican border when he stumbles across a host of dead bodies. Further investigation reveals a drug deal gone wrong complete with a truck full of drugs and bag containing $2M in cash.

His mistake is to make off with the cash and so from originally being the hunter, he suddenly becomes the hunted, as he is pursued by several interested parties. Chief among these is a unconventional hit man with pageboy haircut, who has been hired to find him. This man, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), has two weapons, a silenced shotgun, and pneumatic air gun normally used on cattle. He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake as he relentlessly pursues Moss.



For some time Moss evades him but you just know it’s going to end in tears, or rather blood, at the hands of the clearly unstoppable and psychopathic Anton. He is a killer without any humanity, no one gets in his way. Even being involved in a car crash fails to stop him. When he is shot by Moss we get a great scene of him fixing the bullet wound in a leg, which reminds me of Terminator but with extra blood.

Meanwhile the local ageing sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) is supposed to be chasing them but doesn't really want to. This is ‘no country for old men’ and he doesn’t really want to get involved.

The drugs people also send another hit-man, the cocky Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) who Anton doesn’t want on his patch, so he gets rid of him too.

If there’s a moral to this film, I guess it’s just that the money isn't worth it but Moss quickly goes beyond the point where Anton would let him return the money and live. Anton offers to spare his wife if he returns it, but not him, and there is no chance of negotiation. Moss chooses to have one last try to keep his life and the money. Although Moss’s motives are mainly greed, you still feel yourself rooting for him.



The film builds the suspense but then just as you're gripped by the two main characters and their riveting duel, things change. In true Coen’s style, events you would think to be crucial to see, are not shown and Moss winds up dead but you don’t see it happen. Later when Anton finds his wife and tells her he’s going to kill her because he's promised her husband, you presume she winds up death but again you don’t see it.

The film is a very well-crafted thriller, tense with moments of humour but also brutally violent. Far gorier than Sweeney Todd. While the plot itself isn't too complicated, the characters are. I was gripped for every moment of it, every time the truly frightening Anton is on screen you feel nervous of what he's going to do next. My only criticism would be that after the breakneck pace of the first hour and a half the last bit plodded a little.

Obviously there is no happy ending. Well there really wasn’t an ending at all but then again, how do you expect a Coen brother's film to end. They leave you with a load of dangled threads that you expect to be neatly tied up but as is often the case with their films, it never quite works out that way.

We collect my parents, in far easier traffic this time, and head home, for a small drop of white wine and a slightly larger drop of red.

Sweeney Todd

Tonight it's 'Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street', which, half an hour before the start, they are queuing down the stairs to get into see. We go in the bar and wait for the commotion to die down and enjoy a pint of Legend.

Oddly Daughter has been against us going to see Sweeney Todd, although we've been struggling to understand why. I think it's something to do with her being a big Johnny Depp fan and this, because it's very violent, has been classified as '18' so she can't see it. So I think she expects us to wait four years until she is allowed to see it. With hindsight, it appears she's probably been tipped off about how dull this film is and was just trying to save us from it. We should have listened.

The story itself is pretty interesting. After being sent away for fifteen years for a crime he claims he didn't commit, Benjamin Barker returns to London with the help of a young sailor. Now calling himself Sweeney Todd he wants revenge on the judge who sent him away. He returns to his old barber shop where Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) now runs a shop selling 'the worst pies in London'. Todd believes his wife is dead and the judge now has his Daughter, Johanna as his ward. To complicate matters the young sailor he came home with, is trying to seduce Johanna, and wants Sweeney to help him in this quest.

Mrs. Lovett convinces Todd to resurrect his old barber shop and after a 'shave-off' with a chap called Pirelli, played eccentrically by Sasha Baron Cohen, he establishes himself as the best barber in London. This is one of the better moments of the film. Depp's shaving blade is a whir, almost as if reprising his role as Edward Scissorshands, as he wins the contest. I think there was supposed to be humour in the film but the only titter from the audience came at the hands of Baron Cohen during this screen.

His reputation established, Todd gets some customers but instead of give them a close shave, he slits their throats and Lovett uses their bodies to make her meat pies, which she then sells to her unsuspecting customers. The gratuitous throat slitting, and there is an awful lot of it, is overdone, there's too much ketchup and it's not very scary. We've seen it all before but the main problem with the film is that it's a musical but without any tunes or singers. The songs are all mundane, unremarkable ballads and everything is sung in monotone, so much so that a lot of it is unintelligible. Depp is clearly no singer and nor is Bonham Carter. The 'singing' ruined what could have been a good film because the film's 'look' was amazing. The sets of a grim London were very good, complete with rats. Which reminded me of something funny L read out in the paper this morning, that in London you are never more than five minutes from a Starbucks, or a rat.



So, perhaps if the music had been totally done away with it might have worked, but in this format, for me, it just didn't. The script was padded out with songs rather than with storyline. Right from the start the film was a long slog with little or no tempo to it. L was looking at her watch early on and I didn't blame her.

The best acting came from the ever excellent Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin. Although he appeared to be simply reprising his role as Severus Snape from Harry Potter, which I'm not sure was the intention. Then even he spoiled it by showing his lack of singing skills.

The most chilling scene was at the end, when Bonham Carter gets incinerated in her own oven, that bit was priceless.



Once it was over, the audience just got up and left in silence, hardly anyone commented on it, such was its lack of effect. All rather boring I'm afraid.

Killing Of John Lennon

The film is the story of the events surrounding the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman (Jonas Ball). The film uses Chapman's own words and the actual locations, as it takes us through the lead up to the killing. The film gives you an insight into his background in Honolulu, a place Chapman is desperate to escape and to go and achieve 'something'. He comes over as a man constantly on the edge of madness and it is no surprise that he chooses to do something stupid. Rather than do the sensible thing and top himself, he chooses to kill Lennon for no reason other than that he feels Lennon was a bit of phoney. This chain of though is inspired, somehow, by J.D. Salinger's 'A Catcher in the Rye'. Chapman travels to New York to carry out his task where he even uses the identity of the book's central character, Holden Caulfield. If Lennon was a phoney then what does that make Chapman. He rings an 'escort' to spend his final night of freedom with, as Caulfield does in the book. He assumes he'll manage to meet and kill Lennon the next day, which he duly does when he eventually encounters him at his apartment.



I thought the film dragged a little because Chapman wasn't that interesting and nor was his life. I thought the story lacked depth. There didn’t seem to be much to tell about his background and we find out little about his relationship with his wife. He was just mad but not even interestingly mad. The film carries on after the shooting and actually gets better after the killing.

The film was interesting but not enthralling because it was not easy to identify with Chapman but that may have been because the film kept a good emotional distance from its subject and therefore did not glorify him.

In the end, Chapman just wanted to be famous. At this he succeeds and becomes the world's first celebrity stalker. The movie was made without the cooperation of Chapman or Yoko Ono. However I'm sure Chapman would be happy about this film because he wanted fame and this gives him more of it.



'I was nobody, until I killed the biggest somebody on earth'

Lust Caution

I've only seen one of Ang Lee's famous 'masterpieces', that being 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Danger' and that never really thrilled me that much. I've often just not fancied his subject matter but it appears I may have been missing out.

Tonight we see his new film, 'Lust, Caution'. Set in Hong Kong and Shanghai during World War Two at the time of the Japanese occupation. The story follows a young girl called Wang Jiazhi who has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England. She gets asked to take a part in a patriotic play. A symbolic moment as she ends up working for the resistance and lands herself an 'acting job' for life.

The resistance group she gets involved with are not only amateur dramatics but also turn out to be a right bunch of amateurs in the resistance stakes too. They devise an audacious plan to assassinate the powerful Mr. Yee, a Chinese traitor who is working for the Japanese. They wish to remove him but they know little about him, he is very much an enigma, always cautious and always very well protected.

Masquerading as Mrs. Mak, Wang Jiazhi is chosen to infiltrate the social circle of Yee's wife and thereby catch the eye of Mr. Yee. The resistance's plan is to use her as bait to lure him out into the open where he can be assassinated by the others. He however is so cautious, they realise that it is not going to be that simple and Wang has to be prepared to have a full-blown affair with him. To 'train' for this eventuality she gives up her virginity for the good of the cause, practising with a very unappetising fellow resistance member. In the end though the plot goes awry, a botched murder follows, and Wang flees.

Time moves on and in Shanghai three years later she again encounters the same resistance fighters, this time they are better organised, and the plan is revived. Yee is now the head of the secret police in charge of hunting down and interrogating resistance agents.

She has no problem catching his eye and attempts to seduce him but he is already one-step ahead of her. He is not a man to be seduced and instead rips her clothes off her and forces himself on her. Wang's 'training' would not have prepared her for that. It is scenes like this that have already made the film notorious. At first to him, she is just an outlet to release his repressed lust and the pent up anger and frustration of his job and his life. In order to keep his trust, Wang has to go along with these rough fantasies and fulfil her patriotic duty.



The scenes do calm down and don’t to me feel gratuitous or out of place. They enable you get to see inside Yee's character, the bedroom is the only place he relaxes his caution, revels in his lust, and occasionally appears human. These scenes reveal a lot about both of them as their liaison gradually exposes their joint weakness. The same weakness. That they have fallen for each other.



We were very worried that at two and a half hours, the film would be too long and drawn out but no, it did not feel long at all. The story was well paced and used the time well. Also I usually find subtitles hard work. I often find the dialogue too quick and I don't keep up or I forget to read them. This was the case here too for a while but half an hour into the movie the plot became so gripping and the film so mesmerizing, that I forgot about the subtitles because they had become part of the film. Another reason the subtitles got easier was later in the film there were less of them, as less needed to be spoken. The actions were enough. The scenes of the two of them together were fraught with a psychological tension and I found myself holding my breath.



This is a great film with so much to it and huge emotional complexity. It builds to an ending when Yee finally relaxes his caution too much. The end was slightly surprising but all the better for not having a predictable Hollywood ending. I'm sure people who don’t like ‘art’ films will slag off the whole movie and people who don’t have sex will criticise the sex scenes but the first words L spoke after the film were ‘absolutely brilliant’ and she is right.

I have possibly seen the best film of 2008 already and we're only six days into the New Year. If this isn't it then it's going to be one hell of a good year at the movies. Two and a half hours very well spent.