'No Country for Old Men'

(link) - the creeper himself

Coming back from the L'Abri conference, we ran into a blizzard going through Iowa and had to stay the night in Mason City, Iowa. For about two months I considered going to Iowa State University to get a masters in Journalism and Mass Communication. If this weekend did anything for me, it convinced me that I made the right decision. Iowa is like a lame version of Minnesota (with its northern beauty and 10,000 lakes) and Missouri (honestly, the roads and scenery drastically improved once we crossed the state line). It's a barren wasteland (thanks to Patrick for the literary reference mid-car ride) and the state patrolmen are jerks.

In the Best Western in Mason City, the two cars from Veritas who were stranded there rented a $10 pay-per-view movie and we voted for 'No Country for Old Men.' It was awesome. And, because we were all feeling intellectual and analytical from L'Abri, we had a terrific discussion afterwards. Sorry for y'all who haven't seen it, but I will discuss the plot line.

We decided that Anton (the villain killer creepy dude) personified evil, Tommy Lee Jones's character (the sheriff) was 'good', and Josh Brolin (who is actually Barbara Streisand's STEP SON, not natural son - "Bad uterus, bad!"), who played Llewellyn, was the everyman- somewhere in the middle. There were some really good points made, and the discussion made the movie a lot richer for me.

However, I think Slate.com's commentary on the movie and soundtrack (here) sheds some helpful light:

"No Country is a different matter. Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Tom Bell starts off declaring, "The crime you see now, it's hard to take its measure." By the end of the story he's given up trying to measure evil because he's been defeated by it, professionally and spiritually. Bell is a new kind of character for the Coens, a once-strong man whose pain we understand and care about. We feel for him—even though nearly everything in the movie, including the soundtrack, is radically underplayed. (This being a Coen movie, the violence is not underplayed.)"

I forgot that the Coen bros. directed 'Fargo' - I think the movies look very similar.

I need to rent Magnolia.

More from the article on 'No Country for Old Men':
"The last thing we hear before the credits is the wind and the ticking of a clock. It's not just about death. It's the desert that is eternal and doesn't care about all the human messes played out on its surface, and the wind that will outlast us all."..."The Coens, in their often quirky and passionless way, still have always seemed to be searching for something eternal, and surely in No Country for Old Men they get closer to eternity, in both its human and inhuman dimensions, than ever."

whoa. I am so glad there are people out there who know more about this stuff than I do.