No Country for Me

I watched "No Country for Old Men" last night. I had high hopes going in, which is always a bad sign for a first date with me and a movie.

To start, every critic nationwide has been having a joygasm over this flic. Don't believe me? Google "no country for old men review" and you'll probably find no more than 2 reputable critics that gave it a bad review. Now, I'm not one of those people who goes by star ratings and what critcs say about any form of entertainment. I think I've got a pretty keen eye for good movies, and the amount of wasted college education I spent in lit & film classes reassures my confidence that I can pick apart elements and styles and themes and whatever directors are trying to convey. But, I think if there's 100 people who have studied the same studies I've studied and read the same readings I've read, and 98 of them say a movie gets 9 thumbs up, there's not much reason I should feel any different.

Such is not the case. I can say what I enjoyed, which was the overall idea of evil being unstoppable and a necessary part of life. That's a realistic view that doesn't often get expressed without hiding deeply buried in some buckets-o-blood splatterfest hellbent on grossing people out of the theater. I also enjoyed the cinematography. What a perfect backdrop the barren and flat Texas landscape provides for a cat-and-mouse menage a trois between the film's major characters.

Joel and Ethan, I just didn't like it, and for that, I'm sorry. I feel I have to apologize because of how much I love "O Brother" and "Lebowski." I've also been pining to see this since I first heard "new film from the Coen brothers" booming out of my speakers. Overall, I just thought it was boring. Sure, Javier Bardem was the evil-personified "unstoppable force," but he didn't have any depth or flare to his homicidal persona. He just killed people. Yeah, there's one scene where he calls a guy "friendo" and two that death is preceded by sort of a catch-speech-phrase and a coin toss, but not enough to make me and my friends go around quoting it like Eziekel 25:17. I really don't want to go rehashing why I thought it was boring, I'll just end up singling out Josh Brolin or Tommy Lee Jones or different pivotal points in the movie and just repeat myself. I think it was just boring. Now I'm afraid to watch "There Will Be Blood." I've heard so many good things.

On a weird side note, anytime I'm writing a text message, my T9 thinks that when i type "by" I'm typing "Byzantine." How often does that enter an average text message?