The (Now-Overrated) ILX Top 100 Films of the 2000s Poll Results

No Country For Old Men is well made I guess but it's ultimately kinda glib and doesn't really say or do anything that interesting except for the villain, who is basically the Terminator with a funny haircut.

ya, I kind of thought that the point of the character was that he was an irredeemable creepy whose storytelling function was to distract you from the level of pathological awfulness inherent in DDL's character until the confrontation at the end of the movie, where your sympathies are fully and rudely inverted

I liked this movie so much more than "Magnolia", it was kind of amazing.

(btw: "the character" = Paul Dano in TWBB)

xp nakhcivan - because it was an adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel.

TWBB was my #1

(that was a direct quote from "QT," Yakuza Fanboy)

You sure do a lot of research into a movie you never plan on seeing, then.

ya, I kind of thought that the point of the character was that he was an irredeemable creepy whose storytelling function was to distract you from the level of pathological awfulness inherent in DDL's character until the confrontation at the end of the movie, where your sympathies are fully and rudely inverted

that's probably right, if anything the oddity of the performance adds something to what is basically a cipher for 'organised religion!'

"(that was a direct quote from "QT," Yakuza Fanboy)"

Oh so let him do your thinking for you now. That explains a lot.

i don't have a very idealized vision of what ilx's demographic or sensibility is to be actually disappointed or shocked by any of these placements, but somehow i really hoped y'all movie buffs would find a lot more stuff to champion than these Gritty Epics of the '08 Oscars

You sure do a lot of research into a movie you never plan on seeing

guy being unavoidably in the media for 2 weeks in October = "research"

I didn't vote, tho; I'm just periodically shooting the shit about some of the flicks on here.

i went into twbb not really too excited about the whole thing, because tbh i don't really like PTA's other films *that* much (magnolia annoys me, punch-drunk love is forgettable for me, boogie nights is entertaining but just makes me want to watch goodfellas, hard eight isn't bad but doesn't really do much for me) but i loved this film for the most part. totally fantastic, totally OTT, & DDL was insane in the best possible manner.

where your sympathies are fully and rudely inverted

see - the problem I had with TWBB, and which I have with all of this director's movies, is that I don't have sympathy for any of his characters, because there is this, for lack of a better phrase, posturing postmodern distance that isn't played for enough laughs to be funny.

I'm with you guys that Dano doesn't come off as mythic as Daniel Day Lewis, but that's cause he doesn't have a mythic face! The man can't help that he looks like a venture bros.

lol

i love that the last scene turns into an episode of itchy and scratchy, too.

It's as if we're supposed to have sympathy for his characters because we've seen enough other movies with similar characters that are sympathetic/that make you actually care about them.

Now I'm kinda hoping that out of the 4 movies to come, Children of Men will be the winner. That one felt more fresh and daring and innovative to me than ESotSM or Mulholland Drice (haven't seen No Country for Old Men). MD is a fine film, but there isn't anything in it Lynch hadn't already done (sometimes better) in the 80s/90s, so it doesn't much feel like "best of the 00s" to me.

sympathy for film characters is overrated

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

i never got the impression we were supposed to have sympathy for anyone but his bastard in a basket, and i did, even though he's a rich oil tycoon!

Sympathy For Film Characters Is Overrated fav Chan Wook-Park.

Dano definitely the worst thing in TWBB. Very distracting. Dude was just severely out of his depth actor-wise.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/nocountry.png

Dear sweet Jesus is this good. I just saw it this morning and I'm resisting the urge to run back to the theater right now.

The one thing about this film that's been pissing people off is the ending, in which all the building tension dissipates (rather than climaxing). The more I think about it, the more I really love the Coen's desicison to keep a pivotal death offscreen. It allows us to judge their fate more objectively, and to be shocked by the matter-of-factness of their demise.

And the lack of music. One Mariachi joke and like two stings in the whole film. I can't believe how fucking awesome this is.

― Cosmo Vitelli

iuvd it - unsurprisingly mccarthy's dialog is perfect for the screen.

strange i was totally at the mercy of suspense for the whole thing, then after i realized the pace and style was calming - a seeming contradiction that somehow totally made sense - quite unique!

and javier bardem is is the a++++++ dog as usual.

― jhøshea

another thing I liked about this movie was all the silent scenes of Llewelyn and Chigurh doing stuff with their hands .... hiding the satchel, cleaning a bullet wound, cutting up tent poles ..... reminded me of those Hemingway stories that are all guy builds a fire and ties fly-fishing lures (not exactly a huge revelation since McCarthy gets the Hemingway thing all the time)

― dmr

I saw it this afternoon. So much of it was exactly as I had pictured it in my head when I read the book in January. Lots of it felt very Coen brothers even though the film as a whole didn't feel a whole lot like their others to me.

I thought that Sheriff Bell eating the exact same breakfast in two different scenes did a lot for the character - he's the same dude, doing the same stuff, while all this other craziness happens around him. I thought it was a nice touch.

― joygoat

I think that, overall, this movie really captured McCormack's tone and mood - I was especially impressed by the way in which they nailed the landscape of the opening scenes so well. The silhouetted images of the hunters coming upon Llewellyn's truck and slashing the tires was just great - faceless threats. The subsequent chase was alright, but could have gone on a bit longer. Still, they had more pressing matters...

If Bardem doesn't get nominated for an Academy Award for this, I will be so disappointed. Chigur was just so over-the-top awesome, but also full of little touches that drove home that, if you've met this guy, you're probably dead - the one that really springs to mind is the crazed look he gives Woody Harrelson during their scene in the hotel room; A sort of ecstatic glee in the way things are unfolding.

Tommy Lee Jones gets into this role like few others that I've seen - and it could have been BAD. When you read the book, both his interactions with other people - his deputy and his wife, most notably, and Mrs. Moss - and his monologues, you get this sense that, if read with one type of accents or emphasis, these parts could be horribly hackneyed and cliched. But, upon thinking about it, that's kind of the point - Jones IS a cliche. And his time, at least from his standpoint, is over. Given that understanding, I enjoyed Jones' performance as a pretty nuanced and subdued one. He makes all the right judgment calls and does all the things his job requires him to do - but you never lose this going-through-the-motions feeling. Just kind of tired of doing the right thing, but unwilling to stop.

And Josh Brolin was just great. A plain-spoken guy who gets caught in an undercurrent of life that he has no place being in, and no way of getting out of, but will be damned if he gives up. Despite having a rapidly-widening understanding of what was going down, he's still fighting this great fight, and attempting to get to the end point where he's rich with his wife. But, and this is my one major beef with the movie version, once he steps off the straight and narrow and accepts the invitation of the girl to "have a few beers," his end is sealed. I liked the way that the book dealt with it more - entirely chaste, and ultimately not really affecting the outcome of the story. Once he threw his hat in the ring, there was no way he was getting out alive.

― B.L.A.M.

Finally saw in its last days in NYC theaters ... very good, considering it had nothing esp new to say about crime, violence etc. As for tipsy's "reactionary" accusation, I think they mostly blunted that tendency in the book, most strongly with the geezer saying to Jones at the end "You're not seeing anything new" or whatev (is that even in the novel?).

Bardem was splendid tho he was playing a "ghost"/symbol not a human. The chuckle with "Everybody says the same thing" was perfect.

― Dr Morbius

'No Country for Old Men' - The anticipation thread

#4

No Country For Old Men
Joel and Ethan Coen
2007
United States
(1314 points, 52 votes, 1 first place)

^^^basically an amazing film, on another day could have been my #1

Guess 'The Ladykillers' isn't going to make it.

The most sympathetic character obv is his son; I should have put in a caveat re: DDL's character is that he isn't all that sympathetic to begin with and gets progressively worse as the movie goes on, but in opposition to the crazy budget-Cilian-Murphy preacher he definitely comes across as the lesser of two evils, pretty much up to the last 20 or so minutes of the movie.

Also I am using "sympathy" as shorthand for "understanding their story/viewpoint", not so much "feeling sorry for" although a little bit of "placing yourself in their shoes"; the entire film invites you into this dude's world, making it unpleasant but not entirely alien right up to that last confrontation, which is like "um okay never mind,you are even crazier than I thought".

xp: No Country was also fucking fantastic

no country is so damn good

xp - it isn't just sympathy, in terms of liking a character or having warm feelings about them, it's a larger concept of caring, finding them interesting. They just seem like cardboard cut-outs or meta references to other things, in a knowing "aren't we all so clever" kinda way that I really don't feel like participating in.

Everyone talks so much about how awesome Bardem was (and he was) that it kind of gets glossed over how awesome Brolin was.

there were things I really liked about no country, and things I didn't

the latter mostly involve latebloomer's chigurh = terminator w/ bad haircut sentiment

Everyone is awesome in NCFOM. Acting is stellar across the board.

No Country had great imagery/atmosphere but I'll cop to being one of the slobs who didn't really get the ending or the subtext and still don't really feel like I understood or particularly like it now no matter how much I read about it and try to catch up

what meta-references? like Dano is supposed to be Billy Sunday? Stuff like that?

Woody Harrelson is underrated in No Country.

Really, really loved the ending.

is this a lot of people's favorite Coen movie or would it still take a backseat to a lot of their earlier work?

I didn't vote for NCFOM btw. For some reason I felt like I only had room for one serious 2007 film and I decided to give the points to TWBB for no good reason.

Suspect I loved No Country that bit more because it came at a point in the Coens' career when I thought they'd completely lost it. Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were the kind of nadir you don't usually come back from.

xpost Please elaborate on all the knowing references that are supposed to make TWBB so meta? It didn't strike me as that kind of movie at all - it certainly didn't figure into my enjoyment of it.

for a supposedly realistic take on violence, crime, and evil, they relied a lot on a superhuman character's ability to find somebody anywhere no matter what

like if brolin jumped on a rocket to the moon bardem would just be waiting in a crater anyway

I like Paul Dano more for how he seems to be a genuinely odd person rather than for his great acting range (he's kind of like a younger Christopher Walken in that regard), but I do think he was kind of a weak link in TWBB. But some of the blame must go to the director/writer, I think. He was better and just as odd in his smaller role in Taking Woodstock, for example.

CHIGURH
Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.

PROPRIETOR
...Where you want me to put it?

CHIGURH
Anywhere not in your pocket. Or it'll get mixed in with the
others and become just a coin. Which it is.

I love love that "which it is"--makes the movie for me.

"is this a lot of people's favorite Coen movie or would it still take a backseat to a lot of their earlier work?"

My favorite Coen brothers film is the best one I watched recently (so its A Serious Man right now.)

i liked how he was terminator with bad haircut!

it took so many xposts to get that posted damn

Now I'm kinda hoping that out of the 4 movies to come, Children of Men will be the winner. That one felt more fresh and daring and innovative to me than ESotSM or Mulholland Drice (haven't seen No Country for Old Men). MD is a fine film, but there isn't anything in it Lynch hadn't already done (sometimes better) in the 80s/90s, so it doesn't much feel like "best of the 00s" to me.

― Tuomas, Thursday, February 11, 2010 4:05 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

given the high placement of Adaptation and fkn Synechdoche getting in the list i'm starting to get the sinking feeling that Eternal Sunshine is our #1

"for a supposedly realistic take on violence, crime, and evil"

Whuh?

is this a lot of people's favorite Coen movie or would it still take a backseat to a lot of their earlier work?

its not my favorite, I rate their comedies higher than their WE R SERIOUS crime thrillers, pretty much

"Supposedly realistic" is not something you can say about Cormac McCarthy.

"for a supposedly realistic take on violence, crime, and evil,"

sez who? It's pure mythos, just less cartoony than what you guys usu adore (thank Christ).

altho Dorian totally OTM re: it being their "comeback" film. was seriously considering writing them off altogether