the acting bothered me. the grandma was a fucking joke.

really pretty and deliberate though.

Get dog costumes wrote:Spoilers.As it is, it comes across as either lazy because they couldn't come up with an appropriate death scene, or that they just weren't sure what kind of movie they were trying to make.

i think when filmmakers adapt non-famous books, they feel more license can be taken because there aren't as many fans of the original text to rail at them whenever anything's different...

but since cormac mccarthy is pleeeenty famous, it seems (i haven't read the book) that they tried to stick really close to the book. in an interview with them i saw on youtube, one of them says "the off-screen deaths are the ones that in the book are 'off-screen'" or something like that... obviously there's no "screen" in the book but i imagine they mean the death is treated in a similar intentionally frustrating anticlimactic fashion.

spoilers.




anton didn't kill moss. in the book it is "off screen" but he is not killed by anton. that's one thing i liked about the book and the movie. the realism of stuff like that. it'd be like if in Die Hard a bad guy died from cancer. perhaps less satisfying dramatically but easier to accept realistically.

Wheely wrote:

jason smith wrote:Great movie... Ended perfectly. I like how nothing was really left untied, outcomes just weren't explicitly stated. That was the gist of the tension throughout.

Wheely wrote:To expand on that, the dude had conversations with every character except Jones. And since they were in the same room together, and he seemed to relish these conversations, why not another?

He was in the hotel room next door. Both rooms had their locks punched out. Tommy Lee Jones picked the door on the left.. I think it was the left... a good choice.

Ah-ha! I missed that both rooms had their locks punched out. But why was he in the other room? He retrieved the cash from room #1, so why go into room #2? Anyway, thanks for the info. I need to see this movie again.

SPOILER:

My brother has an early "for your consideration" DVD of this movie. We saw it in the theater then a few days later watched the dvd and went over it frame by frame. Bardem and Jones can see each other in the reflection of the barrel in the empty lock. When jones throws open the door, bardem is not behind the door. It's a mystery, but the implication is that bardem is in the room, but when jones goes in, somehow, bardem is gone.

the big question we had, was that in the second motel where brolin gets killed, the vent looks like it isn't large enough to hold the big case of money. so, since it is implied that bardem is searching for the money (the dime on the floor) you don't know if he has it or not. there is also scrape marks inside the vent.

We also don't really know if the reason why the mexicans flee so fast when the shoot out happens, if it was because of possibly bardem was there too? One detail that blew our minds was the transponder in the case was hidden inside cut out one dollar bills instead of hundreds. this is something you would do if you were truly double crossing someone, to save several hundreds from being butchered, but for a movie to have this much attention to detail is pretty impressive. Of course, it may have been in the book...

Get dog costumes wrote:As it is, it comes across as either lazy because they couldn't come up with an appropriate death scene, or that they just weren't sure what kind of movie they were trying to make.

So far off the mark here. For one, it's portrayed almost exactly as it's written in the Cormac McCarthy book. So if you want to accuse anyone of laziness, accuse him. I think the Coens were pretty damn confident about "the kind of movie they were trying to make": a Cormac McCarthy adaptation.

Why it's off-screen: since much of the movie concerns the inevitability of death, I think it's important NOT to see it. It avoids teasing the audience with "if only he had ducked..." kinds of thoughts. But that's the point: nothing was going to stop Moss's death. Of course he was going to die. That's what the book is about.

Also, it was an opportune time to switch the focus to Bell. Make no mistake: it's HIS movie. If there was some big shoot-out with Moss, then everything afterwards with Bell would feel more like a bloated, and drawn-out denouement.

SPOILERS
In the book, Moss picks up a young hitchhiker and rents separate rooms for them in the hotel. That character is condensed to "woman by the pool" in the film. Anyway, he is a little flirty with her but it's pretty clear his intentions are honorable. He gets killed (in the book) when one of the Mexicans has a gun to the girl's head and Moss lays down his weapon. He takes a couple of rounds to the mouth and the girls gets killed too. Ed Tom tries to tell Moss' wife that he didn't think Moss had been unfaithful with the hitchhiker, but she won't speak to him. So she goes to her death thinking that about her husband. The scene with her and Chigurh in her grandmother's house also comes off in the book as more business as usual for him and much less "don't give me this philosophy bullshit, it's all you, just get it over with."

One thing in the book I kind of took exception to. McCarthy waxes eloquent after the murder of one character, talking about how all his memories, of his mother's face, etc., dripped down the wall behind him with his brains. It's really kind of an interesting and moving little paragraph, but the person he chooses to give it to is Woody Harrelson's character, a hitman, who comes off as more of a scumbag in the book. I suppose it would have been out of keeping with tone and theme to have had it been for Moss' wife or someone with a little less blood on his/her hands, but it rubbed me wrong. On the other hand I have not won a Pulitzer yet, so what do I know?

iembalm wrote:SPOILERS
In the book, Moss picks up a young hitchhiker and rents separate rooms for them in the hotel. That character is condensed to "woman by the pool" in the film. Anyway, he is a little flirty with her but it's pretty clear his intentions are honorable. He gets killed (in the book) when one of the Mexicans has a gun to the girl's head and Moss lays down his weapon. He takes a couple of rounds to the mouth and the girls gets killed too.

This is true but in the book, we don't see this either. A cop tells Bell about it. So even in the book, it's "off-screen."

Get dog costumes wrote:As it is, it comes across as either lazy because they couldn't come up with an appropriate death scene, or that they just weren't sure what kind of movie they were trying to make.

I liked it that way. How did Brolin die? Who cares. Who got the money? Doesn't matter. In the end, we all end up like Tommy Lee Jones. That's what I took out of the movie. I saw it as giving up a shorter plot arc for a much longer plot arc, and while that robbed me of the simple gratification I'm used to in the movie theater, it makes a much greater point upon reflection.

Best new movie I've seen this year, hands down.
(only new movie I've seen this year, sorry)

I agree that they give up "a shorter plot arc for a much longer plot arc," but a "simple gratification" is not all one gets from the former. I liked how the movie drew me into rooting for the Brolin character, even though he's not righteous in any way. Compared with his opponent, he's far less evil, but they both say some funny lines and have independent screen time that makes them interesting. Moss isn't necessarily a hero, he's a guy who finds a bunch of money and tries to make off with it. And we don't all end up like Tommy Lee Jones, some of us end up like Moss or Moss's wife.

If the movie concerns the inevitability of death, it's important to see it, especially in the case of the person who poses the greatest challenge to the idea: Moss, the only man capable of wounding and evading Anton. I'm less convinced of inevitability if the reason the possible exception ends up dying isn't given.

I thought the movie was more about how people deal with great evil. That's what made every one of Anton's interactions, especially those with clerks and Moss's wife, really interesting - and worth considering in aggregate.

If Moss is just another guy who's eventually going to die, and the movie is about Bell, they sure show a lot of details about the conflict between Moss and Anton. To show the nitty-gritty of all of their meetings and near-meetings, and then to omit Moss's death, seems dumb to me. Then again, now that I know that Moss isn't killed by Anton, the omission makes more sense - it isn't directly part of the Moss/Anton story. I don't like "that's what happened in the book" defenses, though. It's worth discussing how faithfully a book was adapted, but there are also some things that work in a book that don't work on screen, and vice versa, and those things are also up for discussion.

I have now officially seen this film 3 times with 3 different groups of people and we have all collectively felt our minds blown. What a top-notch film...incredible still.