DVD Watch: No Country For Old Men

Another thing about having a fever for a few days - it makes one want to just sit back and watch movies. So I've got like a few of these to catch up on.

No Country For Old Men is a Coen Brothers movie which is Swedish for "I was going to see it sooner or later". Country is an excellent outing for them and a pretty fresh one as well. It doesn't have the odd sense of humor or the usual cast of characters ... no this is a slow and thoughtful movie adapted from a Cormac McCarthy (The Road) novel.

The plot and cadence are about as far from mainstream as you can get. When you think you have your bearings on where the film is going, it likes to duck and dive in another direction. These aren't twists, per se, they aren't setups which are later revealed to be tricks or anything - it's just that Country is set in a brutal fictional world where nearly any character could show up and find a way to kill another at some given point. Javier Bardem is simply chilling as the "psychopath with his own code" and the Brothers milk ever ounce of his creepiness through the movie.

The flipside, of course, is that Country doesn't have anything remotely resembling a Hollywood ending and if anyone was expecting a huge climatic flourish - well, feel forewarned. However, missing this film because there's no explosion to clear everything up in the end would simply be a crime against movies themselves.