No Country For Old Men: Movie About What's Not the Plot

No Country for Old Men is a movie about everyone surrounding the plot instead of the plot itself. It opens with Sheriff Tom Bell telling about how times have changed, how the world has become more violent and he has been shaken by people too dark to relate to. From here, we meet Anton Chirugh, sitting on a bench at a police station, his hands cuffed behind him. He pulls the cuffs from beneath his feet, wraps them around the arresting officer's neck and strangles him to the floor until he bleeds out.


The unnoticed, misinterreptation many people have of the movie is it became too distracted from it's plot with the ramblings of Bell and moments less-than-to-the-point with conversations between other characters. But the first death of the movie has a strong impact due to the beginning monologue:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm
afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this
job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet
something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.
He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

This sets a tone around the movie. The slaying by Chigurh has deeper meaning, establishes a selflessness about law enforcement, and makes the act as evil and heartless as the crime first described.

The follows Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon 2 million dollars in cash from a drug deal that went bad in the middle of the West Texas desert. Moss flees with the money, mexican drug dealers and Chigurh chasing after him. Sheriff Bell is concerned for him, knowing the types that are chasing after him, and feels a need to save Moss' wife from the heartbreak of her husband's death. The movie is about characters, for after all, anyone can right shoot-outs, but adapted from Cormac McCarthy's book, the way each character prepares for and acts throughout the shootouts make it something else. Anton is cool and efficient, only expressing pain when hurt, not regret or doubt. He is an instrument. Moss is desperate, but able to rely on people to help him and has the money to get whatever he needs.


The award-winning Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, gave great attention to detail, where you don't know why, but can tell something dark is approaching. Cameras are set up so the man about to run away is in the center of an empty feild, the vast space in every direction. We feel Chigurh will be chasing him by the dark clouds that quickly cover the field towards the man's direction.

Sound and film editing go the extra distance here. The action sequences have detailed sounds, where we hear a sharp, metal squeaking disrupt the silence at one of the most suspenseful scenes. It is the unscrewing of a lightbulb, but the sound was enough to unsettle us, topped with the sudden darkness.


Although the beginning monologue is given to Bell (it can even be argued half his lines are for the sake of avoiding an inner monologue), most of the story is in the simple lines and acting. Dialogue is quick and sharp. One such scene is where Chigurh is talking to a gas station cashier. The cashier noticed his out of state license plates (he killed the owner and stole the car). Chigurh is lost on whether or not to kill the man, and so he flips a coin to determine what he should do. He tells the cashier to call and the cashier slowly realizes whats at stake.

No Country is watched like a book is read. We observe and are left to interpret, to reflect our feelings. There is no chance, or fate left to the closest we have to the hero. This is not the good guy/bad guy action flick, where one should win, but we can tell who is good and who is bad, who we want to win, and who is hit by chance.




The movie ends with a prophetic view, a controntation or realization of what is to come and what has caused all of it. As well as a moral. SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't seen it, stop reading now.


Anyhoo, Moss' wife ends with getting the better of Chigurh in a moral sense. She tells him there is no coin flip, it is only Chigurh who can kill her, no promises he made or left to chance, only Chigurh. She blames him and won't allow him an escape. We're reminded immediately afterwards, Chigurh is still able to fall victim to luck and random events the same as anyone. Bell has two dreams. The first is money corrupts, but he is a good man and therefore money in his dream doesn't matter to him. The second is of his death, which will come. The true beauty is the movie is left to interpretation, but multiple interpretations can arise, many as legitimate as the next. The movie is open, like a story covered in symbols that set a tone, but leave what's behind them for you to guess at.

Brick: Detective Stories Have No Era

Jim Emerson's Scanners : Blog picked the starting scene of Brick, viewed above, as the first mentioned "Moments Out of Time," where they pick the best shots of the year. In this one, (seen above), gumshoe Brandon stares as his former dreamgirl's dead body as she lays in a ditch. The shot cuts back and forth, from her hand to the spread out shot of him looking at her, to his focused stare, then back to her hand. It cuts to the same hand putting a note into Brandon's locker two days ago. We then watch as the film starts from before the ditch, the audience aware to pay attention as we know what's going to happen in 20 minutes.

Brick is not a popular, over the top movie with big names and a famous director. No Oscar went to it.

(Article still under construction...)

Heat: The Cop/Criminal Drama of the 90s

Few movies can have truly climatic, gripping conversations between two characters over a coffee at a diner. Yet Michael Mann's Heat pulls off just that. Al Pacino is on one side as Vincent Hanna, a dedicated detective who obsessively tracks criminals while his marriage becomes more and more distant. On the other side is Robert DeNiro as Neil McCauley, a professional thief with rigiourous descpline and skill for armed robbery. They talk, drink their coffee, and part ways. They don't bond, yet you feel they already have.

The movie is based on true stories and true characters. Neil McCauley is the name a real thief. He has the same motto as DeNiro's character: don't get attached to anything you can't leave in 30 seconds flat. Pacino's Hanna is based a cop who went through three divorces over the course of his career and did bump into McCauly at one point, had a similiar conversation, tracked McCauley for some time until a shoot-out left McCauley dead.

Ultimately, this conversation is the center of Heat. Hanna says he doesn't know how to do anything else. McCauley says, "Me neither." Hanna says he doesn't want to do anything else. McCauley says, "Me neither." Cops need criminals, just as criminals need cops. Hanna is compelled by subtle guilt that he could have prevented the victims of McCauley's crimes when things go bad. McCauley is compelled to keep doing scores by the challenge the cops make it. Nothing else would be so interesting to either.

The second subject is women. Hanna's marriage is falling apart. McCauley is slowly finding a woman that may take more than 30 seconds to walk away from. Val Kilmer plays Chris Siherlis, McCauley's second-hand man, who's marriage becomes an issue of work whenever she threatens to leave him or, in a powerful scene of character developement, McCauley catches her talking to a rich man who may set her up away from Siherlis.

It's an age-old story showing parallels among a variety of characters. Men's work get in the way of the women trying to get them to admit their age and retire to home's while they're still warm. Hanna's wife understands him, and she loves him because of the work he does, knows she can't change him, but loves him still. McCauley is finding an exception to the rules. Siherlis has domestic problems complicated because of his line of work.

Work, women, and the forces feuling for and against the men involved. We see they're not so different. The final scene is one attesting to the Red Tie Law #2, Strangelove. McCauley is shot down by Hanna. As McCauley dies, he says to Hanna who is holding his hand, "I told you I wasn't going back." The dance the two played with guns and scores, they loved more than any woman.

As Dane Cook said in one of his jokes, Heat is the movie that makes you want to make a score. DeNiro, Kilmer, and Tom Sizemore are a crew that knows there stuff. It's entertaining to watch how professional and detailed they are, even creative in their methods. A more realistic viewing of stealing than Ocean's 11 where we watch and wonder what is happening, realizing the detailed planning as everything unfolds. On the other hnad, Pacino is equally energizing as the person predicting McCauley's next move. At times he outbursts like a cocaine addict (Pacino admits a crack addict is what he thought of for his improvished lines), other times he combs every detail as he goes through a crime scene, telling the story in reverse with greater accuracy than the camera.

A final commitment to the greatness of the film is the acting in every character. It was advertised as a match-up of Pacino and DeNiro, but Val Kilmer is equally important. Every actor went through gun training with actual guns before taking up the fake ones. Kilmer reloaded an assault rifle so fast, one marine drill sargeant uses a scene from the movie as an example, "unless you can reload your rifle as fast as this actor..." Amy Brenneman, Ashely Judd, and Diane Verona star as McCauley's, Siherlis', and Hanna's women, giving well-rounded cast to every character makes no scene seem unimportant. Even Danny Trejo, the wheelman for McCauley's crew, was a former convict.

An unspoken character exists in L.A. The scenery and shots were set up with great attention. The cafe shot alone (see top) created controversy. The actors are in the wide ends of the shot, but when the tapes were released in full screen, people were outraged because there is no shot where Pacino and DeNiro can clearly be seen together in a fullscreen shot. This movie is my argument for widescreen.

Until the Departed came out in 2006, Heat was the film that defined cop/criminal drama. With an emphasis on drama, it may still. It made Michael Mann's career, as he would later direct Collateral (a great exercise on climatic characters and plot), and Miami Vice. He would produce the Kingdom, Ali, and a pair of Academy Award-winning films, the Insider and the Avaitor. Throughout all of these, you can see the themes and subjects, as well as the eye for detail and character that is found in Heat.