Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...
... you can learn from:
No Country For Old Men (2007)
Ed Tom Bell: I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carried one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how they would have operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. 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."
A wise movie knows that you give Tommy Lee Jones a monologue to deliver and then you just sit back and listen to Tommy Lee Jones deliver it, and No Country For Old Men is a wise movie, perhaps the wisest, because it does this twice -- at start and at finish. I was torn between which speech to quote honestly -- I do love his retelling of his dreams that closes the film -- but the above one, from the film's opening, just feels a little too meaningful to this moment in time not to highlight it here on the day that Criterion has blessed us with the Oscar-winner on 4K blu.
A Complete Unknown in 350 Words or Less
Obviously I'm one of the founders of Team Timmy so you might think me biased due to that, but honest to blog he crafts a real character here -- this movie doesn't feel exhaustingly yolked to the bio-pic conventions of "here I was born and here I died and oh I did some Forrest Gump like shit in between;" it gives us an arc, and characters, to care about. Granted the real life arc it bridges -- "Folk Music can't be Electric or the world will end, oh my gahhhhhhhh" -- is hella silly from the vantage point of now; the film, as sweet as Edward Norton's performance as Pete Seeger is, really never manages to make that line of thinking seem like anything but nonsense. So that conflict never rises above a shrug.
But the fiery relationship triangle between Chalamet, Elle Fanning (as a semi-fictional take on a real girl that Dylan dated), and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez (both actresses superb) is beautifully acted and surprising and truly honestly earned my heart. And the film is very good at involving us in the songwriting process -- even if I'm not a Dylan fan the movie made me appreciate his skills as a wordsmith and a world-shifting entertainer. A Complete Unknown doesn't break open the bio-pic mold but it's about as good an example of what's-to-be-expected can be. Gonna be a fine pic over the holidays for those forced to endure family time.