"No Country For Old Men"

"Let's go see the new Coen Brothers movie!" I urged. Taking my cue, we all went to see the new movie, "No Country For Old Men".

Roger Ebert says it all:

"No Country for Old Men" is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made "Fargo." It involves elements of the thriller and the chase but is essentially a character study, an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him. Chigurh is so evil, he is almost funny sometimes. "He has his principles," says the bounty hunter, who has knowledge of him.

Consider another scene in which the dialogue is as good as any you will hear this year. Chigurh enters a rundown gas station in the middle of wilderness and begins to play a word game with the old man (Gene Jones) behind the cash register, who becomes very nervous. It is clear they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh has by no means made up his mind. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip of a coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they imply the stakes. Listen to their timing. You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy.

...This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely. As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian" (Ridley Scott's next film), and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where the riverbank caves in, the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. The movie also loves some of its characters, and pities them, and has an ear for dialog not as it is spoken but as it is dreamed.

Many of the scenes in "No Country for Old Men" are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was "Fargo." To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another.

Chigurh's ruthless implacability reminds one very much of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Cyborg in the Terminator series of movies - nothing can stop him!

Many of the scenes were filmed in New Mexico. The El Paso scenes were clearly filmed on East Central Avenue in Albuquerque, just west of San Mateo Blvd. Other sites include Eagle Pass and Marfa, Texas, and Las Vegas, New Mexico.

According to Wikipedia:

The film was shot mainly on location in New Mexico, including Las Vegas, which largely doubled as the border town of Del Rio. The US-Mexico border crossing bridge was actually a freeway overpass in Las Vegas. Some scenes were filmed around Marfa and Sadisiar in West Texas and the scene in the town square was filmed in Piedras Negras, Coahuila in Mexico.

Here's an interesting Coen Brothers interview regarding the movie (especially the part about the blood).