Brandon's Buzz

Incredulous at what I had just spent good money to see, I launched the opening salvo:

“Has anyone seen No Country for Old Men? Has a film ever so gypped its audience with such a ridiculous final act? Is Javier Bardem really gonna win an Oscar for going around shooting people?! (What else does he do in that movie?!) The whole experience literally made my hair hurt.”

My great pal Christianne quickly leapt into the fray, providing a clear voice of reason:

“THANK YOU. Charlie is completely obsessed with that movie. He’s seen it three times and the final time forced me to go with him. I’m not allowed to say I hated it when he’s around. But…I hated it.

(And apparently hating it means that you missed some big symbolism about life and cowboys and wide open spaces. I don’t care.)”

Next came the awesome Mike, whose impassioned defense of this ridiculous film is certainly admirable:

“Hey Brandon, I saw No Country too. Excellent movie. If by the last scene you meant the final shooting, then I didn’t feel gypped by that. If you mean the final monologue by the retiring sheriff which just sort of cut off at the end of the movie, there was a bit of a “what the….?” reaction.

But I think the final act (the killing) was part of the whole arbitrariness of the violence that the Cohen brothers were trying to convey throughout the movie. Bardem wasn’t terribly happy with his character when he read through the script and had to be convinced by the directors that his character was being depicted the way they wanted it to be.

Have you seen any of the other Oscar nominated pics? Clay and I just saw Juno this past weekend. I loved it, and I think you would too. Interestingly, I found out last night that the screenplay was written by a young woman who had been working as a stripper for a living (after failing at ad copy writing) and had started to blog about the sex industry — then someone came along out of the blue and offered her the chance to write a screenplay. Juno was the result and now she’s up for an Oscar!

Anyway the movie is excellent, Ellen Page is a marvel, but the rest of the cast is excellent too. There’s also plenty of music-related stuff for you to chew on too, from the quirky soundtrack to Juno’s taste in music.

I’ve also seen There Will be Blood… (Eventually) which I wasn’t so enamored with. Daniel Day Lewis is fantastic, but the movie is too long (2:45) and I wasn’t sold on the kid who played the firm and brimstone preacher. I’m guessing that Day Lewis will get the Best Actor Oscar but the movie won’t win overall.”

By this point, I was quite fired up and ready to rebut:

“Bullet points, Mike:

— the whole final half hour of No Country was ridiculous and bizarre. I don’t want to ruin the film for those who haven’t seen it and want to, but I’ll say this: I found deeply offensive the way the Coens invite you into their created world — replete with graphically etched depictions of both its people and of the violence those people perpetrate on each other — and bring you to care deeply for the heroes of their piece, only to nonchalantly junk all of it in favor of a deliberately vague act three, beyond which you leave the theater having no clue what you’ve just seen. I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but my blade can slice through a tomato pretty painlessly, and while I certainly don’t need a standard Hollywood ending to find a film enjoyable, I do need an ending. I’m all about symbolism and suggestion, but being so brazenly jerked around by a standard chase flick trying to pass itself off as a high-minded intellectual exercise only serves to piss. me. off. (Incidentally, we saw this at the Lake Creek Alamo last Friday afternoon in a theater full of people, not a single one of which exited the building satisfied. Someone actually said, “Who in the hell picked this movie?!”)

— I absolutely refuse to believe that Javier Bardem is going to win the Academy Award for his role in No Country, a film whose most stringent stretch of its villain’s acting muscles is having him flip a coin. I say this as a previous fan of Bardem (who was great in The Sea Inside a few years back) and not as a knock against him: he never hits more than one note in the entire movie, because the entire movie never requires him to. (Compare this flat, monotonous performance with the eternal gold standard in film depravity, and don’t fail to admire the painstaking way that Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins manages to locate the humanity inside Hannibal Lecter’s heart in The Silence of the Lambs.) My vote goes to Hal Holbrook, not only for a lifetime of stunning work but for his wrenching turn as an old man who fights ’til the end trying to forge a bond with a young tramp in the tragically unfocused Into the Wild. True, Holbrook has fewer than ten minutes of screen time, but his performance in this film is majestic and unforgettable, true north adrift in an oversimplified mess of masculine pride.

— Another bizarre ending (this one much less so, especially considering the dramatic build-up) aside, I thought There Will Be Blood was pretty great. I bought Daniel Day-Lewis’ rabid oilman persona from the second he appeared onscreen, and he never lost me throughout the course of his descent into complete madness. (Even money says his ferocious impression of a milkshake being sucked up a straw goes down in cinema history, yeah? And I spent the whole weekend chanting the words, “Bastard in a basket!” with as much of Day-Lewis’ deranged glee as I could muster.) The score was distracting in spots (a trait shared by more than one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films), but the forceful chemistry and interplay between Day-Lewis and Paul Dano (whom I found scathingly terrific as the preacher, Mike!) was so profoundly chilling that it was more than enough to carry me through the movie. (In fact, I didn’t even realize it was nearly three hours long until you told me!)

— We also saw Juno this weekend, and while I certainly didn’t hate it, neither did I all-out love it. I thought Ellen Page was astounding, and I bawled like a little girl in the aftermath of the birth scene, and I’ve been an Allison Janney acolyte since her days as Ginger the maid on “Guiding Light.” But, even though its avoidance of the standard cliches was pretty remarkable, I thought Diablo Cody’s screenplay was a tad too in love with its cutesy, cheeky self; and the music — Sonic Youth’s “Superstar” and Cat Power’s “Sea of Love” covers obviously excepted — started to grate on my nerves after a while. Ditto Jennifer Garner (who never fails to make my teeth itch) as the adoptive-mom-to-be. A fun movie to be sure, but I’m not quite sure how Oscar-worthy. If it were up to me, Blood would win it all in a landslide.”

Christianne was whole-heartedly on board:

“Brandon, as always, your words are freakin’ brilliant. I just called Charlie in here and read your review aloud. I said, “THAT’S why I was mad at the end of that movie.” He told me to read the book.

I loved Juno. I don’t know how I feel about Oscars, but it was so cute and fun. Totally cried after the birth as well, and Charlie and I STILL laugh every time one of us says, “Are you sure it’s not just a food baby?” and “Hang on, I’m on my hamburger phone.” Heee.

(Haven’t seen There Will Be Blood.)”

Mike, sadly, was not:

“Hey Brandon, I guess I should not surprised you disagree with me. When it comes to popular culture, you and I seem to disagree on just about everything! I find it hard to believe that someone who castigated No Country for a pointless ending was able to sit through three hours of one-note portrait of an oil man in There Will Be Blood and love it. Ah well. 🙂 The middle half-hour where his brother appears from nowhere to keep him company could have been axed from the movie without losing anything except for maybe about 30 seconds of exposition about his childhood. And cherub-faced Paul Dano didn’t sell his part to me at all. There was no menace to him at all. That part needed someone with the charisma of a fire and brimstone preacher, and I’m afraid he didn’t have it which meant his whiny act at the end failed to have much of an impact. Day Lewis was a marvel, and the movie was beautifully shot, but that wasn’t enough for me in the end.”

Did anything get settled here? Probably not. But it was still one hell of a conversation among passionate friends.