Five films (#1), and a conversation about No Country for Old Men
I’ve decided to blog about films whenever there are in my backlog five films I’d like to mention or talk about. I’ll also mention that, when I moved to ikiwiki, I set up a films.rss feed, and some other stuff. Now:
A History of Violence: short and incredible. Has flaws but I still give it 4.5/5. I’ll check more of Cronenberg (I loved, ages ago, M. Butterfly and Dead Ringers).
Bent: gays, nazis, camp. Intense but not overly rough. Mick Jagger plays a drag singer named Greta.
Elsa y Fred: terrific love story between two elderly people. Magnificent China Zorrilla. Ignore if you can’t stand romance or Argentinian.
Martian Child: entertaining, has children and dogs, never ever ever ever ever give up.
No Country for Old Men: oooh. All my friends hated it and told me: “you are going to love it”. And Bardem really steals the show. More below.
You may want to skip this part if you haven’t seen No Country for Old Men, though I won’t be spoiling much. My friends watched it some weeks ago, and I did yesterday (I refused to go with them to a dubbed session).
One of them told me that she had disliked it very much because of the uneasiness she got from it, about how human life can result so worthless for people, and so on. Chatting a bit more, we came to the conclusion that I watch these films differently.
Basically, I can unplug the empathy off from a film whenever (simplifying a bit) violence or cruelty reaches a certain level, and just consider it an entertainment completely unrelated to reality. Sort of, anyway. And I don’t think I could enjoy (some) films as much if I didn’t.
For me, No Country for Old Men had no message in it, and had a single story line: following close the path of a creature portrayed by Bardem, that (maybe not) strangely enough managed to keep me hooked to the screen, not minding the low pace, and finding the end (minus the dreaming bits) very appropriate.