So crazy, it just might work
I had a revelation the other day.
As a film geek and trailerholic, I am no stranger to the trailer for No Country for Old Men. It is, after all, kind of everywhere. So unless you skip the trailers (Horrors!) or spent your time at the theater watching a film about a football player and his girly-girl daughter, you’ve probably run into it a time or two. Or twenty. What I mean to say is, I’ve seen it. I know it. Tommy Lee Jones, western, ominous man flipping coins in a convenience store. Haven’t we seen this before?
But do you know what I realized recently?
The COENf BROTHERS are making the film of a CORMAC MCCARTHY novel.
Let that soak in for a second. I’ll wait. You’ll find, I think, that what we have here is a perfect confluence of awesome. And if you watch the trailer in your newfound knowledge of that awesomeness, you will see a totally different film. We’ve gone from The Movie Tommy Lee Jones Makes Nowadays to a western that is bound to be something different, something precise and violent and blackly, blackly funny. Just close your eyes and listen to the dialogue, and you’ll see what I mean. All of a sudden, I want to see this movie.
Off the top of my head, I would never have put the Coens together with McCarthy (and, frankly, I’m surprised the studios did), but it makes a certain amount of sense. The Coens’ movies are comedies, or at least comic-ish, but they also consistently display the kind of brutality might have appealed to the late McCarthy–think John Goodman as a one-eyed Bible salesman, hitting George Clooney. Think Fargo and the wood chipper. Make sense now?
If you need me, I’ll be over in the corner, pondering: Coen. McCarthy. Coen. McCarthy.
Coen brothers, No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy, Tommy Lee Jones
February 24th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
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