No Country For Old Men

Jonathan Rosenbaum has an extraordinarily negative review of the Coen brothers brilliant No Country for Old Men here and this is a key part of it,

I hasten to add there’s more to this grim, ambitious movie than a psychopathic assassin of the highest order whose carnage is gorgeously shot, though I seriously doubt it would be garnering so much enthusiasm without such perks. The intricate plot, set in rural Texas, involves three characters chasing after Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a lovable salt-of-the-earth type who stumbles upon $2 million and a mess of dead bodies in the wake of a blown drug deal in the desert. There’s the narrator, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a melancholy sheriff nearing retirement who investigates the murders. There’s Chigurh, an associate of the drug dealers who’s bent on recovering the money and totally unconcerned with how many innocent people he wipes out in the process. (Recalling some of the stylish moves that made Pulp Fiction such a hit, he idly tortures some of his victims with arcane mind games before shooting them.) And finally there’s Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a hired gun who offers some comic relief. This grisly thriller qualifies in some ways as a remake of the Coens’ Fargo, with Bell and Moss jointly taking over the role of Frances McDormand’s pregnant sheriff. Bell is the film’s moral center, the law in the midst of greed and senseless death. Moss, already marked by his relative indifference to the suffering of a dying Mexican in the opening sequence, becomes lovable only during his affectionate banter with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). He’s the character we’re supposed to identify with, especially when he’s trying to match wits with the psycho killer.

While it is true that he himself is experiencing a moral crisis that prevents him from seriously engaging with his duty to catch Chigurh and allows him to send his gormless subordinate first into the mobile home that the killer has left only moments before, seeing Sheriff Bell as the moral centre of the film is the central error which leads Rosenbaum astray. While Bell avoids decisions and recoils in ineffectual horror at the situation he is presented with, Moss takes the decision to steal the drug dealers money and, much against his better judgement, to return to the desert with a bottle of water for the wounded and thirsty Mexican that he failed to succour on first encountering him.

And when he is rewarded for his choices, especially the second one, with the attentions of Chigurh, he doesn’t complain or curse himself, he just gets on with solving the problems he is presented with as they arise. It never occurs to him give in.

Moss is not a morally irreproachable character but there is no doubt that he and not Bell is the moral centre of the film. While the Sheriff avoids taking decisions and Chigurh’s psychopathic nature voids his of any moral sense, Moss engages with the world, acts and lives with the consequences.

Norm says the central theme of the film is

an evil abroad and not far off

I think that’s right and I’d add to that “and what we can do when confronted it.” You don’t have to be morally perfect yourself to fight it and if you decide to fight it then there’s no guarantee about the result, but there’s guarantee about the result if you decide not to fight it either. By not turning away though, and doing what you can within the range of possibilities open to you, it’s possible to make some difference.

Insiders

I see that Sergio Wolf has been appointed as the new director of the BAFICI. Good for him. I have no idea what he’s like as an administrator but he’s a very good film critic and I used to love his film slot on Pepe Eliaschev’s ‘Esto Que Pasa’ radio program back in the days when it was on Radio Del Plata.

He’ll have his work cut out for him. On the one hand he’ll have the gilded gobshites who ran everything cultural in the city under Ibarra and Telerman dying for him to fail in order to justify their prophecies of doom and bleatings to foreign embassies. I did a little piss take on this here. On the other, he’ll have to deal with a ruthless, rich bastard of a mayor and there isn’t a cuter hoor in politics than the city’s culture minister.

My suggestion for the incoming director would be the following; try to focus on making things easy for ordinary film goers and not just for film people, film students, culture workers and insiders in general. Most of us don’t give a damn about the parties or the foreign invitees and don’t have liveried servants who we can send to buy tickets for us. We’d like there to be lots of interesting films, that it be easy to find out when and where they are on and that it not be necessary to waste huge amounts of time blue arsing it around the city and standing for ages in queues to get tickets for them.

Good luck Sergio, you´ll need it.

Rosas: escena para una película

Tanto él como su esposa, su hija y su cuñada concurrieron en ocasiones a los bailes que organizaban la sociedades [africanas que había en Buenos Aires], gesto muy importante que les valió una gran influencia, puesto que no era nada común que los miembros de la elite hicieran eso. La colectividad negra porteña en esos años lo llamaba “Nuestro padre Rosas”

Gabriel Di Meglio. ¡Mueran Los Salvajes Unitarios! La Mazorca y la política en tiempos de Rosas p. 137

Allegory

Referring to the Iranian director Mohsen Majmalbaf and his films in Pagina/12 today Luciano Monteagudo says,

.. he has always had a marked predilection for allegory, a mode of expression common in Iranian cinema and one that seems to form a basic part of the country’s culture.

Well, who knows? Maybe he is right. But there is another glaringly obvious possibility; the frequent resort to visual lyricism and allegory in Iranian cinema may have something to do with need to get permission from a committee of bearded bastards in turbans in order to shoot your film and get it shown. The hirsute loons believe that one book in particular contains all that anyone needs to know about cinema or anything else and without their thumbs up, it’s no dice. So, as your characters definitely aren’t going to be allowed to say anything interesting you’d better learn how to hint at what you actually want to say with endless shots of waves lapping onto the shore and the like.

Or to put it another way, in societies where the work of artists is subject to strict  censorship aimed at upholding a particular religion and  a theocratic regime we ought not to be surprised if a lot of the cultural products that come our way rely heavily on oh-so-subtle allegory.

How To Behave At The Cinema

Many of my fellow porteños seem to be under the impression that buying a ticket for the cinema entitles them to behave with the same sort of abandon as they would if they were in the front room of their own house. It doesn’t, you are in a public space now so behave accordingly.

Come on time. “On time” doesn’t mean sometime during the first half hour, it means being in the cinema sitting down when the film starts. What kind of fucking idiot are you if missing the first 20 minutes of the flick doesn’t bother you? If you arrive a minute or two late then sit the fuck down in the first available seat. Don’t stand in the aisle debating with your slack-jawed cretin of a boyfriend where you’d like to sit. Above all, don’t disturb half a row of people to get that perfect seat; the rest of us managed to get there on time and we are watching the film, something we’d like to continue doing without you standing on your toes and tripping over our stuff as you make your way to your place.

Turn off your phone before the film starts. That means turn the fucker off, not put it on silent or vibrate. If the film bores you then grin and bear it or leave, don’t check the time or your text messages; the rest of us don’t want to be distracted by your electronic glow worm. On pain of having your jugular instantly slashed, your eyeballs gouged out and the resulting holes pissed in, do not answer your phone during the film and don’t imagine that by standing up and going to the entrance or leaning against the wall to talk you are making it okay, your fucking well are not.

Don’t talk during the film. How difficult is that to understand? What’s so fucking urgent that it has to be said now? You have the rest of the day/evening/your life to exchange banalities with your date when the film is over. The rest of us don’t want to be obliged to listen to them.

Don’t eat during the film. I know the multiplexes do their damndest to sell you nauseating, foul-smelling shite food but there is no excuse for buying it; if you are hungry go to a café or restaurant, Buenos Aires is not short of such establishments. If you absolutely must eat sweets then take the fucking things out of their wrappers before the film starts and keep your mouth shut when you are eating them.