no country for old men

Saw it yesterday afternoon at the Ritz, with a Fireman's #4, cheeseburger and a coffee porter. Tasty.
At the conclusion, I asked the Ms. if she wanted to stay for the ending.
This is a disturbing film, because it does not provide the answer to the questions it asks, predominately the difference between predestination and free choice. Does living a moral life guarantee one a happy ending? No. Fate is equally important. The coin flip determines that one finds a satchel of money, one lives, another dies, another escapes at the last moment, another gets broadsided while having a green light at an intersection.
A person can live by the rules, make the right choices, and be one side of right and justice, and meet a very evil fate. What is the meaning of it all? The only answer is the dream, where you eventually cross over that snowfilled mountain pass into the safe haven of our fathers, where we can sit by the warmth of the fire and live again with those long since gone.
This movie creates an unsettling feeling, because it is so close to the randomness of reality. It leaves you looking for answers, but there are none.
I think it ultimately means that no matter how you train, how right your side is, how knowledgeable and competent you may be, after that coin is flipped, the sooners and aggies still are gonna win part of the time.
 
Weird, Accurate, I had the exact same food/beer (minus the coffee porter) when I saw No Country at the Ritz last Saturday. Also, I agree with your post. The movie leaves you with a weird sense of almost being too real, too close to home.
 
see, I just don't picture Chigurgh trying to squeeze in behind the door opening or diving under the bed.... with a loaded shotgun... and I can't picture him showing fear on his face (and the scene did)... I think he was really long gone and it was supposed to be Bell's imagination.

and I need to see it again, because the other door next door was taped off as well (don't think the lock was blown out on that one) so I guess he could have been in the room next door, although he would have no reason to go in there if the money was in the first room.

I was wondering how this scene played out in the book... here it is in the script:


In reply to:
Click to expand...
 
Discussion of Spoiler:

The scene near the end, where Sheriff Bell enters the motel room and it appears that Chigurh is hiding behind the door is confusing. It just doesn't seem logical that a good lawman would enter the room without calling in some more officers, first of all. He saw the lock punched out, so either an extremely violent and dangerous cold-blooded murdered was in there, or had entered and was already gone. Wouldn't the sheriff just guard the door with gun drawn and await backups?
Then if Chigurh was in there and escaped when the sheriff entered the bathroom area, that seemed a little unrealistic as well. He would have had the satchel of money, the cylinder of air and a shotgun, a fair amount of stuff to lug quietly out of the room undetected.
I think that is what the scene conveyed, though. The killer was stealthy and professional, so maybe it could have happened that way.
 
The mother in law died of cancer. The body in the pool was the beer drinking chick. In the book, she was a hitchhiker that Moss had picked up and driven to El Paso. I thought the movie was pretty good. I usually just say "the book was better", and it was, but the movie did a good job. TLJ is a perfect West Texas sheriff and the dude playing Chigurh was excellent. Hell, I hope I don't have nightmares.
 
i disagree the story is "real" and not a "hollywood" type story. in fact, it is a "hollywood" type story just not the happy go lucky feel good one. the villain is straight out of hollywood and does not exist in the real world in that sort of invincible, all-knowing sort of way. he was as big a cliche as it gets.

i have represented lots of police unions and in my experience, bad guys and evil guys usually are dumb, mistake prone people who just about always lose to the cops. they are not men of principle and do not stick to the word. i know chigurh was supposed to show this great duality of man: evil but with principles. but how "hollywood" and cliched can you get? for a movie that is supposed to be sooooo realistic and a break the mold type movie, it sure did fall right in line with Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and a few others where the bad guys are superior to the good guys in what is supposed to be an ironic twist.

it just doesnt happen that way in reality. bad guys like chigurah are are despicable people who rarely make the right choice when it involves temptation and are certainly not men of their word. i was really disappointed in what i will call the stereotypical alt bad guy and the played out tired old lawman who just isnt up to the task anymore.

i enjoyed the actors and performances including TLJ and Chigurah but was disappointed in how predictable the story was. it was obvious from the get go the bad guy was gonna get away.
 
So you mean that every cop all over the world is smarter than any guy that breaks the law? There have been lots of cases where murders or serial killers are never found or get away with it for years. I have no idea why this is a hard concept for you.
 
as a collective, yes the cops are generally smarter and better at what they do than the bad guys. the vast majority of bad guys are caught because they made a stupid mistake. and practically all of the bad guys who act and kill like this guy does are safely behind bars.

sure there have been lots of serial killers who have never been caught but they didnt kill in the same way this guy did. they didnt do it so openly and brazenly. he was as cliched as it gets. several people have been referring to him as a killing machine. he was just a man who acted the way he did in the story because he had the comfort of having a script in front of him telling him he would not get caught. in real life, bad guys do not act that way. they are far more discreet and careful than what this character was.

of course i cant say no bad guy has ever acted this way. but come on, so are we to believe chiguah is that one in a billion bad guy that is more skilled, smarter, principled, and fearless than anyone else in the world? and if so, why in the world is he a bad guy? sounds like he should be the president of a Fortune 500 company. he obviously is the most supreme person on earth....right? that is hollywood glamourizing a bad guy at its finest and it is just as improbable of occurring in real life as a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible jump from a train to a helicopter and then back to the train.

or is that too difficult to understand?
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Longhorn 94,

It's a movie. The movie would have sucked if the bad guy wasn't smart enough to elude capture and track the dude with the money. In fact, there would have been no movie at all.
 
Chigurh isn't just some bad guy, he's some former special ops dude from the military that enjoys killing and knows he makes money by being good at that. He's kind of a psycho, but he doesn't have the normal greed temptations of most men.

I haven't seen the movie, this is my interpretation from the book.

and bell isn't some tired, washed up sheriff. He loves his job, but recognizes with the drug trade and its massive violence and temptations, how he's learned to "sheriff" his whole life just doesn't apply anymore.
 
i didnt say the whole movie is a "cliche" just the bad guy.

his killing the wife was in fact hollywood at its finest. he never would have exposed himself and taken the risk of killing another person when it did not accomplish an immediate and necessary goal ie...getting the money or getting away. it just doesnt happen that way. and for him to do that showed me that he wasnt really a great killing machine the way the movie tried to make him appear. but the movie didnt do that to show a fault, it was a mistake. they thought it showed he was a man of his word...etc... that was about as rookie of a move as i have seen... me being a professional hitman and all....
wink.gif


my complaint is so much of the movie is realistic except the bad guy. and he is the character everyone is raving about. he stood out to me as the only truly fake hollywood character in the movie.

and i disagree that there wouldnt have been a movie if he wasnt some sort of supernatural killing machine. sure there would have been. he just wouldnt have been a cartoon character. he would have had to struggle to elude capture. i didnt need him to die at the end. i didnt need to see any sort of confrontation between him and moss or the sheriff. i was fine with the ending. i just didnt like his cartoonish nature. he was a man just like everyone else. he should have had the same sort of real faults and made the same sort of real mistakes that everyone else in the movie made.

also, how in the world did the mexicans find the wife and the mother when they arrived in the cab? how were they able to know what they looked like? not even in this day and age of the internet, could they have acquired all of that info that quickly.

and how did woody find moss at the hospital? he didnt know he was injured. he wasnt at the fight with chigurah. he had no way of knowing he had been shot and to look at a hospital in mexico. can someone please explain how he tracked him there?

and what was woody's purpose? i know he was brought in to retrieve the money and to stop chigurah but how in the world was he planning on doing that? did he even own a gun? did he have any plan of any sort to deal with chigurah? he seemed to give up very easy for a former military man. i would have been running and fighting like crazy. so why was woody so incompetent when it is apparent he had a reputation at being good at cleaning up messes. and he wasnt too fazed with having to stop chigurah....

and what kind of principled man (chigurah) kills the very boss who hired him? and then we are led to believe in the movie that chigurah kept the money since he had killed the boss. so how again is he better than moss or woody? i know this isnt true in the book but that is the only conclusion we are left to draw from the movie. can any of the book readers explain. was he hired by the boss guy he later killed? was he specifically hired to retrieve the money? why did he kill his escorts to the drug shootout scene? i i understand it correctly, in the book, the boss is surprised chigurah brings the money back to him. like he had never hired him to begin with. if he wasnt hired by the boss to get the money, what was he doing in the movie?

and can someone please explain what the heck happened to chigurah in the hotel room. he is clearly behind the door. he is looking at the blown out lock. he sees the sheriff's lights through the hole. he is nervous and quiet. is he in the room next door? the quote above from the book seems to suggest he scrambles inside the room when the sheriff enters....so what happens? i am guessing we are to assume he escaped somehow? or he was in the room next door even though his dime was in the same room as TLJ....?

this is just mho. i understand if others disagree with me. i enjoyed the movie but wished they would have made chigurah a little more flawed.

jason
 
Does anyone disagree that the bad guy got away with the money that Lewellen hid in the AC vent at the El Paso motel? That's why the vent is screwed off with the dime and he uses a hundred dollar bill to pay the kid for the shirt, right?

Also, how does Chigurgh follow Moss to Eagle Pass prior to their shootout? Moss gets out the back of the Del Rio motel with the money and hitch hikes to Eagle Pass. There's never any indication of how Chigurgh is able to track him straight to the hotel room. He had the transponder, but he would have had to be within a couple hundred yards for that to work. How did he know Moss went o Eagle Pass? Does the book explain this?
 
IMO I think the law is made to look a little dumb in the movie. At the beginning the officer does not do a good job of securing Chigurh before he turns his back to him to make a phone call. TLJ's deputee seems to have a bit of Barney Fife in him. TLJ seems to be the only one who could match Chigurh but he lacks the fire to do what is necessary.
 
Uh, guys, have you ever lived in Sanderson, Alpine, Marathon, Marfa, Ft. Stockton, or any other wide spot int the road out near Big Bend. I have, and I can assure you that McCarhty was extremely accurate in his portrayal of law enforcement out there. My Great Grandmother was Justice Of The Peace in Alpine for 18 years and as a result I've had the pleasure of meeting all kinds of law dogs out there. Ronnie Dodson, the current sherrif in Alpine, is a friend of mine. Even he would tell you that the story is spot on.
 
i do not disagree with you and your experience with west texas. i have never lived there. and while i found the old, tired wanting to retire sheriff a little too predictable, that is not what bothers me about this movie.

i enjoyed it but why is it the bad guys are almost omnipotent? why do they get every single break? everything that could go wrong for the good guys does and everything that could go right for the bad guys does. in my life experience, that is generally not the case. for instance, they are able to track moss without fail and with little ease when he did a pretty good job of moving around and laying low. but that crude transmitter just happens to go off when both bad guys are driving around and it leads them to the exact room. and then the mexicans are able to pick moss's wife and mil out of a huge crowd at the airport. how lucky is that? and then chigurah is able to track moss to eagle pass? when did that transmitter turn into a gps tracking device? and then chigurah is able to disappear after being shot? when every other person who gets shot falls to the ground and waits there for the final shot to their head... but not chigurah. he is able to magically and totally quietly disappear into an alley even though he has been severely wounded in his leg. and then woody harrelson is able to locate moss in the hospital in mexico? how? how did he know moss would be in a hospital? and why in mexico? he was able to figure all of that out in 3 hours? chigurah magically escapes from the hotel room when TLJ returns? that for me was one of the biggest issues i had with the movie. it is one thing to not show moss's death. i can deal with it. i disagree with it. but hey its the path chosen by the directors. it doesnt really make a difference to the story and it doesnt require me to suspend reality. but when TLJ enters that motel room with chigurah standing behind the door, i have to either suspend reality or assume chigurah was in the room next door. neither of which make much sense and really bring the story to a halt. which leads us to the issue of a killer going back to the crime scene that is completely unsecured and not getting caught. so i ask you again, why is it the bad guys catch all of the breaks in this movie if it is supposed to be a realistic approach?

if the movie is not supposed to be realistic but instead a commentary on the interaction between good and evil or fate and free choice, then i have a whole other set of issues.

flip of a coin = fate. i dont think so. chigurah was no zen master. it was nothing more than a way for him feel like he wasnt making a choice, to remove the feeling of guilt because by god i didnt choose to shoot this person, thats just the way the coin came up. hogwash. he always had a choice. it was just his way of trying to block himself from feeling guilt and remorse. it was nothing more than a defense mechanism. and a bad one at that.

as for moss being morally compromised. how so? because he chose to keep money he found? wrong. he knew people would come looking for it but you cant say that the "right" to do would be to turn it in. its not against the law to keep money you find is it? not that i know of. so why would it be wrong for him to keep it if he knew and appreciated the consequences? and when chigurah gave moss an option between saving his wife or not, i would have chose the same way. i am not going to go down without a fight. i can not believe that i would lose to the other guy. i am just not programmed to quit like that. i would not surrender my life to someone else. i would fight until the very end. i would get my wife out of town and to a place where no one could ever find her. she would go somewhere else other than the closest airport. and chigurah would have never been able to find her. then i would have tracked chigurah and taken him out. why is it that only the bad guys can track people down? why couldnt moss? so i dont see this movie as a battle between free will and fate. fate had nothing to do with any of it. our lives are controlled by our choices. and unfortunately for the good guys, in this movie every choice made by the bad guys worked out and every choice by the good guys didnt.

once again, i liked this movie or i wouldnt be so passionate about it. but obviously there were a few things that bugged me....


and yes i have read up on the zodiac killer. i am convinced he was either caught or died a long time ago.

thanks for reading my rant...it has been therapeutic. lol!


jason
 
and the del rio police arent going to know anything about it. neither will the morgue. so why go to mexico? how do you know he would go there and not another city in texas? you dont know he is injured so why the hospital? did moss even check himself in? would he have given his correct name?

and how did he even know chigurah and moss were in del rio/eagle pass?

so once again, its the bad guys being able to find a needle in the haystack while the good guys cant hit the broad side of a barn....

and yes i realize this is just a movie. but i guess i expected more given how highly everyone has rated it and all of the praise it has been receiving.
 
Book Spoilers

In the book, if I remember correctly, Moss was in the hospital for four days. Chigurh also spent 4 days in his hotel room and paid the maid to not come back, but give him lots of clean sheets and towels.

Also the part in the movie at the hotel never happens. They are killed there, they are killed by Chigurh though.

I don't see how it would be hard to find a shot gringo in Mexico. They could deduct from the shootout that someone was shot, from the blood on the ground. You would then search hospitals that are within a close distance. You could deduce US ones, because a gunshot would is an automatic call to the police. That leaves only Mexico. I cannot imagine there were just a ton of shot up white guys in a 50 mile raidus of the shootout.
 
which part in the movie at the hotel happens differently in the book? the TLJ/Chigurh scene? if so, are you saying TLJ never returns to the room with chigurh inside? so in the book, does chigurh just get the money when he is there to kill moss and the beer girl? if so, i like that much better.

i understand what you are saying about finding a shot gringo in a mexican hospital and why you would go to a hospital in mexico but how did woody know they were in eagle pass to begin with? how did he know there was a shootout? that there was blood? did he get there the next day? and if there was a trail of blood and a police investigation, how in the world did chigurh not get caught when he was laid up in his room at the hotel?

maybe i am going too deep with this... lol!

i think its time i just moved along. lol! it was an enjoyable movie and i do think the actor who played chigurh deserves to be nominated.

thanks again.

jason
 
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