No Clean Getaways

I rented and watched No Country For Old Men over the weekend. I recommend it highly: Javier Bardem's performance was a tour de force of creepiness, and the ending, while a bit jarring, worked for me. As a friend of mine pointed out it's not your standard Hooray-for-Hollywood action flick, and Bruce Willis ain't gonna ride in at the last minute and tie up all the loose ends with a hearty cry of "Yippie-Ki-Yay, Muthafuckah."

This is (in the words of my friend) a film about evil and death and the futility of thinking that any one person can really make a difference (the moral anchor of the film in this case being the soon-to-retire sheriff, wonderfully underplayed by Tommy Lee Jones). The desolation of West Texas provides an appropriate backdrop for the story, in much the same way that war-ravaged Vienna did for The Third Man.

See it, by all means.