Coens, 11/18.

"Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens' body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema," writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "The Coens aren't nihilists. There may or may not be a God in their imagination... but the lack of theological clarity doesn't necessarily mean that the Coens endorse their characters' decision to be indecent or cruel. Quite the contrary, the Coens' movies strongly endorse the notion that one should honor certain bedrock principles for their inherent rightness (or, barring that, for the benefits such a life might confer). Decency is the Coens' version of piety."

"There is a reason why the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski is one of the great cult films of all time," writes DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "It's because it is one of the great films of all time.... Now comes I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You, written by four guys just as obsessed and ticked by the film as I am and everyone I know."

"When the filmmaking fraternity of Joel and Ethan Coen loosely adapted Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key into Miller's Crossing, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep into The Big Lebowski or Homer's Odyssey into O Brother Where Art Thou, the magic of those projects was their distance from the source material," writes Sean Weitner in Flak Magazine. "What makes No Country for Old Men a queer duck is that there's nothing askance about it at all — it's the most doggedly faithful novel adaptation in memory from any filmmaker... The movie rewards all these right choices by being unreservedly gangbusters.... Still, what's striking is the uncharacteristic faithfulness: Why? What was it about this book that yielded such reverential treatment?"

More from Zach Campbell: "Is Bardem in fact the thing, the object, that gives Jones ('the human subject') meaning, or at least its promise?"

"No Country for Old Men... is, quite simply, the most perfect fusion of literary and filmmaking sensibilities since Polanski's hallowed Rosemary's Baby - and might even be a finer, rarer breed," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger. "Five minutes in, the damn thing already feels like a classic."

Update, 11/19: In the New Yorker, Nora Ephron imagines a conversation between a he and a she who meant to read the book before catching the movie - but didn't.

Updates, 11/20: Jim Emerson on one shot in No Country for Old Men: "It's a directorial (and photographical) coup in many ways, but I was delighted to discover that it's one of those images the Coens visualized in advance and actually chose to record in an early version of their screenplay (which deviates from the finished film in several significant aspects)."

At ScreenGrab, Paul Clark has an explanation for what went wrong with The Hudsucker Proxy.

Update, 11/21: "[T]he movie's revelation is its gentleness," writes Nathan Kosub in a piece emphasizing No Country as a Texas movie in Stop Smiling. "Animals have a presence here, but in dogs and cats instead of horses. No metaphor for innocence (the only dog to engage Llewelyn attacks him on the banks of the Rio Grande), they participate as pilgrims and serve less as a contrast to the violence than a flattening of the reasons men impart to instinct."

Updates, 11/22: "Promoting Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, resident Alamo mad professor Edwin Wise (of DorkbotAustin.org) whipped up a functioning simulacrum of the murderous main character's weapon of choice: a hand-held, pneumatic cow-killer, that, as seen above, drove a steel bolt through a weekendlong series of suitably strawberry-and-banana-filled pumpkin "heads" at 4,000 feet per second." Marc Savlov has that snapshot in the Austin Chronicle.

"Both [Before the Devil Knows You're Dead] and No Country deal forcefully with the reality of evil in the world around us," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "While Lumet's film sees evil as an age-old product of the human character and the social conditions it fosters, McCarthy and the Coens' apocalyptic vision imagines a Satanic force rampaging across our land like an unstoppable killer, implicitly dragging America toward an inexorable destruction. Though I find the former view more persuasive, the two films are similarly challenging and timely in posing tough questions about the blood on American hands and minds."

Update, 11/23: "I've always felt more than a little out-of-step when it comes to Joel and Ethan," blogs the Guardian's Danny Leigh. "Although conventional wisdom traces their decline back to the limply faux-screwball Intolerable Cruelty, I actually found the ole-timey pratfalls of O Brother Where Art Thou every bit as uninvolving - just as, in truth, I've always felt the achievements of the charming but slender Big Lebowski seemed wildly disproportionate to its Godhead cult status. On the other hand, the widespread indifference to the The Man Who Wasn't There still strikes me as bizarre, and while, yes, it's got flaws on its flaws, I think The Hudsucker Proxy may also be as ambitious and interesting a film as they've ever made. So, in short: what do I know?"

Update, 11/24: At the WSWS, Emanuele Saccarelli finds No Country to be "a vacuous and disappointing film. The work of these filmmakers has up to this point been uneven, featuring a widely, and rightly recognized cinematic talent paired to a definite tendency toward detachment and cynicism. Out of this contradiction has come a number of flawed, and in some cases interesting works. No Country For Old Men, however, is irredeemable, marking a regrettable downturn in the career of the filmmakers."

Update, 11/25: More notes on No Country: Peter Chattaway, Glenn Kenny (spoilers!) and the Shamus.

Posted by dwhudson at November 18, 2007 11:39 AM