No Country for Old Men

Ottobon

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I wont say much other then to recommend it. It didn't have nearly any aid in form of theatrical music or anything, but it was classic storytelling mixed with a one of a kind plot and a strange ending.

Anybody else seen it?
 
Just downloaded this a few hours ago...I'm in China can't see it any other way.

I look forward to watching it, have heard good things.
 
Just buy the pirated copies, it's cheaper than going to netbar to dl it.
 
I download while at work :D internet is faster there.
Plus I'm good friends with the network admin.
 
It was a great movie IMO. Though many people do find it to be very boring.
 
I'm ...buying... the DVD... as we speak...
 
Just watched it.

The ending is completely...

"WTF?". I mean, the plot is going along and then it just ends. There seems to be no point to the movie. :|
 
^ Sequel coming then, do you think?
Possibly, but I kinda doubt it.

"Main" character is dead (we think), cop is retired.

Who knows though. Maybe the main guy isn't really dead, maybe the cop will come out of retirement, etc.
 
It's hollywood, so if there is money in it perhaps they will write a way around all the plot issues from film 1. ....
 
Na, this isn't the kind of movie that would have a sequel. This movie doesn't have a real concrete plot, it's just about different people that were connected through a single element. Thinking back on all the crap movies in the past few years, this was easily one of the best I've seen recently.
 
It was quite good indeed, but I just wish they woulda wrapped it up some...
 
Found this on IMDB, might explain the ending a bit better.
It made me think about it more, and really like the movie more.

I think this quote goes a bit over the top with the death references, but it's still great food for thought.

One or two of my own coments at the end.

By someone called sheylerosen for IMDB;

In No Country, Anton is not specifically a psychopathic hired killer, he is Death or our mortality at the cost of living- whichever way you want to put it. At the very beginning of the movie, when Anton pulls over the civilian using the stolen police cruiser, he holds the cattle killing device up to the man's forehead and says "Hold still", before he kills him. The scene cuts immediately to Llewelyn Moss hunting and he gets one of the antelope in the cross hairs of his rifle scope and says "Hold still", before he shoots it. There is no dialog at all in between those identical expressions from two different characters, in different locations, killing two different "animals". That is the establishment of the duality of Death being handed out to humans the same way its handed out to other living things. Another facet of the story aligning the condition of Death shared alike by humans and animals is the fact that Anton kills people with a device intended to kill cattle.
Another indication of this encompassing theme are the two trees Llewelyn comes across when he finds the money after walking away from the carnage of the drug shootout where, its important to note, he left a man to die. So as he's searching for the "ultimo hombre", the last man standing, he comes across the man slumped against a tree trunk. The tree that the man is sitting under is the tree of death and the other tree is the tree of life.
When Anton meets with the "management" at the shootout site at night, he kills them because they have seen him and they know his capacity as a hired killer. You can't see Death and return. (The only people that get to see Anton and live, are the people that don't know that he is a killer.)
When Carson Wells is answering questions from the business man about what Anton is like, Wells says , "Compared to what, the Black Plague?" also known as "the Black Death."
When Carson is talking to Llewelyn in the hospital about Anton, he offers to give him some of the money if he returns it and Llewelyn says that if he was going to cut a deal, he would just make the deal with Anton. Carson answers that Anton doesn't make deals, he says "he has principals that rise above money and drugs and all of that stuff." Of course, you can't make a deal with Death for all the money in the world.
Then, when Llewelyn calls Carson's hotel room just after Anton has killed Carson, Anton says that he is going to go to Odessa, implying that he is going to go kill Llewelyn's wife. Llewelyn says she's not there and Anton says he's still going. Llewelyn gets frustrated and says "If she's not there then why the hell are you going?" Anton says, "It doesn't matter where she is." At this point, Anton is embodying Carla Jeans mortality. He is her Death and he will find her whether she's in Odessa or not. (Just as Death will find all of us no matter where we go.) As he promised Llewelyn, and as we've all been promised, Anton finds Carla Jean to kill her. He asks her to flip the coin to save herself, which she refuses to do and she says that its not the coin, its him thats going to kill her. He says "I got here the same way the coin did." That is, as Death, he is as helpless and at the mercy of the nature of life as we are. He has to kill because we all have to die. The coin is, as he says, "the best I can do" to postpone the inevitable but he can't stop it. She also says to Anton the same thing that Wells said: "You don't have to do this." That's humanities' general lament about our ever pending mortality. Anybody who's old enough to know that they will die one day has had that thought in one form or another.
Our final indication of Anton's purpose, as well as his inculpability, is the car crash at the end when the driver that t-bones him is killed. Anton is hurt, he pays a price in his role as Death, but he walks away. When he says to the boys, "I was gone when you got here." That was true in a two-fold sense. He was gone because the other driver was killed on impact and, in a narrative sense, he was gone because he paid off the kids to say that they hadn't seen him.
Three ancillary points:
A telling piece of dialog between Bell and the other sheriff at the end after they leave the diner where they had coffee. The other sheriff makes reference to "your guy", meaning Chigurh, and says something about him being a "mindless lunatic" and Bell says that he doubts he's "mindless" (I don't think that's the exact word but Bell was negating the assertion that Chigurh was lacking intelligence) and then he says that he's beginning to suspect that Anton Chigurh might actually be "a ghost". This is another clue to Chigurh's status, not as a psychopathic murderer, but simply as humanities fate of mortality. This was already made clear with other clues I already mentioned.
The second minor, yet equally brilliant, piece of writing which portends to the broadest theme of the film is the conversation when Bell and his assistant deputy are sitting having coffee and Bell is reading the article about the couple that has been killing people and burying them in their backyard. His assistant deputy is talking about the Mexicans that were killed in Del Rio and he stumbles over his words when he starts to speak about them as Mexicans in the present tense and he shifts in mid-sentence and uses the past tense. Meaning, his mind gets hung up on whether, after Death, they remain of a particular nationality. Bell looks up over his paper and says "That's the question, isn't it?" i.e.; the question is, does Death level all distinctions that we, as humans, once had while we were among the living?
The third ancillary point I want to make concerns when Bell goes back to the hotel where Moss was killed. We see that Anton Chigurh is in one of the two rooms that is taped off with police tape. Bell steps into the other room. This is completely consistent with a flip of the coin that Chigurh employs a couple of times earlier in the story. The 2 sided coin = the 2 rooms. There is a standard of chance set up in the coin toss and then it is taken out of Chigurh's hands and placed in the decisive move of Bell. This is another indication that the call of the coin, the ultimate call that is, is never truly in the hands of Chigurh. Remember, he "got here the same way the coin did."

Then, in the only ending that there could be, Chigurh, as the personification of Death, walks away. Death can die nor can Death get caught. Finally, the title character, Bell is left to relate two dreams to his wife in his new life as a retiree. The first dream is very short and could be dismissed as irrelevant due to its brevity. But it is crucial, coupled with the second and longer dream, to the act of tying together the movie's universal theme of Death with its narrative constant of the struggle for money.
Bell relates that in his first dream, he's a boy and he goes into town with his father and his father gives him some money to buy something. But he doesn't buy anything and he can't remember what happened to the money, he says "maybe I lost it." This is directly relevant to the chase and all the killing surrounding the money and the fact that Bell never cared about nor tried to get a piece of the $2,000,000. Then, in his second dream, he is in the darkness of a valley and his father passes him with fire in a horn and his father is moving into the darkness ahead and Bell knows that when he gets there in the darkness there will be a fire waiting for him.
The only open ended question in the entire movie is if the light in the darkness is the sign that God has indeed come into Bell's life as he told his friend Ellis(the guy in the wheelchair) he had always expected would be the case as he aged. And did Anton not kill Bell in the literal sense because ,figuratively, Bell isn't going to die in that he's led the kind of life that will allow him the light of an afterlife? Anyhow, that's a question that nobody can answer because once you know the answer, you're already dead.
All this said, though, Bell staying alive is the bone that the Coen's threw to those people who just couldn't stomach such an unconventional story even though every little piece of the story was intricately constructed, works for and establishes a rare amount of cinematic depth, and entertains to the very highest degree while doing so, IMHO.
Everything is answered except that deliberate question of whether or not God stands in the face of Death. I don't think the story or its meaning is open ended or up for debate. It's too specific in too many places to not have a specific intent.

Not sure on the two motel rooms in the end, in the movie is isn't shown that clearly that the other motel room is important, so that might not be exactly right in the quote above.

And the car hitting Chigurh, i think that is karma :p
She didn't pick heads or tails. So thus it has become his decision to kill her.
Now you know he kills her because he checks his boots for blood after leaving the house. Which he also did after killing Woody.
Then he gets "punished" by getting into a car crash.
 
Watching the premiere here in Norway tonight, really looking forward to it..
 
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