PUBLISHED REVIEWS !!!

[Martalogu]

Personal cred forta,expunerea unei cronici publicate deja. Si asta pt ca mediile consacrate de informare au in genere un plus de autoritate, daca nu de reelevanta. Si nu ma luati acuma cu povestea nerespectarii copyrightului, pent`ca ca o astfel de cronica te poate determina (sau nu) in a te interesa mai departe, pana la viziona un film.

Sa-i dam bataie.

[Martalogu]

He Found a Bundle of Money, and Now There’s Hell to Pay



By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 9, 2007



“No Country for Old Men,” adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is bleak, scary and relentlessly violent. At its center is a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop.


But while that chilly sensation is a sign of terror, it may equally be a symptom of delight. The specter of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut, will feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

So before I go any further, allow me my moment of bliss at the sheer brilliance of the Coens’ technique. And it is mostly theirs. The editor, Roderick Jaynes, is their longstanding pseudonym. The cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and the composer, Carter Burwell, are collaborators of such long standing that they surely count as part of the nonbiological Coen fraternity. At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity.

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming.

By the time this moment arrives, though, you have already been pulled into a seamlessly imagined and self-sufficient reality. The Coens have always used familiar elements of American pop culture and features of particular American landscapes to create elaborate and hermetic worlds. Mr. McCarthy, especially in the western phase of his career, has frequently done the same. The surprise of “No Country for Old Men,” the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.

Mr. McCarthy’s book, for all its usual high-literary trappings (many philosophical digressions, no quotation marks), is one of his pulpier efforts, as well as one of his funniest. The Coens, seizing on the novel’s genre elements, lower the metaphysical temperature and amplify the material’s dark, rueful humor. It helps that the three lead actors — Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin along with Mr. Bardem — are adept at displaying their natural wit even when their characters find themselves in serious trouble.

The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.

Mr. Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty-hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh’s mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth — just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell — and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.

And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Mr. Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to get away with taking the $2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.

Taken together, these three hombres are not quite the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but each man does carry some allegorical baggage. Mr. Jones’s craggy, vinegary warmth is well suited to the kind of righteous, decent lawman he has lately taken to portraying. Ed Tom Bell is almost continuous with the retired M.P. Mr. Jones played in Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah” and the sheriff in his own “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Mr. Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling.

Still, if “No Country for Old Men” were a simple face-off between the sheriff’s goodness and Chigurh’s undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card — a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen — and Mr. Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.

And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, “No Country for Old Men” leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

[Martalogu]

Hearts and Minds: Senator Meets Reporter, Selling a New, Improved War

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: November 9, 2007


Career Politicians, the Fourth Estate and Disaffected Youth all earn a stern knuckle rapping in “Lions for Lambs,” Robert Redford’s big-screen lecture about civic responsibility and its absence in the Age of Iraq. Those who remain shocked, shocked that elected officials, certain journalists and cosseted college students sat idly by, huffing Hummer fumes and nodding out on 24/7 infotainment (all Britney, all the time), while the administration led the charge, first into Afghanistan and then into Iraq, may find much to embrace here. Everyone else will continue to nod out or resume banging their heads against the wall in bloody frustration.


I suppose there’s something commendable about Mr. Redford fighting the good fight, or at least one civilized version of it. Movie critics often flog directors for not engaging with urgent contemporary matters, like the current wars, but when they do engage, as several have tried to this year (“In the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition”), we complain that they’re not saying much of anything. Consider “Lions for Lambs” exhibit R in this open case: It names the wars, presents a handful of fictionalized main players from politicians to soldiers, and drops words like “the people” and “Al Qaeda” and “propaganda.” It flashes photographs of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, if without overtly naming names.

What else do we learn from “Lions for Lambs”? That America is no longer only the land of the free, home of the brave, but also of the opportunistic and the compromised. Among the most conniving, or most true-believing of these new Americans are politicians like Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), a Republican senator with his eye on the White House. Among the most compromised among us, or the most exhausted, or timorous — or something — are journalists like Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), whom Irving has summoned to his office so he can pitch her a shiny new war plan. Mistakes were made, he says, but that was then, this is now. From their framed photographs, President Bush, Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice silently keep watch.

Nothing if not on party message, the senator has taken aim at Iran, which, he tells Roth, is allowing Iraqi terrorists to cross its borders on their way to Afghanistan, where they will fight alongside Al Qaeda. As Roth leans forward, you can almost see the thought bubble above her: Howzthatagain? But Roth is also vain; she’s a journalist, after all, and rubbing shoulders, and who knows what else, with movers and shakers has blunted her senses, clouded her vision. Power is an aphrodisiac, as well as addictive. And power begets power, as Mr. Redford reminds us when he shows Roth looking at a Time magazine cover story she wrote about Irving. She helped make the senator and he did much the same for her in turn.

It’s fun to watch this acting odd couple spar even in such a visually inert context. Mr. Cruise pours on his characteristic intensity and lights up the board with alternating flashes of charm, sincerity, gravity, indignation and outrage. Every mood feels phony, a total put-on, which works well for a character delivering a self-conscious, constructed performance. As his audience of one, Ms. Streep’s journalist must do a lot of listening, which the actress does with one of her vibrant, entertaining, gestural performances. Every twitch, blink, shrug, head bob and seat shift speaks softly at first and then with increasing volume, giving physical form to the inner voice we actually hear only later. Mr. Redford’s camera pays her close, appreciative heed, as do we.

Alas, there’s more — namely two other story threads, the dreariest of which involves yet another two speakers locked in one claustrophobic space: a history professor, Dr. Stephen Malley (Mr. Redford), who has summoned an apathetic student, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), into his office for a metaphoric spanking. One of those bright young things who puts the “i” in Generation iPod, Todd has been dodging Malley’s class, opting to turn off and tune out even while agreeing to drop in for morning coffee. It’s not nearly as much fun to watch these two, largely because the screenwriter, Matthew Michael Carnahan, has stacked the deck so much in Malley’s favor you know the end of the conversation as soon as it gets going.

It’s a long conversation, more soporific than Socratic, and brimming with parental chiding, generational conflict and invocations of Vietnam. You see, back in the day, Malley fought in that war after being drafted. He didn’t want to fight, didn’t agree with its aims, but he did nonetheless, which leads to another story fragment and two more of his students: a Latino, Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Peña), and an African-American, Arian Finch (Derek Luke). After absorbing Malley’s lessons about responsibility, Ernest and Arian joined the army. These lion cubs don’t believe the current wars are righteous, but they believe they can effect change from the inside, which is how they land in an Afghan misadventure more unbelievable, both in thematic and visual terms, than Senator Irving’s military strategy.

In truth Ernest and Arian are less lions than sacrificial lambs that exist solely so the film can wave the flag (and race and poverty) along with index fingers. Malley regrets but respects the students’ decision to enlist, which echoes the prevailing wisdom that you should support the troops even if you don’t support the wars. The problem isn’t whether this assertion is true; the problem is the film reflexively embraces it, much as it does every single other cliché, without inquiry, challenge or a single ounce of real risk. It tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders. Mostly it tells us that Mr. Redford feels really bad about the state of things. Welcome to the club.

[Pitbull]

Sa-i dam bataie.

Hai cä-ncep eu.
Aratä-mi-l, si-l troznesc de-i cântä dintii Tricoloru'.
(Costinel, 1972, în spatele blocului)