No Country for Old Men | 
| Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Actors: Javier Bardem, Rodger Boyce, Josh Brolin, Barry Corbin, Beth Grant
Studio: WALT DISNEY VIDEO
Category: DVD
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $2.34
as of 7/30/2010 16:27 CDT details
You Save: $17.65 (88%)
New (51) Used (95) from $2.34
Seller: closeoutvideo
Rating:  739 reviews
Sales Rank: 692
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Languages: Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), English (Original Language), Spanish (Original Language), French (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Discs: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Running Time: 122 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: DISD55640D
UPC: 786936746754
EAN: 0786936746754
ASIN: B00118T63C
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Release Date: March 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
The Coen brothers make their finest thriller since Fargo with a restrained adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Not that there aren't moments of intense violence, but No Country for Old Men is their quietest, most existential film yet. In this modern-day Western, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a Vietnam vet who could use a break. One morning while hunting antelope, he spies several trucks surrounded by dead bodies (both human and canine). In examining the site, he finds a case filled with $2 million. Moss takes it with him, tells his wife (Kelly Macdonald) he's going away for awhile, and hits the road until he can determine his next move. On the way from El Paso to Mexico, he discovers he's being followed by ex-special ops agent Chigurh (an eerily calm Javier Bardem). Chigurh's weapon of choice is a cattle gun, and he uses it on everyone who gets in his way--or loses a coin toss (as far as he's concerned, bad luck is grounds for death). Just as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a World War II vet, is on Moss's trail, Chigurh's former colleague, Wells (Woody Harrelson), is on his. For most of the movie, Moss remains one step ahead of his nemesis. Both men are clever and resourceful--except Moss has a conscience, Chigurh does not (he is, as McCarthy puts it, "a prophet of destruction"). At times, the film plays like an old horror movie, with Chigurh as its lumbering Frankenstein monster. Like the taciturn terminator, No Country for Old Men doesn't move quickly, but the tension never dissipates. This minimalist masterwork represents Joel and Ethan Coen and their entire cast, particularly Brolin and Jones, at the peak of their powers. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Product Description
WHEN A MAN STUMBLES ON A BLOODY CRIME SCENE, A PICKUP TRUCK LOADED WITH HEROIN & 2 MILLION DOLLARS IN IRRESISTIBLE CASH, HIS DECISION TO TAKE THE MONEY SETS OFF AN UNSTOPPABLE CHAIN OF VIOLENCE.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 739
 Modern Day Masterpiece July 28, 2010
JMF (Monroe, NC United States)
Seldom do you see a movie nowadays where every aspect of the film is perfectly made. Give credit to the Coens for their much deserved Academy award. This film could have been made in a present day setting but the Coens made the effort to do a 1980's period film instead. The attention to period detail is commendable making it look like a Peckinpah film. The casting for this film is absolutely perfect with rich and memorable characters such as Tommy Lee Jones as the weary sheriff with the timely one-liners as well as Vietnam vet Josh Brolin as the resourceful man on the run who would have been more than a match for most pursuers with the exception of Chigurh played by Javier Bardem. His character is one of the most horrifying villains in movie history whose only motivation for killing is his own warped principles. Some have criticized the ending and it might have been more satisfying for there to have been an exciting shootout or something but that would have been too predictable. Instead we have a not so neat ending with loose ends so we're left saying wtf. That's what makes movie making an art form and something that would make Sam Peckinpah proud if he were alive to see it.
 Aren't you a man yet? July 24, 2010
Automated Message (SF)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
In the pure-bred, NIMBY-pamby town of Atherton -- the land of motorized, spear-studded gates and Meg Whitman -- they have a saying: "No non-Caucasians allowed, unless you're about to use a lawnmower or a dishrag and I can put you on this leash." In the city of Palo Alto, they have another saying, but it's not so much a quote as a video that's gone viral over my iRetina, and I haven't quite deciphered it yet, but I believe I'm not going out on a limb by saying it's revolutionary. By the way, in Alabama, a bluetooth is when you've just taken a slug of antifreeze, then you smile and your single remaining tooth looks blue.
Which brings me to my point: "No Country for Old Men" is nothing but the film-adaptation of a story written by some old geezer cranky about technological advancements ruining his Andy Rooney way of life and if-it-was-good-enough-for-granddad-it's-good-enough-for-me hooey. I mean, the title says it all. The ham-fisted metaphors all but slam you in the forehead like a hamburger-maker. For instance, early in the film, "Mr. Big City Man" Anton Chigurh (whose name sounds like a hayseed filled with chewing tobacco asking, "Ain't ya cheek hair?" which translates from rural-speak to mean, "Aren't you a man yet?") walks out of a cop car he has stolen to kill some clodhopper, carrying an odd-looking, highly advanced weapon straight out of a science-fiction tale. I mean the thing doesn't even need bullets! The most sophisticated thing his victim has on him, in turn, is a safety pin holding up his burlap britches. Later, when Big City shows up at the convenience store, his high-falutin' talk confuses the man behind the counter. In fact, it may very well be that Chigurh just talks too fast for the bumpkin to process in time.
Of course, this may just be something like the same situation in reverse: thinly-veiled propaganda for city councils trying to snatch land that has belonged to hard-working families for centuries so they can give the thumbs-up to crooks in crisp slacks slathering at the bit to build more dollar stores and auto malls and basically turn the whole world into asbestos-laden parking lots.
That, or this is the zaniest screwball comedy since "Horse Feathers"!
 "A good man is hard to find" (especially the older you get) July 18, 2010
Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States)
Tommy Lee Jones relates in the latter stages of the story that he's quitting as sheriff. He had expected "God to somehow come into his life" but is now too fully aware that God much less he himself is over-matched. The film's nemesis is a merciless "executioner" with less conscience than The Terminator and sufficient inscrutability to make even Woody Harrelson's perceptive diagnosis of him (as a psychopathic killer with principles, albeit devoid of "morality") inadequate. In short, the film is a version of an Ingmar Bergman film like "Through a Glass Darkly" or perhaps an earlier film like Bergman's "The Seventh Seal"--the primary difference being that the Coen Brothers' filmic and narrating style is more apt to catch the attention of a larger, even mass, audience. It's doubtful many of those who see the film will be satisfied with the conclusion. In fact, there is no closure, thus breaking an unwritten rule of all cinema. Recall how Hitchock has a shrink appear at the end of "Psycho" to explain in logical terms the character of Norman Bates and the whole narrative for us. And when the 1919 German expressionistic film, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," played before American audiences, an actor was hired to appear on stage at the end of the movie to assure us that the monstrous killer-psychopath was now completely cured (no need to worry about a Hitler or Nazi movement). And so we would all like to believe--about extended life-spans, the "cures" of medicine, the progress of science. But the older you get--and the more inquisitive--the more you realize that the advertisers-promoters-money-hungry pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic surgeons, "powerful" positive thinkers--have sold us all a bill of goods. Like the characters in the film, we walk around saying we don't know what's going to happen next, pretending that life is an open and free proposition and that we could be one of the "lucky ones," awaiting the equivalent of personal fame and fortune if not immortality.
Josh Brolin appears to be the sympathetic "hero"--flawed by greed and, like the characters of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," making what could be a fatal mistake. Yet he has a John Wayne-like rugged individualism, a knack for survival, and commands instant respect from those around him once they learn of his service in "Nam"--but that won't get you diddly in the relentless, fatalistic, flip-of-a-coin determinism that, in the Coen Brothers' view of modern existence, controls our lives. Brolin's conscience requires him to return to the scene of a crime with water for the survivor of a drug deal gone terribly bad, yet he can dismiss his wife's concerns for her mother. And in this instance we as the audience can afford to dismiss them as well. By this time we're conditioned to expect such a remark to be followed by the Executioner's (Javier Bardem--looking like a smaller but more chilling version of Schwarznegger or Andre the Giant) quick extermination of the person so named via his powerful weapon with its menacing silencer. But that would follow a certain pattern of logic--instead she dies of cancer. And when our leading contender for hero is momentarily distracted by a sunbathing babe in long shot, there's no need any longer to even play out the executions. We're not permitted the privilege of seeing him bravely succumb to the enemy: after all this, he's instant "dead meat" floating on a motel swimming pool (motels outnumber "homes" by a considerable margin in this movie--after all, who among us can claim NOT to be a transient).
Brolin's wife suddenly becomes a central figure, but only briefly. She at least has no illusions about getting a lucky roll of the dice. Her fate, like that of all mortals, is preordained, and she refuses to play the Executioner's coin-flip game, calling it more accurately: "It's not me or the coin that decides what happens to me. It's you." But in this circular question about free will and the meaning of life, Bardem answers her back: "You're wrong. That's how I got here." Each of us could not have been born had the slightest circumstance been changed on the night (or whenever) we were conceived. And who knows why we were born as human beings and not cats? It's all a game of chance, and there's isn't even an authentic card dealer. (The viewer can only speculate why the Executioner sees his own dicy birth as license to reverse the process--serving as the agent of hastening death for all. Is he sparing his victims Kierkegaard's "sickness onto death"--a charitable interpretation, yet his actions practically resist characterization as "evil" due to their inexorable and mechanical necessity). His presence might be interpreted as the embodiment of a cynic's message: Stop scapegoating, shut up you tea partiers and birthers and deathers. Stop pretending that life would be peachy if we could be good Americans and get rid of all those terrorists out there, not to mention illegal aliens. Because of him, the movie destroys all of our self-illusions and ultimately goes after the most hideous sin of all--which even after the Bible, the great tragedians, all the world's important literature and religions, we still can't seem to learn: pride, hubris, appropriating God's prerogatives. When will we learn? Why can't we? Why must we be so prideful in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?
But therein lies the film's admission of Aristotle's "fatal flaw," and along with it the small ray of light in the film (along with some moments of humor, which even the critics seem to have missed). Brolin, after all, did make a mistake and had the arrogance to think he could get away with his theft of the drug money intended for someone else. And for a moment, he let carnal desire distract him from the real threat. Moreover, he took his own life more seriously than that of his wife or mother-in-law, assuming that the Nemesis-Executioner was interested only in him. And the Executioner passes up an opportunity to snuff out the sheriff, Tommy Lee Jones (the closest thing to an authentic hero). Not being detected could be a motive, but is it possible he senses in the sheriff greater realism and honesty than in any of the other characters?
The last two scenes do nothing to prepare the spectator for an end, but they do "require" interpretation. Those viewers who simply refuse to discuss, think about, or interpret a movie are basically told by this movie to shape up or ship out. The Executioner (quite vulnerable himself, by the way, but a better survivor than Harrelson or Brolin) walks away. Behind him he leaves the seeds of greed (and of fatal pride) in a young boy who took money (from the Nemesis, naturally) in exchange for what was supposed to be a Good Samaritan act. Before the recovered Executioner, who ambles off into a typical American neighborhood out of the "narrative frame" of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," lies what--who knows what? Another victim? The sheriff? His are the last words as he reports a dream about meeting his father (who did not die an old man), and then says: "I woke up." That awakening is what this movie is all about. The screen goes black waiting for the spectator's inner light to come on. It's time to wake up--perhaps now more than ever. There may be a future, but there will be no lottery tickets--even to those who win them. It's we who must act to make the best of that mortally-defined fateful span of existence that lies before us. We can't know if our efforts will bear positive fruit, but we can know that "good" isn't simply going to happen by wishing and waiting for it. And we can also know that our prideful moments can only bring more misery. And if you don't know this now, you most certainly will either know it, or feel the effect, when you're older.
[The Coens are masterful movie makers, letting the visuals tell the story while assuring that you'll remain riveted to the screen for every second, not even aware of the passage of time. Yet I'm occasionally annoyed by the feeling that not all of the suspense is "earned." In other words, it's easy to feel somewhat exploited by the time required simply to figure out what's going on--orientation in space and time, the jump shots, the new and unprepared faces--instead of experiencing suspense about the elements of the story and plot. (I consider those stretches, regardless of how artful the filming is, "wasteful." By contrast, filmmakers like Bergman and Hitchcock never waste a frame by requiring the viewer to make sense of location, characters, the mechanics of the plot.) "No Country for Old Men" is a well-made film with more substance than most American movies, but it's eclipsed by "There Will Be Blood," which is simply richer, more complex, more profound that the Coen brothers' movie. "Old Men" may be an adaptation of a great author's work (which I haven't read), but were it not for the artfulness of the filmmaking, I'd be tempted to call this effort somewhat mono-dimensional if not sophomoric. As an alternative to either the novel or this film version, read practically any short story by Flannery O'Connor. She simply never misses, giving us everything that's in this story plus enough humor, grotesqueness, shocks and revelations to last a life-time--or what's left of it.]
awesome movie, friendo. very well put together. acting was great. June 30, 2010
jimjohnson (cali)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
love this movie. ive watched it 4 times and i know ill go back and watch it some more. nice extras too. the movie is one of the best for the year.
Not for the Weakminded or Lazy June 27, 2010
cineman
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Bob Dylan once penned "Dont criticize what you cant understand." Unfortunately, a large audience of naive and lazy movie-goers dont adhere to this ideal; and thus we get the many terrible one-star reviews concerning the film, No Country for Old Men. They are reviews which oversimplify the film to a "bloody pointless mess of mumbling characters." Yes, nearly 200 people have put their ignorance on display with similar "thoughts" on the film.
No Country for Old Men is a film not for the lazy or weak-minded. If, one watches with expectations only for violence and explosions, then he may find the film slow and mindnumbingly methodical. But for people who understand that "good" films are not about substance more than style, there is great reward in this film.
*The following may contain what some may consider as spoiler information*
Fate and freewill are possibly the two most intriguing ideas in life, as well as in the film No Country for Old Men. The film depicts a less-than-middle class man, living on the Texas plains in a trailer with his wife. Extremely small choices cause detrimental events to occur in the life of Llewellyn Moss.
We see Fate charitably give him all the money he could ever need, only to play upon his conscious and character to watch him lose it all. Fate seems to keep a caste system, and it intends to make an example of Moss.
Fate chooses its victims and its heroes, as well as its messengers. Antoine Chigur is that messenger in No Country for Old Men. He is to bring back the ill-fallen money, he is to put Moss back in his lowly place, and make demonstrations to all others directly and indirectly involved.
No Country for Old Men is, in it"s most simplistic definition" a film about Fate. It's about one thing causing a series of spiraling events to destruction. It is also about the good and evil of man, and the timelessness of those qualities-- how that they never die, only change forms. It's about people desperately trying to find their place, only to discover it may already be chosen for them.
The film never really concludes that freewill does or does not exist, but rather challenges its characters with both, leaving us no more enlightened on the subject, but, at least, more provoked to thing about it with each step we take.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 739
|
|
|
