No Country for Old Men

Big surprise: a reformed socialist hippie, now masquerading as a self-righteous right wing bandleader, lacks the moral capacity and intellectual complexity to comprehend art with senseless violence as its thematic core. No wonder Grossman still supports a vanity war by an incompetent and criminal president and his libelous cabal of lying propagandists and inane architects. So Judd: Does the death of 4,000 U.S. servicemen, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and a trillion dollars of unpardonable debt for a war based on now provable lies offend your deep-seated revulsion to senseless violence? Or, is your one-dimensional moral antennae only attuned to those artists who cut through the fog of your soulless appetite for supporting the profane fiction of flag-waving torturers while reminding you in the cold dark of your most sleepless nightmare of just how hypocritical and shallow all your masturbatory warmongering really is?
The Ghost of Thomas Paine

Starting and ending a movie review with an expletive ("F-you, Coen brothers.") is a poor and lazy approach to review writing, especially when the rest of the body copy reads like a frustrated 12-year-old who can't find deep meaning in a movie's moral message if it isn't dished out in three acts and wrapped up with a happy ending delivered through a clear protagonist who somehow evades total destruction. Unlike film school-level analysis, not every story cleanly wraps up a hero's journey to overcome the antagonist, and sometimes, as it is with No Country for Old Men, the antagonist is within each of the characters themselves. To blame the Coen brothers for Grossman's misunderstanding of the film outside of strict adherence to formula cinematic storytelling is to sink into the rationale of Chigurh, Javier Bardem's maniacal character who justifies annihilating others through adherence to his own principled system through which he can blame his victims for his own choices. Several times in the film Chigurh is told just before killing a victim, "You don't have to do this," and it's true—he doesn't. But it's easier for Chigurh to remain within his worldview than to accept that there are other options and viewpoints to consider. A film critic has a duty to thoroughly review a movie. It is not enough to dismiss a film entirely—nor use expletives in place of a well-written lede to do so—because of disagreement with a film's moral message, as it is only one part of the total piece. Assessed holistically, the directing and cinemaphotography of No Country for Old Men is excellent, the acting was top-notch, and the dialogue in most scenes was well written and memorable. Additionally, the violence in each scene is pretty tepid compared to other current and recent releases. While the film's ending was fairly untraditional compared to the spoon-fed stories of modern cinema, the storylines for each of the individual characters remained consistent: "Know when to get out." The story was done as much as it could be. Judd Grossman's unfinished and unpolished piece, however, should have gotten out of the Planet before going to press.
Cici