Gold

Hey, howarya? Long time, nuthin' new.

Well, that's not entirely true, but I had to get this thing started somehow ...

So, yeah, that guy, his girl and that little film did okay at the Oscars the other night. It's kinda weird, a year ago they were playing to 50 people downtown, and it sounded like they were getting the biggest cheers in Hollywood on Sunday night. And now they are playing Radio City Music Hall in May. Radio City Music Hall. Which can seat several thousand people. I can't get my head around that. We saw them again in November, they played the Beacon Theatre. I looked around and the place was jammed. It was bittersweet in a way. The secret was out, and I'd only been in on it for a little more than a year but this ... this secret was now being broadcast at high volume. I wonder what it will be like next time through. Still, it was a wonderful moment when they called Glen and Marketa's name, I was laughing as Glen strode to the stage pumping his fist and gave a sweet, humble, nervous thank you. And then Marketa is called back out to finish talking and delivers an amazing little speech. Once again, they knocked everybody out.

But that's not what I came here to talk about. No, really.

No Country For Old Men. Best picture. Hmm. Yeah, let's talk about that.

Sure, I saw it. It was ... okay. Granted, I saw it when the hype was at a fever pitch so maybe my expectations were too high. But the thing I noticed as I was watching was that it was basically a bleaker Raising Arizona ... actually a premise for a number of Coen brothers movies: a person, or people, who may not be the sharpest of tacks on the corkboard, want an object of value (wife/baby/money) that belongs to a person higher on the food chain (husband/father/bad dudes who want their money back) and that person then dispatches a terminator (kidnappers with funny hair or just look funny/mercenary with funny hair/killer with funny hair) who will stop at nothing to get that valuable back. Wacky hijinks may or may not ensue. Sometimes they make it out of this jam of their own making, sometimes they don't.

I used to be a huge fan of their stuff. Miller's Crossing is one of my favorite movies. But I think that they haven't made a movie I've enjoyed since The Big Lebowski (another favorite), and lately I've noticed they have been guilty, in my hyper-opinionated opinion, of a Cardinal Sin in my book: judging, even outright making fun of, their characters. They've made an awful lot of movies about dumb people drawn into situations that are far over their heads who then struggle to find a way out of it. Fargo is a movie I did really like but does fall under "The Same Flick" category, and is really saved by Frances McDormand who refused to make fun of a character that we were maybe supposed to just laugh at, instead making her a genuine character and not some now-patented Coen brothers dimwit caricature.

No Country was not a bad movie, it was well done all around, but Best Picture? When I saw it I left the theater thinking of Beckett's first sentence of Murphy: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

(pause, looks around)

Whoa. Lookie that. A new post.

Maybe I'll be back soon with another ...