if "Old Nowhere" has seen all the Coen Brothers movies, especially those that have reached the top, the International Film Festival has also given the highest honor, you will find that "Old Nowhere" is nothing new from the inside to the outside.
Lens usage, the slow and empty scene of the first western scene is in step with the empty mood of the heavy snow in "Ice Storm". Everyone in the movie feels that they can control the development of things, but things are not controlled by anyone. It is always a plot that is out of control, starting from the first "Blood Maze". The accent of the characters and the style of speech, "Old Nowhere" is like any Cohen movie. It is neither in life nor any novelist who would use it in writing. Only in the movies of the Cohen brothers, it makes the shape weird. Actors are the best. The rhythm of photography likes to be slow, except for the noisy "Raising Arizona", "The Three Kings of Prison Escape", and "Hedsack's Agent", there are basically no exceptions. The scenes, recently David Fincher's "Zodiac", Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Blood Is Coming", are all this slow look. The slowness is not for sensation, but for prolonging the desolation of helplessness. This kind of slowness may be regarded as a tributary of Hollywood, walking against the tide of Hollywood. As for the bloodshed that is not as sparse as the American horror film, it looks more terrifying than the American horror film. It is also the result of learning from Sam Remy's movies and sublimating the bloody scenes.
Let's not talk about the analysis of the technical school of this film. The original Coen brothers I wrote in the magazine was mediocre, but the brothers’ skills in making movies are almost the same after all their brains and analysis. In this movie, there are still those skills and I haven’t seen new ones. In fact, the Coen brothers' feature-length debut "Blood Labyrinth" is technically very mature, and there are very few subsequent works that have escaped from this one. At that time, it looked fresh and vigorous, the fire was pure, but now it looked steady and calm, and it was pure fire.
After reading "Old Nowhere" for the first time, what is meant by "No Country for Old Men" and what is called "No Country for Old Men" is not very clear. It is just the pain that the characters in the movie are unable to control during the development of the event. In "Blood Maze", "Barton Funk", "Ice Blood Storm", "The Absent Man", and even the entertaining "Old Woman Killer Group" have all met each other. I watched it the second time, and the meaning of being old is clear. After watching the Tommy Lee Jones film, I finally told my wife that I saw my father’s dream. The last sentence was: "Then I woke up." I understand: Everyone will get old, and everybody is powerless in the matter of time passing. Therefore, "No Country for Old Men" is also "No Country for Every Men".
The Coen brothers like to be humorous silently, and many senses of humor are usually only tasted after recollecting from the lines. This movie lacks a lot of humor, but many lines are still ridiculous, and some seem to be utterly meaningless. Talking is the characteristic of the characters in the Cohen Brothers movies. Steve Buscemi in "Ice and Blood" is simply nagging and frustrating. In "The Absent Man", the protagonist who does not speak in life hides behind the screen. Monologue from beginning to end. "Old Nowhere" does not have a character with a lot of words, but the dialogue is constant, and there are still too many people to keep up with the rhythm. Many of these words in the movie seem to make people feel that half of them are useless. Regarding the chattering dialogue in Cohen's movies, I think of someone commenting on Rubinstein playing the piano: half of the notes fell on the ground. The notes that fall on the ground are not useless, but that people can find a way to interpret the music from the gap between the notes that fell and those that did not fall, and experience the mood expressed by the pianist. It seems that half of the dialogues of the Coen brothers fell to the ground, which prompted me to watch their movies repeatedly. I had to pick up the dialogues that fell to the ground and found the deep meaning that I had never discovered.
There are a few words in "Old Nowhere" that reminds me, and I think they are the best footnote to the theme of this movie.
Carson, played by Woody Harrison in the movie, took the task of finding money and said something seemingly insane to the gang agent: "When I went upstairs, I counted it. This building is missing one floor. "The building was not made by Carson. Of course he didn't know how many floors the building should be. There is no context, no logic, but there is always sound outside the strings. When the building is built, one floor is missing, and it is still a building. After the building is built, if one floor is removed, the building will be crumbling. The few people who fled, hunted, and hunted for two million in the movie are like building a building with less than a key floor, and their days are not stable. Lu Weilin thought that with two million he could do whatever he wanted with money, but the killer Anton’s air guns and shotguns used to kill animals made Lu Weilin better not to meet these two million. Lu Weilin could not use two million. Millions built their own life edifice, but let their original life small building collapse. The policeman Ed thought that he could solve the case as before with evidence. As a result, his old age encountered Anton, a new type of murderer who killed people with a bull-killing gun. He first suffered from the fall of this world, and he lost a layer of life. It was the time that passed in his life, the speed at which he couldn't keep up with the world's fall.
Another interesting sentence was that the murderer Anton said to Lu Weilin's wife. He asked the woman to guess the coin to decide whether she could live or die. The woman was panicked, saying that the coin is just a coin, and it is you who decides the matter. The killer was unhappy and said: This coin came here, and the way I came here is no different. This is a wonderful remark. Behind the theme of "nothing to rely on" in the Coen Brothers movie is this sentence. What this means is that in the world, in life, people, like anything as small as anything else, move by accident. This accident has logic. One thing is indeed guided by another, but logic is not mastered. In the hands of humans, in the hands of God. Therefore, in the films of the Coen brothers, things are always going against one's wishes. Things are always going in the opposite direction of hope, and they go straight and confident, because there are always inevitable and unexpected coincidences that will happen.
In the monologue at the beginning of the movie, Sheriff Ed missed the past and missed the father of the police. In those days, it was possible to leave the police without a gun, but the world is gone now. Ed is seeing Lu Weilin die. Afterwards, chatting with another old policeman, the old policeman said: "If you said twenty years ago that there would be young people who would dye their hair, punch many holes in their body, and pierce a bone in their nose, I would never believe it." De reluctantly: "These start from despising bad habits. When people stop calling'Mr.' and'Ms.', the world is almost over." The original world continued to collapse and fall, and the fragments in the collapse continued to fight. Sticking and sticking into a new world, collapsing and sticking together, time has passed, people are old, and no longer have the strength to adapt to the new world, so they are old and have nowhere to depend. Ed thought that when he retired, there would be a town of gentleness, tranquility, and tranquility to rely on, but it didn't happen. In the end, there was only a dream, and the dream didn't last long, so he woke up soon.
The most obvious line in the movie is the story of Sheriff Ed telling Lu Weilin’s wife about slaughtering cows. A man slaughtered a cow with a gun. The shrapnel that flew out bounced back on the bones of the cow, but he hurt himself. . Lu Weilin found two million, but lost his life for the two million. Anton chases and kills Lu Weilin. He never thought that Lu Weilin would hurt himself badly, and he did not expect that after solving Lu Weilin’s wife, he would There was a car accident on a quiet small road in the small town. He didn't run the red light, and the rules didn't work. This is what Anton said: If the rules take you to this roadless situation, what is the use of the rules? The many movies that the Coen brothers have filmed are nothing more than the twists and turns of stealing chickens and eating rice. In the end, even the idea of stealing chickens was eroded, leaving a corpse, or like in "Ice Blood Storm", the corpse was also After entering the wood shredder, the meat flies all over the place.
Therefore, life cannot be relied upon, rules cannot be relied upon, and oneself cannot be relied upon. There is no reliance on this world. The theme of nowhere is like after many years, it will finally come out from the inside to the outside. The Coen brothers originally wanted to say, have said, and did not say clearly, they are playing games in film techniques and picture style (maybe called painting style and mirror style). Visible and indispensable internal pillars, the theme is no longer hidden behind, it is clearly stated.
In other words, the Coen brothers originally had a theme of nothing to rely on, and then used this theme to play movies; now that the movie has reached its apex, there are no more playable skills, so they mobilized these prior skills and borrowed skills. Let's make the subject of nowhere to be thorough.
(Rating: 9/10)
Film information:
[老无所依] No Country for Old Men (2007)
Director/Screenwriter: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Original Novel: Cormac McCarthy
Starring: Woody Harrison Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and other
countries/regions: United States
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