Entries associated with the tag "Cormac McCarthy":

Last week at the Cinematheque Top 5 Project, site proprietor Kevyn Knox posted the results of his best westerns poll. No surprises among the top five finishers (save number three—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly??), though when it comes to handicapping oaters I'm the last person you'd ever want to rely on.

Let's see ... it's probably Bud Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959) in my number one slot (for the minimalist desolation, a hardscrabble dry run for Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, all broken waste and laconic cowboy palaver), then Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) at two (for the austere classicism—horse, rider, sky, mountains, piney breaks—with sudden pointillist spurts of color, e.g., in the mountain mining camp, to counterpoint the Zen-like stripping down), and ... then what?

3. Not The Searchers. Not that I have anything against John Ford, but the stylization's too schizoid for comfort: e.g., all that naturalistic Monument Valley rhetoric (shades of Sergei Eisenstein, in the heroic up-angle shooting) versus the boxy studio artifice of Natalie Wood's Indian encampment. If The Sun Shines Bright (1953) were even remotely feasible as a western—and to me it does actually feel like one—I'd unreservedly put it third (click here for Jonathan Rosenbaum's warm appreciation). But the river that says yes to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Long Riders and even The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (!) unfortunately says no to Kentucky. So y'all go figure.

4. The Ruse, William S. Hart (1915). Because something by or with this silent-era icon has to be on the list, and since (shame, shame) I haven't seen Hell's Hinges ... Come to make fun, then go away astonished: as an early modernist study in the psychology of underplaying, the guy's at least 30 years ahead of the competition.

5. The Phantom Empire (1935). With, gulp, Gene Autry—which probably isn't anyone's idea of a "good" western, or even a good serial, a singing cowboy chapter play that takes place mostly underground. Like a Max Ernst bricolage, in the thematic mating of misaligned elements—but aside from Cameron Menzies's Things to Come and Powell/Berger/Whelan's The Thief of Bagdad, no movie sparked my childhood imagination more. And where would The Mole People be without it!

So how silly is it gasbagging about a movie you haven't seen based on a book you haven't read? Since that's approximately where I'm at vis-a-vis Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel of no particular distinction, at least if you trust what the literary rags tell you. But already we've been inundated from all sides as the national release date approaches (11/9), and preliminary impressions have been formed. Not least from the track records of all the parties concerned—the two sibling filmmakers, the novelist—which, for me anyway, sets anticipations galloping in contradictory directions.

Not because "one's good, the other isn't," but mostly for the mismatched sensibilities and tones. Since why would the Coens, generally irreverent, scattershot types, ever be drawn to the work of someone so resolutely hermetic and austere? "For the characters"—or maybe caricatures, depending on your point of view—is how some critics see it ... except McCarthy doesn't traffic in characters: typically he has oracles, avatars of violence, prophetic mouthpieces raining down perdition. Nothing wrong in that, and within the straitened, minimalist context he almost invariably adopts (in Blood Meridian, The Road, the Border trilogy, etc—every pared-down syllable a discrete "plish" in the silent narrative pool) it manages to work just fine.

But the Coens aren't minimalists (yes, there's the highway stripe in Fargo, but still ...), so what's the "creative" connection? Apparently there is one—or so the brothers' "conversation" with the author in Time (10/18) would lead you to think, though the exact reasons for it seem pretty obscure. Some sample musings:

Cormac McCarthy Days of Heaven is an awfully good movie.
Joel Coen Yeah. Well, he is great, Terry Malick. Really interesting.
CM It's so strange; I never knew what happened to him. I saw Richard Gere in New Orleans one time, and I said, "What ever happened to Terry Malick?" And he said, "Everybody asks me that." He said, "I have no idea." But later on I met Terry. And he just--he just decided that he didn't want to live that life ...
JC One of the great American moviemakers.
CM But Miller's Crossing is in that category. I don't want to embarrass you, but that's just a very, very fine movie.
JC Eh, it's just a damn rip-off.

Miller's Crossing? Richard Gere? Some of the things folks tell you you'd rather not know ...