NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

I just caught bits of the Screen Actors Guild awards. Well, who cares really? I can't resist the following observations.

Julie Christie looked very composed, extremely well preserved and a bit too beautiful to be real. But there she was. Her voice is a husky now, with that grand dame diction that English actresses seem to acquire. Those of use who remember the bloom of fine British film during The Sixties will always feel that tingle of nostalgia in her presence. She won the best actress award for her role in the film Loosing Her. (They insist on calling it the Best Actor Award as though stripping actresses of their sexual identity elevated them in some way)

Now it's a curious fact that Julie Christie wasn't a very good actress in her youth. So seeing her in Loosing Her was a double shock. She had not only aged markedly but gracefully, but she is now a truly masterful actress. The film is a jewel and I hope she will be remembered for it.

No Country for Old Men won the best picture award. The actor accepting the award for the cast couldn't resist making the usual pseudo-profound allusion to current affairs which is the usual thing now. He also expressed a graceless remark that seemed directed at the films audience. One thinks of Lord Olivier's famous line in The Entertainer, "I'll come catch your act sometime." It seems that people didn't like the films ending. I have to agree that this is unfair. Why expect a film to end with a point when the film is pointless in it's entirety? It's a Coen brothers film after all.

All of the Coen brothers films I've seen are essentially the same. A set of almost autistic characters are propelled by events and the pointless eccentricities of other characters to a pointless and droll conclusion. They're like feature length Seinfeld episodes with some violence thrown in. I suspect that the Coen brothers find Americans as baffling as their middle brow liberal audiences do. So they just keep making these in-joke movies about the funny sounding people in fly-over country. It's all very transgressive and cutting edge you see. I think of them as Borat for the PBS crowd.