Quote: Godot Taxis @ October 26 2010, 4:29 PM BST
The first half of No Country is brilliantly realised. The rest of the movie is pretentious and hopeless. The Coens don't make great films - they make great set-pieces. They should stick to writing and art directing. All of their movies are far less than the sum of their parts with the possible exception of Hudsucker - which of course also had Raimi onboard.
The pre-credits sequence of Raising Arizona is a masterpiece - the rest of the film - though great in parts - is plodding. Fargo is cut from the same cloth as No Country - and Man Who Wasn't There - trying to wring high significance out of insignificant and formulaic events -like shining a Christmas fairy light on the human condition.
Haven't seen every one of theirs yet I don't think but I agree a bit about them being scene makers and art directors rather than great narrative film makers. They are similar to Powel & Pressburger I'd say, who made very memorable films with their artistic stamp all over them but not necessarily very good ones all the time, unless you like gaudiness or pretention.
But with 'No Country', they made a really good effort I thought to end that patchiness and make a good narrative movie. I thought the ending worked actually, really well, it was a titchy bit pretentious maybe yes, but I saw it as the 'anti-ending' if you like, it made me think of Butch and Sundance and the typical heroic movie ending of going out with all guns blazing, when in real life they died peacefully, and the out of place 1960s jingly soundtrack it had, when No Country had none. It was a realist western trying to make big points with its stark realism, yes a bit pretentious still, but a piece of big film making, I thought. Thought it definitely deserved the Oscar.
