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The Coens’ No Country for Old Men

I finished work early yesterday and went to the Laemmle in Santa Monica to catch a matinee of the Coen brothers’ new film, No Country For Old Men, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel by the same title. The story is about a welder named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on a handful of dead men in the Rio Grande, along with a bag full of cash–about 2 million dollars. He takes the cash, setting off a chain of events, which, although easily guessed at, are nevertheless completely suspenseful. On Moss’s trail are a psychopathic killer (Javier Bardem), a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), an assassin (Woody Harrelson), and a handful of unnamed Mexican drug dealers. (Unnamed, and undeveloped as characters, something that is true also of two of the three females in the book.)

In some ways, the Coen brothers’ adaptation remedied a couple of the problems in McCarthy’s otherwise excellent novel. One is that a crucial scene that resolves what happens to Moss is missing from the book, but not from the film. The other is that, in the book, it’s easy to miss the fact that the story is set in 1980 (the date is hinted at the beginning, but not mentioned again until about halfway through the novel.) Obviously, in the movie, the sense of time was immediately clear. The film also gives us the pleasure of hearing McCarthy’s pitch-perfect dialogue spoken by talented actors. (You know how, after watching Fargo, you left the theater and tried to speak like Frances McDormand? You’ll be doing the same with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.) But there are also ways in which the Coen brothers’ movie doesn’t quite compare with the novel. The one female character, for instance, that did something other than plead with a man or serve him food or coffee ended up being cut entirely from the film. Still, the level of craft that went into making this adaptation is really, really remarkable. Not to be missed.




The Barbarians Are At The Gate, Part 5786

In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper reviews four recent books that purport to show that Europe is under attack from Islam and/or Muslims: Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept, Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe, Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, and Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia. Here is Kuper’s intro:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

Bat Ye’or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye’or is Hebrew for ”daughter of the Nile”, the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.

Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye’or’s genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.

The four books here provide a fair summary of the ”Eurabia” genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.

And then he proceeds to deconstruct all these books’ claims. You can read the full article here.



Lindelof on the WGA Strike

I’ve been following media coverage of the Writers’ Guild strike, and it’s really unsettling to see how the writers are being portrayed as greedy bastards who don’t care that TV crew-members will be losing their jobs soon. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Damon Lindelof, who writes for Lost–a show I watched on TV here and streamed online when I was in Morocco on my Fulbright–explains why the strike is necessary:

The motivation for this drastic action — and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day — is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet.

My show, “Lost,” has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.

Read it all here. You can send a message of support through this website.



R.I.P. Norman Mailer

As you no doubt have heard, Norman Mailer died on Saturday, at the age of 84. I have read too little of his work to contribute anything personal in this space, but there are articles and remembrances in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the SF Chronicle, the Nation, the New Yorker, TEV, Critical Mass, and many, many other newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Here in Los Angeles, the Times had a front-page obit yesterday, a long article that covered Mailer’s entire literary career and included photos from key moments.



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