Well I tried and tried to get all the way through No Country for Old Men but about 20 minutes from the end a routine inner state check reported:
- faint aversion to pending violent action
- faint desire for pending violent action
- resultant scrunched up, induced anxiety
- foreknowledge that psychotic killer will kill woman -
- slightly stronger aversion to seeing that
- no other interest whatsoever in who kills who or how or who gets the money.
So I went forth into the daylight and bought a book for my son.
I browsed some reviews that night: Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. This is P. Travers in Rolling Stone who thinks that we would all have taken the money (and left the wounded man to die of thirst). I conclude that his fix on the people who share the planet with him is something less than rigorous.
There’s plenty more profundity-mongering around, but luckily you don’t have to go past Google’s first ten hits to find a drily unimpressed Stephanie Zacharek in Salon
Against this backdrop of ruthless killings and overall creepiness, Sheriff Bell ponders the meaning of existence and other stuff, which would be pretty boring if not for the occasional distraction of human life being snuffed out by cattle-slaughter devices.
For those who like camera angles, there are lots of camera angles.