HuntinPeck80

I have been meaning to take another shot at reading In Praise of Folly. I tried before but kept dozing off. I wonder, what does a fool's folly amount to, is it very different from the folly of a king? Are we all the same in the eyes of the gods, so much fluff in the world's navel? A bit of lint in the pocket?

It is folly to write this review, is it not? To add it to the virtual pile, the immeasurable morass of meaningless content. But one must persist, nonetheless.

At times I wept, watching RAN. At times I felt I ought to laugh, yet I could not. I do not have the emotional distance of a sky god. Only the king's fool, and the vengeful Kaede, can find the strength to laugh.

One thing confused me. Why did the two brothers bring a double army to attack the castle when its occupants amounted to little more than a warband and a nest of concubines? No wonder everyone was running past one another. The battle scenes in RAN arguably have more visual flair than bloody realism, but the images sure are striking. Nothing is so striking, however, as the blanched look of astonishment on the lead actor's face; not even those preposterous floating eyebrows on the forehead of the lead actress.

Good scoring by Takemitsu, Japan's most famous western-style classical composer.

Coming to this movie again after having revisited the Spanish movie ¡Dispara! (1993), I feel there's a certain camaraderie, almost as if one were the spiritual mirror of the other. In this one, No Country, we see people, especially Llewelyn, make a number of bad decisions. Fatally poor choices. In ¡Dispara! It is more a case of decisions that seem trifling but which lead to fateful, unforeseeable consequences. Basically, I guess, it's a question of fate in both movies.

Llewelyn, hunting in the desert, finds a bunch vehicles and their dead occupants, a drug deal gone wrong. One wounded survivor pleads for water, but Llewelyn ain't got none. He absconds with the drug money (bad move), then decides to go back and help the wounded man later that night (bad move), leaves his truck parked on a rise a long way from the crime scene (bad move), and then has to run for his life when a new batch of baddies drive on in. And I haven't even mentioned Anton yet, now have I?

Pride. Overconfidence. Bloody-mindedness. Obstinacy. The long arm of the law is slower than the quick footwork of the bounty hunter.

Blah blah. This is a terrific road movie, a game of cat and mouse. In Anton Chigurh (Bardem) the movie presents one of the most appalling bad guys to disgrace the silver screen. I suppose, one could say that the whole middle act of this movie, all the shenanigans at the motel - Llewelyn's socks and tent-poles - are pretty ludicrous stuff, and what exactly happens during the disastrous detour to El Paso (the panicked, high speed getaway: were there multiple parties converging on Llewelyn?) remains quite unclear. But there are wonderful, sober performances from all involved, especially Lee Jones, Brolin, MacDonald and Bardem. Harrelson injects a satisfying dollop of humour into the nefarious goings-on.

Try watching it on a double-bill with ¡Dispara! See what sort of correspondences, thematic or emotional, you find.

A young man, a journalist, interviews a talented performer at the circus in Madrid. Her speciality, marksmanship on horseback. The two people feel a mutual attraction and things move fast. He leaves for another assignment, just overnight. Alas, things can change in a person's life in just a day. New faces in the audience the next night, and it's not her horseback riding that is being admired. Blossoming joy turns to acrid despair, and worse is to come.

Outrage in the English dub, Dispara (Shoot!) in the original. Bad decisions, impulsive actions, the cruel smile of Fate. This is a movie that invites us to ask ourselves, would we really have done things differently had it been us? We think that we would, make more sensible decisions, but then again we're sitting comfortably merely watching a movie, and everyone is different, let's face it.

Marcos didn't want to go to Barcelona, and what if he hadn't? Ana shouldn't have shot at that beer can, right? Why did the policeman needlessly insist on inspecting her handbag? Did Mario really need to use that wine bottle the way he did? If only the doctor had respected her wishes, yes? The wheel of fortune turns, the thread of existence snags on a sharp stone, and things happen. The show must go on, but the circus is a dying institution.

Some nice landscape photography and beautiful scoring by Alberto Iglesias. This is a revenge tragedy, not a revenge exploitation movie.