This week’s blue-ribbon-winning letter from a reader comes in response to my review of No Country for Old Men, which was published at CTMovies.
The reader writes:
I cannot believe that any Christian could review this movie as objectively as you did!!!!!!! This is exactly what is wrong with our society! Tell it like it is and don’t be afraid to offend anyone!!!!! I question not only you, but the motion picture industry????? This movie was HORRIBLE!!!! This movie was NOT entertaining, NOT art, NOT what I think most normal AMERICAN people want to watch. It was dark and offensive and extremely disturbing. HOW could you give this movie 3 1/2 stars? Did I miss something???? I like how you tried to sensationalize the characters!!! I am disappointed in a web site touting Christianity that would give credit to a movie that had NOTHING to do with being a Christian much less just being a decent person! I feel compelled to somehow get into the movie business after such garbage!!!! I would love your input and arguments as to why this movie was rated so highly. Sorry if I sound so irritated!!!! I AM!
Thank you.
You’re welcome!!!!!!!!! You are welcome to read my “arguments” in the book Through a Screen Darkly!!!!! And I LOOK FORWARD to your venture into the movie business!!!
Maybe they could do a documentary on the use of the exclamation point through the centuries.
Thanks for this, it made me giggle.
Or should I say, MADE ME GIGGLE!!!?!!?!!
They must write headlines for Ain’t It Cool News.
Too funny. THANKS for POSTING!!!???
This person is probably Partly Right–as many of those who disagree with us are.
I think Kathleen Norris said the movie almost drove her to watching The Sound of Music, to recover. Almost.
I cannot emotionally afford the cost of this movie, no matter how technically good it is.
Um, didn’t Tommy Lee Jones have a big speech toward the end of the movie about how the world is going to hell because God has been taken out of morality, leaving blind chance as the only determining factor?
That’s what I got out of it, at least.
granted, consciences being seared and a de-sensitivity isn’t a good thing.
that being said, [i thought] the movie was cleaver and had many cohenish aspects which make it good art. also, [i think] there is something to take from it that is redeeming, maybe as you say, in the lack of what is in the movie (mercy, compassion etc.). perhaps i’m a pessimist (as Wolfe said, that’s a realistic worldview) but in my circle, there is just enough beauty in the hand basket, call it common grace, for people to live “good lives” without God. sometimes we need [in my estimation] a guy running around with a captive bolt pistol to make us believe in evil so as to cry out for redemption.
slowtrain – i see you were at the calvin writing fez… Norris also said she thought Borat was hilarious… it is only because of a skirt-wearing-middle-aged-cloister-walker that i will now see that movie. 😉
i digress… was the quote guy saying he was God at the very end? I mean, it’s even in caps… i can’t believe a Christian would do that. maybe i’m taking his phrase out of context… aren’t we all.
facesunveiled:
yeah, and then his uncle tells him that that’s vanity and that things are as they’ve always been. i think it’s valid to think of sheriff bell as our representative as champion of traditional morality, but ultimately we have to accept that he’s also the character who perceives reality but cannot bear its brutality and finally turns away, who lives knowing he’s awoken from and can never return to the dream in which his father bears the fire of civilization and goodness against the cold and darkness of the world while he follows after.
so i think one has to be careful when trying to ‘christian-ize’ this movie. god lives inside the world of no country for old men, but i think the film is challenging us to think of god differently—as a god of order, but the order of tooth and claw, not of civilization. god is dangerous and, perhaps from our perspective, god is cruel. to me, the movie is a challenge to and an accusation against christians who, as mccarthy wrote in the crossing, do not understand what it means to devour the flesh of god and to drink his blood, for if we did we would not live as we do. it’s a proposition about the nature of god that is understandably offensive to some christians.
personally, though, i loved it. except for the scene where sheriff moss returns to the hotel which i think is, at best, unnecessarily confusing and, at worst, intentionally misleading.