I felt sorta iffy checking the ‘consumed this’ box, because I didn’t get past half an hour of this movie.

I just… didn’t get it. I get this a lot with oscar winning movies, I have to say. All I saw was some guy shooting pretty much everything that moves. And then there’s some other guy who finds some dead guys who have a bag full of money and takes off with it.

There is some sort of weird tension thing going on which is vaguely interesting, but it just didn’t tickle me enough to keep on looking. I think people who like pulp fiction type movies probably like this one too. But it ain’t my cuppa tea.

Unimpressive.

It is very rare that I can offer an unreserved recommendation of a film adapted from a great novel. Because a novel is so much denser and more verbally complete than any film can ever be, one almost always is aware of how much is left out when a novel becomes a film. Cormac McCarthy’s work relies so much on verbal description and authorial commentary, I would not have thought the Coen brothers could have made such a satisfying and complete film from his work, but they did exactly that. Some have found the final scene disappointing, but it didn’t seem that way to me. At worst, it is an extremely good scene preceded by amazingly outstanding ones.

Got a chance to see this last night. As someone that’s familiar but by no means well-versed in the Cohens, I really enjoyed the effective mix of quirkiness and building tension, from which we never got a traditional satisfactory release, but in this case, that’s a good thing.

I respond pretty strongly to suspenseful movies, and I was absolutely terrified during this one. I was jumping nearly out of my seat, not because it was startling, but because of the lack of music, the amazing lighting, and the slow but consistent build of tension.