Cormac/Coens = Old Men

I saw No Country For Old Men last night. It may have been one of the best movies I have ever seen. Sometimes you just know. In the last few years when I saw a movie like City Of God or Old Boy I walked out knowing I had never seen anything like them. That these would go down in history. You know when you have experienced something truly new. One of the tensest movies I've ever seen. With perhaps the most realistic violence. Perfect sound. When someone shot at someone else it had this perfect distance, percussion, and eventual deep hit in either glass, wood, concrete, metal, or flesh. There was nothing clean and perfect about anything in the movie. I love the Coen brothers, but this is in my mind their best movie. Everything they had promised with Blood Simple and Millers Crossing comes to life here. Plus as a fan of Cormac McCarthy I was amazed that someone could adapt something of his to such a level of perfection. This was maybe the best adaptation of a book that I have ever read. I've noticed some reviewers totally missing the point of the movie(and book). It's about the meaningless of violence. Therefore meaningless violence occurs with no moral or outcome meant to satisfy. This is very important to understand. Dying happens. It has no meaning or worth. It's a nihilistic, existentialist point of view(something that was very prevalent in the other two more violent and dark books I have read by McCarthy). This isn't about making the viewer or reader happy about outcomes of conflicts. This is about real life and how unhappy and unfulfilling true violence is. I think the last scenes make this all too clear yet I have read people who either didn't listen or see the scenes in the context.

Everyone is great in this movie. Josh Brolin is perfect, I know that Tommy Lee Jones has been waiting to play this particular part for decades(he's optioned a book or two in the past by McCarthy and made his own movie that closely parallels this one). Woody Harelson is great and in his own film catalogue this serves as a sharp answer to Natural Born Killers. But it is Javier Bardem that is something else. Oscar worthy and any other year that Daniel Day Lewis didn't embody acting he would be the obvious choice for best actor.

This is a movie only an experienced film maker could make. You would have to have about ten or more movies under your belt to have this level of patience and the daring to basically piss off your audience(which this does). But if you listen it's all there. Everything you need to know. Or don't need to know. And that is what makes it a Cormac McCarthy story.

The last scene is devastating. And perfect like few others.

If you don't like films that don't explain things and have a philosophical bent more important than plotting, morals, and outcomes then really don't watch this. It is not an action movie. It is the antithesis of one.

Adrian

Ouroborous

Snake Eating It's Own Tail

I had one of those Joe Matt Peepshow moments today when I got an e-mail from a woman I mentioned liking a few times in these posts. We were e-mailing back and forth about stuff and finally she mentioned seeing the picture I painted of her(which I already knew she knew about) and reading the post attached to it where I go into detail about an embarrassing story about hitting on her. She said she was flattered and had no idea. She said she felt famous since people read this thing. I felt famous that someone I only kind of knew read about me liking her on a website. We don't get that many hits but it was a nice feeling never the less. (BTW, the Joe Matt reference is to this one issue where he wrote a similar thing to my story, later became friends with the woman and then she read the previous issue and it all went down the drain in a later issue... if any of that made any sense).

I like another right now(although I am not putting out my flame for you if you are reading this honey). I won't write about her. At least not until it goes all wrong(or the snowball chance in hell it goes right).

Drew this with White paint, Black ink, Colored Pencil on green paper. When I scanned it the color was way more real and brilliant. When I "copied it for the web" it deadened the color for some reason.

The How To Draw Noir book by Shawn Martinbrough is rad. Check it out.

I just woke up at 8pm and I don't feel Smarter Than A Fifth Grader or Jeff Foxworthy. So I'm changing the channel on this shit.

My cat is weaving between my legs and the chair legs like a shark being fed chum from a pier.



Adrian

151

I had some tea at some place in Piedmont the other day. Licee. No. Lackee. Leekee. The name of the tea was something like that. It had those scary balls at the bottom that look like rat eyeballs or large fish eggs. Whatever the case it was excellent. I even ended up liking those insect eggs or whatever the fuck those things are.

I drew this picture of some dude sitting like a foot and a half to the side of me. Luckily he left so I didn't have to explain how I stole his soul and put it on paper. Remember this is a tea place. A few miles from Berkeley. They'll think shit like that. Anyway it was done with acrylic ink, ink, and white charcoal pencil on gray tinted paper.

The other night I hit on a beer wench(that's what she called herself, I told her never to let anyone call her a wench). Mendoza was convinced I'd chicken out since she was the cutest there. The singer of a band I was watching cracked his head open. My friend Taylor said he heard Mendoza on a video tape later say, "Come on keep playing, it's just a little blood, thats what we came for". Mendoza is so evil sometimes I think we must bow to him. I drank 151 proof. That was pretty much my halloween in Berkeley.

Adrian