Word: belled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shot at: as he tries to ford a river pursued by a varmint posse and a killer dog, or jumping out a second-story hotel window with some of Chigurh's ammo in his gut. Joining the chase, of both Moss and Chigurh, are the venerable, philosophizing Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and a wise-ass DEA headhunter (Woody Harrelson). And every bit of this way, I'm admiring and loving...
...both Moss' can-do resilience and Chigurh's inhuman relentlessness; the film is fascinated with the expertise and poise under pressure of desperate men whose time is running out. For an hour and 40 mins. the film never lets up, deftly charting the itineraries of Moss, Chigurh and Bell as they lurch toward a triangular showdown a a Del Rio motel...
...then... well, not much. Moss vanishes from view, instead of slaking our desire to see him get away free and rich or go down with guns blazing. Chigurh has a unlikely, unsatisfying run-in with coincidence. Most of the screen time goes to Bell: his musings, visits to old friends and recollections of dreams. Jones is always worth watching, but why here? The Coens have lit a fuse they don't let go off. It's as if they junked the natural last reel of the film and substituted it with outtakes for the DVD edition. All this is faithful...
...plague of modernity has brought to our backbiting a new crudeness. We have eschewed toady gentility in favor of self-serving strife. And now the scoundrels bring us Risk, to rearrange that nasty competitive instinct along arbitrary House lines. The opening bell had hardly sounded before the color-coded trash-talk began. Those same horrid specimens who might otherwise have greedily withheld a study guide or sabotaged a classmate’s project instead spend their hours hijacking his account and sending his beloved soldiers to their doom. The effect is less severe, but the motive just as inglorious...
...Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu...