Word: coens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...acting awards went to two performances of grieving spouses. Konstantin Lavronenko was cited for The Banishment, the Russian film about a crumbling marriage, in a slim fortnight for male actors - though Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem would have been more than worthy for their roles in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men. This was a year for les femmes, with many films about woman isolated in their passion or misery. One of those performances, Jeon Do-yeon's in the Korean Secret Sunshine, was the favorite to take Best Actress...
...Still, over the fortnight certain favorites have emerged among the critics. Few would be surprised if awards went to the Coen brothers' crime drama No Country for Old Men or the Romanian 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. Either Josh Brolin or Javier Bardem, the hero and villain of No Country, would be a fine choice for Best Actor. Jeon Do-yeon, the addled widow in the Korean Secret Sunshine, and Asia Argento, in An Old Mistress, give just the sort of passionate, showy performances that win Best Actress awards. And there are other films, esteemed by the critics, that...
...Speaking of shudders-and returns to Cannes-Joel and Ethan Coen have been going to the festival since 1984, when they peddled their first feature, the murder mystery Blood Simple, in the Cannes Market. They won the Palme d'Or in 1991 for Barton Fink. But the brothers' earlier crime dramas are mere frolics compared to No Country For Old Men-a grim, mostly enthralling version of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel about $2 million in missing drug loot. For most of its 122-minute running time, this is a gnarly action movie, a duel between a kind-of-good...
...indelible villain to give you the nightmare creeps, and a kind of hero - the kind the mass movie audience can root for, to get away with a $2 million satchel, and do it against Everest odds. Joel Coen says this is "about as close as we'll ever get to an action movie." On that count, and for most of the film, No Country delivers, with suspense scenes as taut as they are acutely observed. Moss spends most of his sorry time being chased and shot at: as he tries to ford a river pursued by a varmint posse...
...Coen brothers have adapted literary works before. Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett's tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred The Odyssey to the American south in the 1930s. But No Country for Old Men is their first film taken, pretty straightforwardly, from a prime American novel: Cormac McCarthy's 2005 rumination on the changing ways of crime in West Texas...