Well if I'm here again its probably about some movie I saw. Okay, so the other day I took the day off because we were getting our house painted (sounds like as good a reason as any to take a day off, no?) and I managed to catch a couple of movies---one I had seen a long time ago, and one I was seeing for the first time. Both are classics.
1) White Heat--I saw this movie years ago, but was watching the DVD. God, what a great movie. James Cagney was nearing the end of his legendary career, and he is one of the alltime CRAZEES here as Cody Jarrett, the homicidal criminal with a severe mother complex. And I mean REALLY severe. If you stop to consider that this film was released in 1949, its amazing how violent this film is. I mean, there are some shocking scenes here, such as the one where Cagney has a guy locked in a car trunk.
He asks the guy through the trunk how he's doing.
"How ya doing in there Parker? You okay?"
"There's not much air in here."
"What's that? You say you need air in there?"
And then he proceeds to shoot the trunk 6 times, obviously killing the guy, and says:
"There...now you got your air."
I can imagine what people watching the film almost 60 years ago must have thought.
Virginia Mayo is very good as Cagney's floozy (a role she mastered), and veteran character actor Edmond O'Brien was never better than here, as the Treasury Department's snitch who's out to bring Cagney to justice. Crime drama just doesn't get much better than this. Great film. *****
2) No Country for Old Men---here's a film that I had waited, and waited and waited to watch. And for some odd reason, the longer I wait to watch certain films, the better they always seem to be. Here's this years winner for Best Film, a western set in 1980, a time when running drugs into Texas from Mexico was just beginning. And with it comes a wave of violence that has never been seen by a weary small town sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones, who must have his picture in the encyclopedia under "weary small town sheriff", because this is a role he was born to play. Josh Brolin had one heck of a year in film, first playing a dirty cop in American Gangster--his was the performance in the film in my opinion---and here he plays a guy who, while out hunting, stumbles upon a horrific crime scene in the middle of nowhere. Its a drugdeal gone bad, and since no one is around, who's going to notice a couple of million dollars missing? This sets the movie and the events in it rolling, and its also what sends Jaiver Bardem, this year's best supporting actor, after Brolin. And trust me....this is not someone you want looking for you. Besides truly great performances by the three leads (and I'm not really sure how Bardem was nominated as a "supporting" actor, since he really has the most important role in the film), there are also terrific performance---I mean really nuanced pieces of work--by veteran character actors like Barry Corbin, Tess Harper, Woody Harrelson and others. A brutal modern day western...very violent, but full of acting tour de forces.
***** Deserving of its award for Best Picture.
Later,
Jeff
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