A bit of a cold coming on, so stayed home and took it easy. Watched two movies, chosen almost at random, and thinking about it this morning, how well they functioned one after the other.

The first was Two-Lane Blacktop, via the excellent new two disc release by Criterion. Perhaps best remembered for its stunt casting (James Taylor as the driver and the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson as the mechanic), perhaps it is better remembered as an artifact of an era when a major studio released a film so heavily influenced by the French new wave of the 60s. It’s a film about a cross country car race in which there is not so much racing, a film starring two music stars with almost no music to be heard. Taylor, Wilson and Warren Oates (driving the GTO) are outsiders, they have no connection to society. Oates seems to strive for that connection, picking up every hitch hiker along the way, seeking some sort of validation perhaps and tells a different story to each of them, trying to reach out and gain acceptance from strangers, while Taylor and Wilson sit mostly in silence, even with their cute female hitch hiker – whom Oates seems to want more than victory in the race. It’s directed by Monte Hellman, a graduate of the Roger Corman school of film-making, who did several other notable films in the 60s and 70s but has recently been relegated to things like Silent Night Deadly Night 3.

Two-Lane Blacktop mostly takes place along the back roads of the American South and Southwest. No Country for Old Men marks the Coen Brothers’s return to West Texas, a place they visited in their first film, Blood Simple. And while a lot of critics are comparing No Country to Fargo, this is really an anti-Fargo. It has far more in common with Blood Simple.

Assuming that most of you haven’t read the original novel by Cormac McCarthy (I hadn’t), it becomes almost impossible for me to talk about this film without spoiling the plot. So let me just say that the three leads – Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin – are firing on all cylinders here. My attention was riveted to the screen for the entire time – the suspense in some scenes is practically unbearable.

I didn’t much care for the Coens’ Intolerable Cruelty or their remake of Ladykillers. This is an excellent return to form for them – much more in the vein of Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing than Big Lebowski, though there is a good deal of subtle humor to be found amidst the horror here.

Anyway, the comparison between the two very different films comes because often in Two-Lane Blacktop, the people they encounter along the way don’t seem to be professional actors, they seem to be “real Americans” and through them we see very clearly into a segment of America at a particular time.

And I got the same feeling from much of the supporting cast in No Country For Old Men, the old man in the gas station, the hotel clerks, the taxi drivers. Other films tend to look down on these kinds of people, but here they’re simply presented to us as the way things are.

P.S. This is the time of year that I look forward to, not so much because of the holidays, but because it’s when studios send out DVD screeners to Oscar voters and many of them end up on the internet and probably in the shops in Shenzhen as well. Studios have tried digitally watermarking these screeners – in the case of No Country this means two blurry “bars” on screen throughout the film, masking the identifying marks or numbers.

I’m looking at the coming soon list on Cityline’s web site and I don’t even see No Country for Old Men. I also don’t see There Will Be Blood. Coincidentally (or not?) both are co-productions from Miramax/Disney and Paramount.

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster – a major studio release with major international stars – first opens here in January, two months after the US release. Sweeney Todd doesn’t arrive here till Chinese New Year. But we get AVP2 and National Treasure 2 and Alvin & the Chipmunks day and date with the US. If it wasn’t for the internet, a movie fan could starve to death in Hong Kong.

P.P.S. As in the past, sorry, I will not respond to comments asking for information on my sources for obtaining these films.

Hongkie Town
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