August 08, 2005
Other great films seen during the remaining days of the Video Festival:
Mana: Beyond Belief (dir. Peter Friedman & Robert Manley)
Film As A Subversive Art: Amos Vogel And Cinema 16 (dir. Paul Cronen)
Meet Marlon Brando (dir. Albert & David Maysles)
Noel (The Obituary Project) (dir. Hope Tucker)
Wake (dir. Keun-Pyo Park)
There were a handful more that were good, and only one or two that didn't strike my fancy. I ended up missing just about every film I had planned to catch (thankfully, in most cases, because otherwise I wouldn't have seen Phantom Limb and most of the other amazing titles listed above). I did miss a lot of films that I should have seen, due to scheduling conflicts, unexpected overlaps, and forgoing the entire last day of the festival for a wedding. Still, based on what little I did see, the lineup was pretty strong this year.
I finished No Country For Old Men a while back, and then passed it on to my dad, thinking that it might provide us with a rare common point of interest (for the record, while the book is McCarthy's most accessible, I wouldn't generally recommend it as an introduction to his work). He finished it last night, and his take on it, in so many words, was this: McCarthy is suggesting that postmodernism has left our culture incapable of dealing with evil.
I agree with this reading of the text (which, true to form, eventually, expertly, transcends the noirish conventions with which it begins); while out of context it sounds a bit simpleminded - and, yes, conservative - one must take into consideration the level of evil with which McCarthy deals. As he did to a more powerful, more important degree in Blood Meridian, he's taken the stereotypical and turned it into something prototypical; it is not mere villainy he excels at creating, but a primeval sense of pure, amorphous malevolence that cannot be dealt with on any terms but its own.
While looking for other reviews of the novel, I discovered this synopsis of a screenplay he wrote, entitled Whales And Men. I wasn't terribly fond of his other screenplay, The Gardener's Son, but this outine is fascinating (and there are elements that don't sound too dissimilar to a certain script of my own). If I had more time on my hands, I'd hop in my car and take a day trip to the University of San Marcos, where the only publicly available copy exists, just to read it.
Posted by David Lowery at August 8, 2005 11:18 PM