We watched a couple of movies that told me not to watch them again. This happens occasionally and I usually do listen. There are so many movies I have seen that I have never revisited. That's actually a good thing, makes more time for the good stuff.
No Country For Old Men is a 2007 Cohen brothers movie set in 1980. It's based on a novel by Cormac MacCarthy. Not a guy I read, in fact, he's a guy to avoid if you're like me and don't care for depressing novels about the sad sorry side of life and death. I don't read mainstream novels for the most part. And even though McCarthy's The Road is a post apocalyptic story, which I sometimes like, I don't much want to see it either. Joe says the movie is about three times more depressing than the Cohen's movie. Sure doesn't say "Watch me!" to me. In NCFOM Josh Brolin plays a guy who comes across a bunch of dead Mexican's in the desert. Instead of running he strolls right down into the mess. The ground is littered with the bodies of several bloody men and a dog with holes in it. Really, who the hell brings their dog to a drug deal? That's some stupid shit. Brolin finds a badly shot guy who's still alive. He's begging for water but there's no water. There is a pickup truck filled with wrapped plastic bags and a little ways away from the carnage is a guy. He's dead and beside him is a satchel with 2 million bucks inside. Josh takes the money and goes home. Stupidly he returns to the scene later that night with a gallon of water for the last dying guy. Some horrible people find him there and the chase is on. They know who he is, where he lives, and who they need to kill. Javier Bardem plays a nasty psycho murderer who seems to kill pretty much all the time. There was a lot of buzz when the movie came out, especially for Javier, and it did win four Academy Awards for Best Picture, director, adaptation, and a nod to Javier for the Best Supporting Actor. It is a well made movie with lots of great character actors going to town. As always I enjoyed seeing Tommy Lee Jones and the large tv and BluRay really showed the craggyness of his face. I was with the movie for a lot of it but near the end it pushed me away. It's all dark and black and sometimes I like that but this film didn't have a good ending for me. I enjoyed the Cohen brothers Fargo and A Simple Plan much better than NCFOM. Not going to make it to my buy list and neither will the next movie we watch.
Spearhauk found a copy of The Spirited Killer Trilogy on clearance. It's three movies packed onto one disc. We had seen Spirited Killer a while back. I basically said don't watch it. In 2007 I had picked up a copy of the two disc dvd of Spirited Killer because the box said that Tony Jaa was in the movie. He's cool and he is in there, in one scene, near the end of the movie. Spirited Killer is part of a vague unconnected series of films where people encounter spirits and get killed. SK is number 4 and it's got a release date of 1994. Spirited Killer 2: Awakened Zombie Battles is another in the series. The dvd box says it was released in 1997. I'm certainly wasting more time than this mystery calls for. The print is pretty poor, damaged in many places, and it's been transfered without using an anamorphic lens to widen out the film. Everyone was pretty skinny until Spearhauk did some magic with his tv and Oppo DVD player. It looked fairly normal. Some folks are in a forrest, one of the only things common to all the movies in the series. One group is looking for the grave of the grandfather of one of the two women with the group. She's Chinese and she wants to take the body back to China. Some punks are looking for the grave of the grandfather because they heard there was some gold in there. Some gangsters are burying their dead boss. He was killed by police in a set up. The gang is distraut. The magician with the lady uses a spell to find the grandfather. It awakens the grandfather and the gang boss. The movie calls them zombies but they are really like the hopping vampires that were a staple of the Hong Kong Cinema. They hop and they have vampire teeth. Not much different. The groups fight. Not much else happens, there's some slapstick and some fart jokes. Like many of the Hok Kong movies of the 70's that it emulates this Thai movie drags and soon I was wish it was over. Eventaually it was. Buy at your own peril.
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