Most Anticipated: The Road

How can you have more than one most anticipated? Shut up, that's how!

Four reasons why I'm looking forward to The Road.


1) Viggo Mortensen. Look at him there, in that picture, all bearded and badass. Viggo has quickly become one of my favourite actors, mostly (entirely?) thanks to his work with David Cronenberg (esp. A History of Violence). Viggo also has Good and Appaloosa coming out this year, which look good and interesting, respectively.

2) Cormac McCarthy. The man wrote the source novel to No Country for Old Men, which I loved, as well as the source novel to this. And ummmm All the Pretty Horses, too I guess.

3) John Hillcoat. The man directed The Proposition, which was all kinds of grimy and gritty and violent and dirty realistic down under western, which would seemingly make it for this project as it's set in...

4) The Post-Apocalypse. How I love post-apocalyptic worlds. Maybe because they so often involve zombies. Not that this involves zombies. None that I am aware of, at least. But I can love them separately. I'm not sure what love came first. It's a chicken and the egg thing.

My Best of the Year in Film: No Country for Old Men

The Year: 2007

The Film: No Country for Old Men

Written and directed by the Joel & Ethan Coen based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy.

Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem.

Brilliant.


Justification: I may not see as many films in a year as I wish, but no other had quite as much impact as this one. I'll give it a proper review once I can watch it again, hopefully over and over on DVD. And I'll discuss how I personally justify the undoubtedly contentious ending. I imagine everyone does it just a little differently.

Runners-up: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Eastern Promises, Zodiac, The Darjeeling Limited

Sailing to Byzantium

"Sailing to Byzantium"

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

- William Butler Yeats, The Tower, 1928


Almighty, going to have think on this some more.