1) I saw No Country for Old Men.

2) Okay, I saw most of No Country for Old Men. Almost all of it, in fact. Except for the ending, during which I had gotten up to go to the bathroom.

3) I did not spontaneously combust upon returning from the bathroom and discovering I had missed the ending of No Country for Old Men. This is an achievement in sheer willpower.

4) I got to know this gentleman:

Future horror icon and Halloween-costume perennial. Guaranteed.

5) I read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s infamous review of No Country for Old Men. Perhaps this is just the brain damage incurred upon discovering that I’d missed the film’s ending when I got up to take a leak, but I am partly convinced this review was conjured from my unconscious mind as an embodiment of the stupidest possible way to engage with a violent genre movie. It’s not just, and it’s not even mostly, the unintentionally hilarious, outraged insistence that everything be about one’s own politics, perhaps best represented here by the straight-faced statement that a reference to a serial killer’s dog-collared victim is a “particular allusion to Abu Ghraib.” Nor is it the inevitable factual error made while ignoring all other concerns in favor of getting everything point in the direction the reviewer wants it to go, in this case lambasting a character for refusing to help a dying man when it is precisely helping that dying man that gets him into the mess he’s in in the first place. No, the review’s philosophical core is what I’ll have no truck with, and that is this:

The picture of human nature in No Country for Old Men is by contrast so bleak I wonder if it must provide for some a reassuring explanation for our defeatism and apathy in the face of atrocity.

To which I can only reply (twelve months ago):

There is nothing special about your pet target. On the contrary. All humans, from every country and time period ever, are terrible. That’s what great art is about. I can see an argument being made that embracing this belief is a way of letting oneself off the hook; I submit that one who makes that argument proves in so doing that he doesn’t understand the belief at all.

6) I saw a trailer for There Will Be Blood, which with a combination of its title, its music by Jonny Greenwood, and post-Bill the Butcher Daniel Day-Lewis may have been the most ominous trailer I’ve ever seen.

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