He's got way more talent than Cruise ever pretended to have. I'm looking forward to seeing him in this overflow of apparently good parts. Kind of like when John C. Reilly was in all the good movies the year Chicago was new.

pgs

Pam Strickland

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut

But sorry metulj...I have to take exception with your saying Grindhouse wasn't good It was EXACTLY what it was meant to be...a tribute to the 70's B-movies. Nothing better than a ginormous bucket of greasy buttered popcorn, jujubes, and a huge Coke paired up with a dark movie theatre and a double feature of horror movies. But then, I've always had a Gothic sense of humor anyway.

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"You can't fix stupid..." ~ Ron White"
"I never said I wasn't a brat..." ~ Talidapali

I saw No Country for Old Men a few months ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, and, as all of the critics are saying, it's a very well made film. Brolin is fantastic in it, as are Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardim. And fans of the Coen brothers -- especially people who like Fargo -- will love it.

Having said all that, though, I didn't really think too highly of the film. It aspires to be something more profound than it actually is, which is a fairly run-of-the-mill genre film -- part western, part film noir. I saw it in a massive theater with about a thousand people, and nearly everyone around me was laughing at and cheering on the violence. Nothing like good, heart-warming sadism. It'll win a million Oscars.

Long Pauses

Like Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road, this next-to-last one was something of a parable. A man succumbs to a strong temptation, one he knows to be wrong, and then in the course of the story finds out the consequences of his actions. The moral implications are devastating as the tale unfolds. I understand that the movie is very faithful to the novel. The real tragedy is that the film still hasn't opened here in McCarthy's hometown.

Is someone making Suttree? May I recommend they they go for a different kind of darkness then in No Country for Old Men... Suttrees darkness is slower, and there is more to laugh at.. but it is painful and lonesome and cold and dark at times too... It deals more with nature in my mind, directly or indirectly. I think at times of the pacing in a film like Jerimiah Johnson........ not becasue Suttree is a mountain man or anything, but becasue I feel a greater eye watching from the river, the woods, the mountains, even the windy city street. That's what I would do.... and you'd have to some body who really knew the urban mountain south in the 1950's... the abadonment of it, the feeling of it.... the ten or twenty years over lapping feeling of it that was not present in much of the rest of the country. Al these things would have ot be done. It could not be a "Fifties Flick!" It is really a window into a forgotten world, where, as McCarthy tells us, "no child shall walk but thee..", menaing the reader..... OPr, hopefuly the viewer someday. Boy, you'd have to get it right though, and it wouldn't be a film for just anybody.

Some books should just be books.

Submitted by sobi on Mon, 2012/12/10 - 6:36pm.
Suttree is one of them.

YES!

My gosh, I got so amazingly excited reading this that time stopped. Somehow, perhpas in a manner not unlike a childm shaking a box at Christmas, I got the idea that the Conen brothers were taking on the beautiful and yet equaly difficult task of creating a version of Suttree. My gosh, I sure go ahead of myself there.

I wish that that would happen, so much. So long as they didn't rush to the ending. What they did with O Brother Where Art Thou prooves that they could get the fully southern (and fully human)flavor of comedy amidst the backdrop of an epic journey, and experiences durring adventures and soul searching. Such a story of the heart. Yet in order to do Suttree properly, you would need damn good music (the kind that directors like Davied Lane weren't afraid to use. I am imagining somthing entirely different, yet that should give some idea of the idea of scale) It would certainly need a theme of sorts, and truly the director would have to have a full aprechiation of the work, and Suttree's journey through a dark forgotten world. More than anything I have ever read, that book took me into a place that, as a boy in Tennessee, seemed always justn around the corner around late afternoon or sunset.... a glenn by some railraod tracks I was suprised to find outside of a new subdivision, or a sign of an old buisness, say a grocer or hardware store, faded on a wall now half covered in Kutzoo, abandoned or serving some storage function for another buisness now. It was always just around the next bend in the river, or maybe you thought if you jumped off an old iron bridge where you and the other boys swam, you might emerge in that other time before your world seemed so fractured.... when the world, the voices and culture around you, were of one way and one culture in a vast world where places were real, and time was not just a intrival sum of seconds awaiting for an end.

This is why modern audiences might not understand the movie Suttree, per say, as they might a film like Jerimiah Johnson, which I often see somehow as being a kin to it, though the sotries are vastly different, becasue of it's relation to man, individualism, exile, nature, loss, and to some degree redemption. To do Suttree right, one would have to put aside the fear that some might not get it, and just go ahead and make a two and a half hour plus movie..... With a ten minute intermission..... and I better see lots of amazing shots of the river that make Stanly Kubric proud. No c.g.i, no obviously fake southern accents, no hillbilly caricatures from central casting. I need it to look like you went back to 1951 with a few good cameras and started filming. This means understanding the time period. Looking at the photographs. Understanding thatn knoxville then was closer to the Great Depression then the post-war boom that was just emerging in most of the country. Re-creating Suttree would be to re-create a world that has not only been forgotten but in many cases rubbed out intentionally. It would be like archeology in a way, and to make this flow seemlessly might be difficult. Also, you would have to find the right actors.
Paying locals wouldn't be out of the question, yet you would need to find people with body types that are hard to come by now. People back then generally did not have muffin tops, unless they were just out and out chubby. You would also have to get the settinsgs right, giving everything an extremely lived in quality. Also, the various chaos and children and dogs runnning amuck on the river banks. All in all, actors would have to understand accents that are now almost extinct, or tainted int a general malaise of gutteral south. It would be a task.

"Coen", I mean. Anyway, I don't know why I wrote all this anyway. I just got excited.

I'm still wondering if/when this is going to be released.
~m.