Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Our long time contributor and friend, Copernicus, has returned in order to fill us all in on the Coen Bros' newest flick NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Yeah, I could really, like, watch this flick right now...

When I am President, I am going to create two new cabinet positions: Joel and Ethan Coen will each be given lifetime appointments as co-Secretary of Cinematic Awesomeness. Their movies come in two flavours -- part-brilliant, with some flaws, and staggeringly brilliant. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN certainly falls in the latter category, and there will be all kinds of arguments over whether it is the best Coen brothers' movie ever made. For some it will be. Having only seen it once, I'm not sure, but ask me again in 20 years. Certainly it should be added to the AFI top 100 movies list. And they should just call an emergency session of the Academy Awards right now, give it Best Picture, Director, screenplay and two or three best Actors, so that they can open the competition back up again to everyone else for the rest of the year.

Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's book, the basic premise is that hunter Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong in the west Texas desert, complete with corpses and millions in cash. Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) starts to investigate, and meanwhile the ultimate cinematic badass, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), creates a trail of bodies in his quest to track down the loot. Seriously, this guy may be better than Darth Vader circa 1981. And I don't care if Vader can choke people with his mind, Chigurh would track Vader down and murder him. Brutally. With no magic, only technology from 1980. He actually has a device akin to the force, and a weapon every bit as novel and iconic as a lightsaber. He blows in like a tornado, and he almost seems to represent something elemental, primal – a force beyond human control or understanding. Part of the reason Chigurh is such a memorable character is that he is blessed with some truly remarkable dialog. And the other part is Javier Bardem. In anyone else's hands this would simply be a great character, but he has turned it into a piece of cinematic history.

As an astronomer, I have spent a shitload of time in west Texas, at McDonald Observatory, in the exact small towns, and wide expanses of land where there are no towns, where this film is set. From Alpine, it is a 3 hour drive to the closest airport in Midland-Odessa one way, or 3 hours to El Paso the other. It is beautiful, desolate, and about as isolated as you can get in the US, outside of Alaska. The Coens and cinematographer Roger Deakins have teamed up to perfectly capture the look and mood of the countryside, from the continuous hills of scrub brush, to the stormy horizons. But even more important than the scenery are the people – this is the kind of place you can drive 40 miles and come across a single person manning a store or post office, with no other human being as far as you can see in any direction. I have come across real ghost towns. People who can live out there tend to be both independent and friendly as hell, and they look out for one another. In other words, they make perfect Coen brothers' characters. Josh Brolin hits it note-perfect, as does Kelly Macdonald, playing his wife. Both capture the kind of uncomplicated honesty and sincerity that so many folks from that region have. Tommy Lee Jones' accent bothered me in a few spots, but I am hypersensitive to the nuances of west Texas speech – overall he is exceptional. Even the bit-parts give standout performances here.

What makes NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN critical dynamite, but potentially box office poison, is that it is utterly unpredictable. Nothing is wrapped up in a neat little Hollywood package. This makes the violence doubly brutal, because it never conforms to our expectations. It can come out of nowhere, or a beat off from when you expect it, or sometimes they just don't show it at all, and you are shocked to stumble upon its aftermath without warning, through the eyes of another character. Characters don't have arcs so much as threads that sometimes come together before they end without notice. Few could pull this off, but the Coens do it by making every shot, character, and line of dialog compelling. You may not get the resolution you are seeking in one bit of the story, but that just forces you to think a little harder in the end.

-Copernicus