Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. The Coens rule. No doubt about it. Can't wait for that one. And I really dug Joe Wright's PRIDE & PREJUDICE, so ATONEMENT looks promising to me as well, even though we have two reviews below for the film that aren't 100% positive. The first comes from MCU and the second from Ripblade. Enjoy!!!

No Country For Old Men

This has already been reviewed here, and for the most part I agree with that (more in-depth) assessment.

No Country For Old Men is a welcome return to form for Joel and Ethan Coen, and an exhilarating ride for an audience -- probably, I think, whether they are die-hard Coen fans or not.

The Coen genre is probably best described as the "bungled crime" genre, and No Country For Old Men fits right into that, with Josh Brolin's Texan-drawling everyman of a protagonist stumbling on the $2 million leftovers of a drug deal gone bad, and relentlessly pursued by Javier Bardem's spooky and bone-chillingly merciless killer and an aging lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones.

The filmmaking here is the most restrained the Coen brothers have ever practiced, and the effect, in terms of clear setup, careful build-up, and sustained suspense, is thrilling. In terms of spareness, one film this brought to mind (for me) was Million Dollar Baby, although where that film featured Clint's gentle music throughout, there is, like, *one* musical cue in No Country For Old Men that I noticed, and even that was a single, barely audible note. (There may have been more music, but if there was, it was so inconspicuous that I didn't notice it.)

Performances are outstanding, with all the leads (including Kelly Macdonald as the hapless protagonist's wife) perfectly nailing the understatedly detached and funny Coen-McCarthy dialogue, and supporting players are nicely cast. Nicely shot, cleanly edited, all the things you'd expect.

I will comment briefly on the ending, which is true to the book, but which I didn't think worked as well on film. I won't say any more about it, though, because (a) it's deserving of a whole discussion of the differences between narrative in film and books, and (b) it's no way, in any way, a reason not to see this great fucking movie as soon as humanly possible.

...

Atonement

I didn't see director Joe Wright's take on Pride and Prejudice, but based on that old reliable buzz and some glowing advance reviews, I was really looking forward to Atonement.

And I really wanted to like it a lot more.

The story, short version: after a relatively light-hearted opening act set at an English manor between the wars, a little girl's stupid lie tears apart the class-broaching romance between the daughter of the manor (Keira Knightley) and the housekeeper's son (James McAvoy). The rest of the story is about what happens to them during the war, with the daughter now serving as a nurse in London and the housekeeper's son a soldier in France, and the two of them dreaming of getting back together. Throughout all this, the little girl, now grown up and the younger sister of Keira Knightley's character (and played as a young girl by Saoirse Ronan and as an adult during the war by Romola Garai), slowly comes to understand the consequences of what she did as a child.

The narrative, which starts small, becomes sprawling, to say the least, with increasing (and seemingly unnecessary) jumps back and forth in time -- France, Four Years Later; London - Six Weeks Earlier -- to make the audience work a little to piece together what exactly happened. And keeping track of the where and when is a little more work than it should be.

There is a fantastic (and I do mean fantastic) single-shot set-piece roaming the nightmarish circus of British soldiers awaiting evacuation at Dunkirk that will leave half the audience shaking their heads at the ridiculous of war and the other half marvelling how-did-he-do-that and how-much-did-that-cost to pull off. It's actually a little distracting.

The framing device at the end, which shows the now-old woman who was the little girl who told the original lie being interviewed about the book she wrote (and which we've apparently been watching) feels a little tacked on.

All this is to say that everything probably works terrifically well in the *book* (which I haven't read) but doesn't come together completely on screen. It's rare that one wonders exactly what a movie is *about*, but this might be that movie for some, as it was for me.

Another thing that kept me from getting more immersed in the story was Wright's handling of the material, which I'm going to start describing as: if Michael Bay directed a Merchant-Ivory picture. There are fancy cuts aplenty, but what really started to irritate me was the sound editing. In Wright's world, typewriters (and there are lots of typewriters, one of which is a major participant in the film's pervasive "typewriter theme" on the soundtrack) don't just click and clatter: they thump and crunch like crashing cars; and lights in the London tube don't just flicker: they sound like someone is flipping the heavy arm of the main power supply, shaking the theatre each time.

But one other hand, and this may make everything I just said moot: if you want to see Keira Knightley emerging in her underwear, soaked, from an English manor fountain (twice), this may be the movie for you.

Yeah, that sounds really bizarre. Here's the second look at ATONEMENT!!!

A very unique film indeed…

It is very hard for me to review Atonement, in the normal sense as it is a fairly strange film. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the film is a marvel to behold, the cinematography, the direction, the acting, the music and sound design are all nigh on perfect, even how it tells the story is brilliant and interesting.

But (and this is a J-Lo sized but) the story itself isn’t really that in-depth and my biggest problem is the fact that the main driving force of the plot (most definitely the 2nd half) is based on a lie told by a 13 year old girl, a little girl named Bryony. A lie which doesn’t need to be told and for some reason should never have been told in the first place. This lie then proceeds to ruin (and end) the lives of the two main characters, the only two characters you actually like and feel for - Robbie (James McAvoy) and Cecillia (Kiera Knightly).

What the film then tries to do is make you feel sorry and empathise with this stupid 13 year old girl who caused all this hurt in the first place! It doesn’t succeed.

You see, to begin with the lie is slightly understandable in the fact that Bryony has mistakenly confused Robbie to be a sex maniac, due to an unfortunate incident, involving a letter being wrongly sent filled with dirty writings about Cecillia (hey, it happens to the best of us, get over it).

Therefore when the prudish Bryony witnesses her cousin being raped by (what appears to be) a man she doesn’t clearly see, she assumes it was Robbie. Despite the fact you already begin to dislike her for getting an innocent man sent to jail, at this moment it is slightly understandable based on her age and situation, but when at the end of the film it is revealed that she saw the rapist as clear as day. The film falls apart, and you realise that all the sorrow you have just watched was all based on some stupid little girl telling a lie for absolutely no reason! And therefore there is no way in hell I ‘m going to feel sorry for her. She just caused the deaths of two interesting and likeable characters by being a nosey stuck-up twerp (best posh insult I could think of)!

Despite this rather large plot hole, everything else in the film – from production design and special effects to the acting is so well done that I can’t really say it’s a bad film, because it’s not, it’s bloody good.

The standout being a shot that lasts nearly five minutes (with no cuts) when Robbie and his two buddies arrive at Dunkirk. I really couldn’t say if there is any CGI used as everything looks real, but in which case they must have had thousands of extras and used a lot of the budget on this one set-up.

I also particularly love how the first half is predominantly told in a fairy like state, with loads of bold vibrant colours filling the screen, when everyone is happy. Then how the second half (when the mood shift considerably) is shown through much more washed out colours.

It’s hard to give this a final score, because despite how good everything is and how well produced it is, the fact that this stupid lie ruined the ending and could have made a lot of what happened easily avoidable, it really knocks it from getting top marks for me.

But it’s bound to win loads of Oscars, because they love this kind of stuff!

8.5/10

For more reviews check out Ripblade Reviews here:
ripbladereviews.blogspot.com