REGINAROADIE'S BLOG

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NO COUNTRY/FIREFLY comparisons
Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Hey All

I just saw NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN for the third time over the weekend. I think it actually takes that many viewings of it to really appreciate the film for what it is. I know it ends rather anti-climactically, but it actually works when you know what's going to happen and keep everything in context.

Anyways, when watching it for the third time, I couldn't help but notice there were a few interesting character parallels with FIREFLY. Lewellyn Moss seems like a modern day version of Jayne whose a lot less crude. And seeing him with Carla Jean is almost like seeing a parallel version of Jayne and Kaylee as a couple. That's sort of the main parallel, though. Carla Jean and Kaylee look, sound and nearly behave so similar. I like to think that in some parallel universe, Jewel would have played that part, and one of our BDH's would have worked with the Coen Bros.

Where they do differ, though, is just the scene in the end when Carla returns from her mother's funeral and Anton is there in the corner, telling her to "call it". You can't help but notice the parallels between that scene and when Early confronts Kaylee in the engine room in OBJECTS IN SPACE. But in NO COUNTRY, she's the one character in the whole movie who actually says no to Anton. She knows who he is, she knows most likely that she's about to die, but she doesn't back down from him. I like to think that if the show had lasted x number of years, that Kaylee would have become like that. That she'd still be a positive force, but that she isn't so thin skinned and that if confronted by a man like Early or Anton, that she wouldn't back down.

And as for Anton Chigur, he's what I think The Operative should have been. I know Joss was trying to come up with a new kind of villain that didn't conform to the regular standards of the Big Bad, but I think Anton Chigur would have just destroyed The Operative upon seeing him. He would have destroyed everyone. I think the only people left standing in his path were gas station attendants and clerks, and he would have killed the trailer park woman if there wouldn't have been a witness.

I think Chigur truly is the ultimate badass. It's not often you see a character with literally no soul at all. I mean, you've seen assassins and killers of all shapes and sizes with their own set of rules and codes and all that, but not like Anton.

I think it would have been cool to maybe have seen an ep of FIREFLY where it seems like Cormac McCarthy had guest written an episode, like when Stephen King did an episode of THE X-FILES. Where all the iambic pentameter of Joss' writing style was just thrown out, there's little to no dialogue, and it's just stark, bleak imagery of endless deserts and unimaginable violence for 44 minutes or so.

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