Maynard goes to the movies
If you take movies seriously, this one needs to be on your radar. It grabs you by the throat and never lets go. It’s fascinating in the way that watching a rattlesnake strike is fascinating…and at the same time, it’s quietly questioning what might be going through the mind of the rattlesnake…and asking whether God has really thrust us into a world filled with rattlesnakes…whatever was He thinking?…and what are we supposed to do about it? I wonder too.
I give thanks to the Coen Brothers. It’s a few dedicated artists like these guys that justify an industry that produces so much garbage.
Here’s the official movie website, and the Metacritic rating, and RottenTomatoes.
Unsuitable for kids due to very graphic and realistic scenes of violence.
..from the AV club review…
“the film winds toward a revelation about the overwhelming realness of evil, and its persistence in the modern world: Its essence changes, but not its form. … But the ultimate vision here is of a hard world in which civilization is the aberration, and the things we fear are always waiting for an excuse to make life normal again.”
What is civilization, anyway? I like to think it is a respect for another’s life, liberty and property. Does civilization really include the initiation of violence against others just because their desires do not coincide with yours? Prohibition against alcohol was justified as a noble experiment to improve the character of man; it was a dismal failure. The end does not justify the means. THAT is evil. To impose your will over another with coercive force is to commit an immoral act far more heinous than the one done by a poor, abused soul trying to self-medicate. These murderous bloodbaths as portrayed in this film are the result of people accepting the contradiction of a government ‘protecting’ our liberty by destroying it. The VietNam quote “it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it” is being played out on our streets today. This country learned in the 1920s and 30s what happens when people presume that Jefferson was wrong; that all men are NOT created equal; that like in Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, “some animals are more equal than others” and can presume to order them around as long as the ‘majority’ approves. Mike Gray’s book ‘Drug Crazy’, in sync with the Cohens film shows us the folly of ‘serving’ others with violence.
How do we make life normal again? By practicing what we preach about individual rights, letting the drug ‘problem’ recede into the background where it was before the big ‘drug war’. Liberty is meaningless if you only have the ‘liberty’ to do what you are told. That’s not what civilization means.
Glad to see your post for this movie. Was afraid it might be full of liberal crap. The cinema’s too expensive to take that kind of gamble. Kudos.