call it. friend-o.

Like all other reviews I've read, the only thing I can say is this:

JESUS CHRIST GO SEE THIS MOVIE. 

Also: I've never read the book, but I could feel the McCarthy seeping out.  You can hear it in the dialogue, in the silence of the landscape, in the breathing and the taps of the murderous oxygen tank, you can see it and you can feel it.  McCarthy's prose has been described as "cinematic" and the Coen Brothers were faithful to it. 

The plot is unimportant to whether or not you should see the movie.  Even if you have no interest in the subject matter and have never read McCarthy (like my mother), you will still be amazed at the cinematography and the finesse of everyone involved.  Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones were all brilliant.  So were Kelly Macdonald as Carla Jean (Trainspotting) and Woody Harrelson as Carson Wells.

Pete Hammond of Maxim calls it "a superior, bone-chilling ode to the New West".  This is a film about an evolving, decaying American pastoral.  The American dream is over.  Not even treasure-hunting is possible, because there is no treasure, and don't even suggest climbing the ladder by your merit and hard work.  Little dogs, at the beck and call of their masters, will die for the gun.  Only outlaw cats survive.  It's the Wild West without the sunset, without the possibility of a new frontier, without the fairytale (so refreshing after all the romantic fantasy bullshit that's being propagated to us lately: Stardust, Enchanted).  There's sheriffs and there's robbers, like in the Old West, but now there's a new breed of highwayman: the Hunter, a monster of modernity (those who've seen the Criminal Minds episode "Open Season" or the Crime Investigation Australia episode "The Kimberley Killer" will be familiar with the type). 

Paul Virilio in Strategy of Deception, italics his, bold mine: "The 'deportees' in the 'camps' of our urban wastelands are not, as our ministers go on joyfully repeating, 'savages' or even 'new barbarians'.  In reality, they are merely indicating the irresistible emergence of a previously almost unknown level of deprivation and human misery.  They are waste-products of a military-industrial, scientific civilization which has applied itself for almost two centuries to depriving individuals of the knowledge and sill accumulated over generations and millennia, before a post-industrial upsurge occurred which now seeks to reject them, on the grounds of definitive uselessness, to zones of lawlessness where they are exposed defenceless to the exactions of kapos of a new kind... a ruined planet, where there will soon be nothing left to take... With the appearance of new forms of bio-political conditioning, in which the other will no longer be considered an alter ego, nor even as a potential enemy (with whom reconciliation is always possible), but as the ultimate quarry.  Nietzsche had, in his day, predicted the imminent arrival of this new misanthropy - an anthropophagy which would have no particular ritual, as he put it." 

"Call it, friend-o," says Anton Chigurh, the Hunter of No Country for Old Men to a suspicious, pudgy gas station clerk who wants to know what he stands to win by saying either "heads" or "tails" to Chigurh's coin toss.  Everything, of course.  He stands to win his life.  He calls correctly and survives.  When Chigurh tosses the coin again at the end and tells Carla Jean to call it, saying it's the best he can do for her survival, she refuses.  "The coin ain't got no say," she says, "It's just you." 

An anthropophagy which would have no particular ritual.  Yet this is the stuff Cormac McCarthy meditates upon. 

Just see it.  It's going on my top ten list, and it deserves an Oscar or five. 

exploding outward like a cannon while blocking.

My family are all Fire elements - me, my parents, my grandfather (my mother's father - my father's parents, I will never know).  I'm a Fire Rabbit (adventurous, prone to tantrums, conflict-averse), my parents are Fire Pigs (risk-takers, all or nothing, excellent leaders), and my grandfather's a Fire Goat (less sensitive, selfish, social).

Fire: south, red, bitter, middle finger, speech, Vermilion Bird, apricot, beans, youth, passion, intelligence, movement.

In other news, my mother ran into a box in our garage while parking the car a few months ago and now the contents are in our basement.  It's old assorted books that she doesn't know what to do with and has no interest in reading.  At least some of them are hers - I can't imagine my dad ever owning a book called Breakdance: Apa dan Bagaimana? (what is it and how do you do it) - and the rest are his, presumably.  I'm keeping Armed Separatism in Southeast Asia and Time Out of Hand: Revolution and Reaction in Southeast Asia, but my most exciting find was A Passage to India, one of my favorite novels that my mother has never claimed to know.