No Country for Old Men [Joel Coen and Ethan Coen] (119 points/17 votes)“How often do you hear someone say ‘The movie was O.K., but I liked the book better’? Adapting a novel into a screenplay is a tricky business where the writer must breathe cinematic life into pages in a book, yet still maintain fidelity with the original source material. Though images on a screen do not always flow naturally from words on a page, Joel and Ethan Coen brilliantly managed the transition by turning Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men into a feature film.
"A marvel of economy, the screenplay condenses the novel to its essence, captures the wonderful flavor of McCarthy's prose and simultaneously conveys it in the Coens' own unique voice; no casual trick, but a work of supreme confidence.
"Some have quibbled, especially in regard to the film's difficult ending, that the Coens have succeeded more on literary terms than cinematic, but this complaint misses the point: No Country for Old Men is more than just a motion picture, it is a work of art. It follows its own set of rules and it all begins with the superb screenplay which reads as well on the page as it plays on the screen.” ~ Craig Kennedy
Runners-up:
There Will Be Blood [Paul Thomas Anderson] (85/12)
Zodiac [James Vanderbilt] (57/9)
Michael Clayton [Tony Gilroy] (35/6)
Ratatouille [Brad Bird, Jim Capobianco, and Jan Pinkava] (27/4)
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1 comment:
no country for old men is unassumingly unconventional and yet (thankfully) never over the top... all in all the Coen brothers deserve their Oscars, well done indeed.
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