I tend to hate European movies because they lead you through a very engaging movie and leave you with an ambiguous ending and claim that they want to leave it open ended for the audience to ponder about. I hate these types of movies because they often feel as if the writer couldn’t figure out how to wrap up the loose ends and give you a nice long bullshit speech that it’s supposed to force some kind of pondering on your part as the audience.
So when I saw the ending to the “No Country for Old Men,” It felt really sudden as if they decided to end the movie right in the middle. I highly recommend that you watch this movie if you haven’t yet as it sports the scariest, ruthless and most menacing assassin; and the best modern western I have seen to date. The movie has your usual hero, heroine, the sheriff who wants to do good, and your bad guy. I’m so used and conditioned to expect the hero to save the day and ride out into the sunset with his heroine, the sheriff tipping his hat for a job well done with the villain dead or put behind bars. The movie just ignores the rules and throws them out the window. Everything you expected happens, but doesn’t turn out the way they usually do.
The hero fails to save his heroine.
The hero dies and gets killed by some third party.
The villain chases the hero throughout the movie but doesn’t even get close to getting him.
The sheriff doesn’t even get close to the villain and is always several steps behind and too late.
The sheriff quits.
The bad guy gets away.
After a second viewing and taking in the title, everything made sense and didn’t feel as much of a shock. I was so set on the sheriff to get the villain right after the hero dies right in the middle of the movie and despite several minutes of scenes of the sheriff talking about quitting and talking to his wife about retirement, everything just went past my attention that I failed to see what was really going on. The sheriff was old and tired. He just couldn’t handle the changes going around him. He could not cope.
This made me realize how I might have failed to understand people and ideas in the past that just didn’t register because my mind was conditioned a certain way. If this is the way people are with religion, what steps would it take to help them understand reality?
I was raised Roman Catholic and was very devout. I attended mass without fail every Sunday, I prayed before bed, participated in every religious festival, etcetera. My gradual loss of faith was influenced by my voracious appetite for reading, histories and wondering if life was just a huge pattern of routine traditions. I found Ayn Rand through “The Fountainhead,” and it sealed my “faith,” forever.
Loosing faith is liberating. It is as if you lived your whole life in chains and realized that you can take the shackles off and be free. We’re bombarded our whole lives with double speak so we lose our capacity to think and understand the full impact and meaning of freedom.
Just recently, a lost Amazon tribe was found who had had no contact with the rest of the world. What must television, airplanes, ipods, computers and other modern conveniences and technology be like to them? Can they even comprehend it?
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