No Country for Lars

Yes, it's movie review time.

Got your popcorn ready?

Good.

Hubster and I watched two VERY different movies over the past several nights.

Last night we watched "Lars and the Real Girl" starring cutie pie Ryan Gosling as the handsome yet delusional Lars Linstrom, a young midwestern man who orders a sex doll off the internet, promptly falls in love with her and announces to his family that she is a missionary and has come to stay with them. The movie is quirky-funny (which normally I love) but never really gets going.... just sort of stays stuck in second gear. The truly bizarre thing about the plot line is that the entire town buys into the fact that because poor Lars really believes that Bianca (his "half Danish, half Brazilian" doll) is real, then by golly, they'll just have to treat her as though she's real as well. So, the family dresses Bianca in a new outfit every day. They wheel her around town in a wheelchair. She goes to the beauty salon and gets her hair cut. She accompanies Lars to a holiday party, and even goes to church with the family. And, in an almost unbelievably silly ending, Bianca "dies" and they have a Real Funeral, complete with casket, graveside service, etc.

At one point during the movie, my husband looked at me and said "I'd give anything for a car chase right about now..." and I nodded and said, "Me too, honey. Me too."

Movie number two was the Feel Good Movie of the Year (JOKE), "No Country For Old Men". I was actually really excited about this movie because: 1) I normally love the movies that Joel and Ethan Coen direct ("Fargo" is a favorite movie, as is "Raising Arizona"), and 2) Javier Bardem is awfully cute.

Well, let me tell you right now, Javier Bardem is NOT cute in this movie. He is the Terminator with an ugly haircut, and he's absolutely terrifying. He kills everyone. And I mean everyone. The only person he DOESN'T kill is Tommy Lee Jones' character, and the only reason he doesn't kill him is because their paths don't directly cross.

The movie is over-the-top violent (Cronenberg could even learn a thing or two) and there is absolutely NO resolution at the end, and NO hope. It's desolate. It's vultures circling corpses (figuratively, of course, not literally.....). It's Chernobyl at midnight. There is NO HOPE HERE.

The next DVD atop our TV is "Enchanted". I don't think I've ever looked so forward to a Disney movie in all my life. :-)