If not for other reasons, Viggo is very hot :)

Part of it was evidently filmed here in Washington State; there are areas around Mt. St. Helens which never fully recovered from the volcano.

--
-Geoduck

After finishing the book I had a black cloud o' doom hanging over me for a week, so I'll pass on the movie.

Excellent review. You're right on the book, it's a classic. In fact, those who doubt the need to avoid cataclysmic war, pollution, etc. need only read the first few chapters. But the story is really one of loyalty and relationship. Since I read the book, I'll see the film guilt free;) Mortensen is perfect casting just as Javier Bardem was Anton Chigurh. McCarthy is the great chronicler of our grim reality.

McCarthy, as usual creates characters I empathize with. One page begs another; his stuff is hard to put down.

But his view of dark always exceeds reality.

Give me a break: a world where all living things are dead except humans? Fucking cock roaches and rats will be around if there's still a man breathing.

His inistence on no punctuation can be confusing at times. I found myself losing track of who said what.

McCarthy is a master, but All the pretty horses and No country for old men were better books in my opinion.

The last two books in the pretty horse trilogy were depressing as hell also--the dude makes you fall in love with characters and then kills them.

All of them. Even the wolf, dogs and horses.

And Blood Meridian. While true that the events described are based on real stuff, all that real stuff didn't happen to a single fellow. It's dark to the point of absurd.

Bet he shoots himself in the head someday. (But I hope not. Like I say, he's a great writer.)

Despite the flaws, I say read the book also. While the setting is unreal, the work fiction, the dialogue between a man and his son and the struggle they endure is compelling stuff.

I was tempted to make the drive to Austin to see the movie. Believe I'll pass unless it shows a little closer to home.

I did inhale.

I mainly lurk on this site but I love the book so much that I felt compelled to share.

My best friend/kid brother died in 2005. Coming from a very religious family, I was left feeling abandoned by a God that I had been brought up to love. And at the age of 24, as I entered one of the darkest depressions I have ever experienced, I ended up doing a lot of reading.

Two years later I was still in a deep dark depression. The Road was a book that a co-worked gave to me and I was very lucky that it wandered into my life. And the words brought me more peace than any biblical text or self-help guide. For like the world ending scenario that is painted by McCarthy, I was watching my own world come to end and I no longer felt like living.

From the very opening, in front of me, were two characters that despite every sign pointing to hopeless, still carried on. And in thinking that my own life was hopeless, I was relating to the father and the son on an insanely deep and personal level. A level that I have never had with two fictional characters. I was right there with them, I was living their nightmare.

When there is a promise of no hope and no future, the Father and the Son still live entirely for each other. My brother Jaye and I had the type of love depicted between the Father and the Son. It was unconditional and always ready. No strings attached.So now that I was all alone, I guess the book reminded me that I was still "carrying the fire".

-peace

http://www.acloudtree.com/sivle/

http://www.acloudtree.com/god-is-faithful-until-hes-not/

..., to tout McCarthy's writing. But you just can't translate it to movies. I wasn't far into "No Country for Old Men" when I came to the conculsion that he was writing it for the movies. It was still a great book..., but it still didn't work as a movie.

I agree with Don that his lack of punctuation goes a bit overboard by eliminating quotation marks in conversation..., but it can be quite effective at times. I was on the transit bus on the way to the job when I read this passage from "The Crossing". It took my breath away. I wanted to stand up and read it to the other riders. It still takes my breath away.

He camped that night on the broad Animas Plain and the wind blew in the grass and he slept on the ground wrapped in the serape and in the wool blanket the old man had given him. He built a small fire but he had little wood and the fire died in the night and he woke and watched the winter stars slip their hold and race to their deaths in the darkness. He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse's mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw far to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.

How do you write something like that into a movie script?

You can't.

and Margaret Atwood's "The Year of the Flood", which has a similar theme, is on my Christmas list. It 'll be interesting to compare the two.

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

Though not a big McCarthy fan. The boy is well-drawn in the book; too bad he's not in the movie. Will watch on Netflix.

Moral's 2004 work "Apocalypse" has a photograph of a woman pregnant with twins in a crucified position in front of 28 female bodies -- including those of four children and four pregnant women -- wrapped in white sheets. "This is God as woman," Moral says. "And this is God saying: 'I give you life, and you just take it away.'" (via Graham)

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}

What would happen if some catastrophe laid waste to the earth and society broke down? A new film of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road dares to confront these questions. Mark Lynas is awe-struck

The Guardian, By Mark Lynas, December 16

As the credits roll and we fall stricken and tear-stained out onto the dark streets of Soho [In the rain? - oh, sorry], it seems fitting that I am accompanied by the director of the second bleakest film ever made – Franny Armstrong, creator of the The Age of Stupid. The bleakest film ever made we have just endured together, over two relentless, harrowing hours, and are now so emotionally raw that we know not where we are going, nor do we much care. It doesn't seem to matter. "Oh my God," moans Franny, repeatedly, head in hands.

Remember, this is a woman who has just spent five years creating an on-screen warning about the impending apocalypse. But what we have just experienced takes place on a very different level. The Road is a brilliant, intensely moving piece of film-making, so powerful that it is almost a test of physical, as well as emotional, endurance. By comparison, the specific climate catastrophes that I portray in my book Six Degrees, of killer heatwaves, mega-droughts, spreading deserts and methane-driven runaway warming (the scenarios used in The Age of Stupid, for which I was co-writer), seem almost prosaic by comparison, with their leaden anchors of voluminous scientific referencing. Cormac McCarthy's apocalypse is unstated – he describes just "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" – and is all the more realistic for it.

As the Blair Witch Project showed, the unseen horror is always the most unnerving. McCarthy is not expounding any particular end-of-the-world scenario (though it sounds to me most like a nuclear holocaust), but tapping into our collective psyche, into a deep-seated, suppressed fear of what may lie beneath once the fragile veneer of civilisation is torn violently away. The precise nature of the catastrophe that starts the two protagonists' journey in The Road may be unclear, but what matters is that it is all of our worst nightmares added together. It is also a film that everyone needs to see.

[...]

The warning The Road is not of a specific outcome arising from a specific course of action which we need to change. Unlike The Age of Stupid, it is not about what might happen if we don't "seal the deal" in Copenhagen. The Road is about the human condition, and how humans might behave to each other if the worst does happen, in whatever way. If we ever do push the planet so far that the majority of the human race is left without food or water in uninhabitable areas, what will it feel like to be one of the starving millions? Initially we might all come together in adversity, in a kind of global blitz spirit. McCarthy admits this possibility: at first, others had "come to help" the survivors. But "within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered. By day, the dead impaled on spikes along the road." We won't stay united for long.

How can anyone prepare for this kind of outcome? Over the years, I have received many emails from people asking where they might need to set up home if runaway global warming begins. New Zealand, perhaps? Norway? I'm sure all the questioners share the same survivalist fantasy, the one where they take their family into the hills and survive on a small farmstead, stockpiling rice and baked beans and keeping a loaded rifle by the well-guarded front door. The Road exposes even this limited comfort as being futile: sooner or later the ammunition will run out, the pounding on the door will begin to splinter away the hinges, and the ravening, faceless horde will pour in. If the worst happens the truth is that there is nowhere to hide, and the road itself will offer no comforts. Of that we can be certain.

"Are we still the good guys?" asks the boy plaintively after his father has had to resort to violence to protect him. If they are, it is not just because they refuse to sink into cannibalism and thievery, but because of the love they share for each other – father and son are "each the other's world entire", as McCarthy writes in the novel. This, and only this, gives their lives meaning. It is nothing short of the difference between life and death itself, and this is surely the essential message of The Road. For without love there is nothing – just smoke and ash and gunshots echoing in the lonely, freezing darkness. Love is the light; the delicate, stuttering candle that they – and we all – must hold against the all- consuming darkness of death.