Granted I have a bit of a thing for curmudgeonly old men, but in this recent, rare interview with The Wall Street Journal, No Country for Old Men/The Road/Blood Meridien author Cormac McCarthy provides plenty of evidence of his own awesomeness. That’s not an opinion, it’s objective fact. Here are some of the highlights, although I’d recommend reading the whole thing.
WSJ: People have said “Blood Meridian” is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story.
CM: That’s all crap. The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary. [Editor's Note: I always thought Blood Meridien seemed much more movie-adaptable than The Road]
Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a hell of a book, the kind of thing you wish they’d make more movies out of instead of crap like The Lovely Bones. It’s about a man and his son (who never get names) wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cannibals and roving bands of outlaws. Though so far, reviews of the John Hillcoat-directed movie adaptation have been sort of mixed. I wasn’t a huge fan of Hillcoat’s last movie (The Proposition), but Viggo Mortensen is perfect casting. That dude has looking like the survivor of an apocalyptic cataclysm down pat.
It also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. I don’t know much about this kid other than that he clearly has a couple of a-holes for parents. Really? It wasn’t enough to stick him with a hyphen, you also had to make his first name a misspelled version of crappy name to begin with it? AND you put an ‘I’ at the end? Was he supposed to dot that with a heart? You only had nine months to come up with something he wouldn’t have to drag around like wheelbarrow full of cement his entire life, so well done. Might as well have named him Stealmylunchmoney McPussy. Then again, that was my nickname, and look how well I turned out.
(Don’t worry, Viggo, someday you’ll be a butterfly.)
At long last, we have the first trailer for The Road, John Hillcoat’s (The Proposition) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s pulitzer prize-winning novel, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron. McCarthy also wrote No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, and critics have often described his work as “gnarly as f*ck.”
The Road is the epic post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. [TrailerAddict]
It opens in October, and my guess is that it’s going to be pretty good. For one thing, no one can look like the survivor of an apocalyptic event like Viggo. For another, skulls mounted on sticks in the trailer. Think about it, have you ever seen a movie that had skulls mounted sticks in the trailer that wasn’t awesome? Is the answer yes? Congratulations, you’re a liar.
Two movies I’m excited about in a row? I think this is some kind of record. Either that or the coke’s working. EEEEEEE!
Anyway, John Hillcoat’s currently hard at work directing a film adaptation of The Road, from No Country for Old Men author Cormac McCarthy. If you’ve never read Cormac McCarthy, his sentences are as long as they are nonsensical, and yet somehow awesome. Also, most of his books are really violent. They’re basically like a Wesley Willis song that stabs people in the face.
The pic comes courtesy of RopeofSilicon, and in it, Viggo Mortensen seems to be saying, “Son… I’ve been bitten by a rattlesnake on the penis. …You’re gonna have to suck out the poison.” Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it.
