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.

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Pock-marked gravitas peddler Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount.  According to the suit, Jones took a lower up-front fee to do No Country for Old Men (which eventually grossed $160 million) in exchange for back-end compensation, of the kind I frequently provide your mom.

As part of his contract negotiations, Jones insisted he receive the same treatment as Scott Rudin, the movie’s producer, and Joel and Ethan Coen, the directors, producers and screenplay writers, under all of the terms of the contract, including the percentage of box office bonuses he would receive.

Overall, the lawsuit contends, Jones has been deprived of more than $10 million. In the suit, Jones requests an auditor be appointed to review the company’s books and records and determine how much he is actually owed. [San Antonio Express-News]

The suit was filed in a Bexar County, New Mexico court, which, if sweeping generalizations have taught me anything, is presided over by a judge who bangs his gavel on a dead armadillo and wears a hat made of dead rattlesnakes.

It might be too much to hope for that this will ever happen, but in a recent interview, Ridley Scott discussed adapting No Country for Old Men author Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian.

“We got [Blood Meridian] down as a screenplay and the problem is that it is so savage. But that’s what it is. If you did it properly it would be an X-certificate. But you can’t apologise for the violence and you can’t quantify the violence and you shouldn’t try to explain the violence. It is what it is…an exercise in brutality, savagery and violence. For the most part it is probably relatively accurate. It shows the flipside to Dances With Wolves of how the United States was probably taken. It was taken by the throat.”

Oh please let them do an NC-17 version of Blood Meridian – God, if you make this happen I promise I’ll stop asking for a bigger penis.  If you’ve never read the book, it’s a ridiculously violent tale of 1840s scalp hunters traveling through the southwest who like to drink whiskey and kill without provocation.  Like all really violent things, it makes me slightly sexually excited.  That’s healthy, right?   

[Eclipse Magazine via /Film] 

You all remember Fred and Sharon, FilmDrunk’s filmmaker’s of the year.  What you may have missed, however, are their star turns in such films as No Country for Old Men and As Good As It Gets.  Note to people of the internets: get working on a Wicker Man version of this immediately.

[Thanks to Ron for sending this over.  One more video after the jump and a couple more here.] 

Some E-Cards is clearly one of the best sites on the internet.  Thank God they finally did something movie-related so I can give them a shameless endorsement. 

Today I bring you their line of Oscar-themed e-cards.  Some of my favorites: "Juno showed me that speaking in cute lingo can negate the horrifying chaos of an unwanted pregnancy," and "I think the dark horse for Best Actor is Viggo Mortensen’s cock." 

We salute you, Some E-Cards writing team. (click on thumbnails to enlarge)