“What are you going to write this time for the magazine?” I asked from my good friend Jude. “About ‘No Country for Old Men’ ”, answered Jude. Mmm.... ‘No Country for Old Men’, Coen brothers’ multi Oscar winning film. These two brothers really are something. When you look at those two, you can’t even dream that they would make such a great film. They really look somewhat geeky.

No, I’m not trying to insult them; anyway there’s nothing for me to fear as they are not ever going to read this. But really what I’m saying is that, they don’t match the personalities that one imagines as the creators of such a film would have. Anyway it’s the creations, not the outer appearances of the artists, which should show their personalities. But I felt somewhat sorry for the Coen brothers when they struggled in giving the acceptance speeches at the Oscars, especially considering this was not the first time they won at the Oscars. In 1996 they won the best original screenplay award for the film ‘Fargo’. Oh, when it came to killings, it was also in the same league as ‘No Country for Old Men’. But at least the killers get caught at the end in‘Fargo’. The character of the pregnant police officer in it was played by Frances McDormand who is married to the older Coen Brother, Joel Coen. Even though Frances McDormand won the best actress in a leading role Oscar that year, she mainly got supporting character roles in subsequent years, like in Cameron Crowe’s 2004 film ‘Almost Famous’. ‘Almost Famous’ won the award for the best adapted screenplay at the Oscars that year. But the interesting thing is that it wasn’t even nominated for the ‘best film’ category.Does that mean that Cameron Crowe is a very very bad director? If that’s the case, the very best director in the world should be James Cameron. Because ‘Titanic’ the winner of 12 Oscars including best film and best director in 1997, wasn’t even nominated in the best screenplay categories. To make such an award winning box office giant, James Cameron should be an incredibly talented director. I’ve heard someone say “You can make a bad movie from a good script, but you can’t make a good film from a bad script”. Well what do I know, obviously Hollywood people know about cinema than me. But is it really ‘Titanic’ the best film to come out of Hollywoodin 1997? I honestly think it was ‘L.A. Confidential’. It’s a shame that the director of ‘L.A. Confidential’ Curtis Hanson didn’t make another film in that caliber. Yes of course he made ‘8 Mile’ starring Eminem, but it can’t even come close to ‘L.A. Confidential’. One of my favorite actors, Kevin Spacey, starred in ‘L.A. Confidential’. Spacey won the best actor in a leading role Oscar in 1999 for Sam Mendes’s amazing ‘American Beauty’. But it was for Brian Singer’s ‘The Usual Suspects’ that Kevin Spacey won his first Oscar, which was the best actor in a supporting role award. Yeah..., ‘The Usual Suspects’, now there’s a film, there’s a script, mind boggling. If you want a SCRIPT now that is a SCRIPT. Now let me see.... how many times might I have watched it? Probably seven... eight times. “Keycer Soze, Who’s Keycer Soze....?”, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. I should watch it again after writing this....

John Ottoman who edited ‘The Usual Suspects’, also composed music for the film. That is usually unusual. Another film in which John Ottoman did the dual role of editor and music composer is ‘HalloweenH20: 20 Years Later’; the film, as its name suggests, was made to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of the first ‘Halloween’ film. But John Ottoman had a riff with the producers for using parts of music from the film ‘Scream’ in ‘H20’. It really is a joke to use music from ‘Scream’ in ‘H20’, since if not for the 1978 John Carpenter’s original ‘Halloween’ there probably wouldn’t have been a ‘Scream’ made in 1996 by Wes Craven or thousands of other slasher films in which female protagonists get chased by a madman with a knife in hand. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis’s attempt to bring John Carpenter to the director’s chair in‘H20’ became unfruitful as the producers rejected the $ 10 million director’s fee Carpenter demanded. Jamie Lee Curtis, known as the “Scream Queen” by fans, became a star and a cult figure because of John Carpenter’s casting of her in 1978’s ‘Halloween’. I think the reason Carpenter cast Jamie in that role is her mother Janet Leigh. Janet Leigh played the role of Marion, who gets stabbed in the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece ‘Psycho’, the film which had a huge influence on ‘Halloween’. Jamie Lee Curtis’s father Tony Curtis was also a famous actor. Recently, when I saw a local TV station showing their trailer for the film ‘Misfits’ starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis came into my mind. Marilyn Monroe played the love interest of Tony Curtis in 1959 Billy Wilder film ‘Some Like It Hot’. Since Monroe was an average actress, it is said that some shots took more than thirty takes. Therefore it is rumored that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who played the other main character in the film, used to bet on how many takes it would take Monroe to get a shot right. But when you see the film now, it is hard to imagine someone else in Monroe’s role. Cinema really is a great illusion. Anyway in 1996 the American Film Institute voted ‘Some Like It Hot’ as the greatest comedy to come out of American cinema. ‘Some Like It Hot’ is a great film, there’s no doubt about that, but I don’t understand how they measure all the films produced in the first century of cinema using one yardstick, since they were made in different decades, in different economical, political, social situations and under different budgets, and say “This is the Greatest” or “That one is better than the other one”. I don’t understand how one can compare the comedies of Buster Keaton’s or Ernest Lubitsch’s or Billy Wilder’s or Mel Brooks’ with the Coen brothers’ new comedy ‘Burn After Reading’, using the same yardstick. But I can somewhat understand how one would compare Coen brothers’ ‘Burn After Reading’ with their last year’s film ‘No Country for Old Men’. Mmm... I wonder what Jude wrote about ‘No Country for Old Men’.