Name: Big Picture: No Country For Old Men (2007)
Start: 2025-08-20T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Tampa Theatre

Big Picture: No Country For Old Men (2007)

Part of August's BIG PICTURE: HELTER SWELTER
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2h 2m / R / Crime, Thriller
TRAILER:

VENUE: Historic Duncan Auditorium
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This month’s Big Picture offering is all about weaving together horror films that take place largely in the sunlight, in the heat. It sure doesn’t get too much sunnier or hotter than West Texas, where No Country for Old Men is set. But we hear the complaints already: it’s not a horror movie, it’s a crime thriller! Your own webpage says so!
Surprise: No Country for Old Men is Halloween. A mysterious man-shaped figure (with an unsettling look) blows into town one day and starts killing. The police can’t stop him; most of them don’t even believe he exists — except for one older authority figure, who somehow senses exactly how terrible things might get. Obsessed with pursuing one person, the monster ends or ruins countless lives in a brutal spree. And at the end, (big spoilers for No Country for Old Men – skip to next paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie) he simply disappears, leaving behind only carnage and the grim certainty that he could be back any time. A force, an idea, with a weapon.
The name of the Coen brothers’ film, and the Cormac McCarthy novel it’s adapted from, comes from the William Butler Yeats poem Sailing to Byzantium, about an old man yearning to be free of the agony of his aging body but still skeptical of youth. Here’s how it opens:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
What’s young will die. What’s alive and invigorated in summer rots by fall. What is “that” country, one wonders, where the youth don’t yet feel the shadow of their doom at their backs.