No Country For Old Men

This weekend I had the opportunity to sit down and watch a great film. It was released in 2007 and was directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. These same directing/writing duo brought us "O Brother Where Art Thou","The Big Lebowski", and "Fargo". Not only did the film have great leadership but its cast, though it was small in number, was large in name power. With Tommy Lee Jones playing a wise and weathered sheriff along with Javier Bardem who plays a sociopathic killer, the story is driven to a whole new level. What really stood out to me was silence the film provided. Many times we as an audience is flooded with all kinds of sounds and stimulus. No Country for Old Men gives us the audience an opportunity to listen to what is being said by the actors and the director. We get to truly experience the emotion poured out in the performance in front of us. Music has its place in a film but when it begins to take away from the story should it be omitted. The carefully crafted lines delivered in this film could have easily been overpowered by the presence of a powerful score. It just reminded me that music is a tool to add to a scene, it can easily detract from it as well. As we go on making short films we should not be afraid to let our audience sit in silence.