I suppose that, had I seen No Country For Old Men on any other day, its unrelenting bleakness would have seemed unnecessarily maudlin—or even worse, comically absurd. But just a few hours before my wife and I walked into the theatre, we read news stories about two shootings in Colorado that ultimately left four people dead. And just a few days earlier, a troubled young man walked into a posh shopping center in my old hometown of Omaha and killed eight people before turning the gun on himself.

Suddenly, No Country For Old Men‘s vision of humanity caught in the clutches of an unstoppable and incomprehensible evil that leaves its few survivors—if you can call them that—reeling and shocked seemed less absurd and all too real. The world depicted on the silver screen looked a little too much like the world I’d left outside the theatre walls.

The latest film from the Coen Brothers—adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel—bears many similarities to their previous films. There’s that ear for quirky dialog, the obvious love for characters’ idiosyncrasies, and the brief flashes of absurdist humor. But those are merely on the surface. Arguably, they’ve never done anything this unremittingly bleak. Not even Fargo with its wood chipper wanders this far into the wasteland.

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It would be way too simple and too easy to label Hot Fuzz—the latest work of cinematic brilliance from the folks behind Shaun Of The Dead and Spaced—as a parody of the stereotypical, big budget Hollywood action movie. Sure, Hot Fuzz contains countless references to such films as Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys (1 and 2), Point Break, and Die Hard (not to mention The Wicker Man, Terminator, Chinatown, He-Man, and Harry Potter).

However, parodies often seem to have an element of mean-spiritedness and cheekiness about them, which is not at all the case with Hot Fuzz. Rather, just as Shaun Of The Dead was obviously the work of folks who knew and loved zombie horror films, Hot Fuzz is the work of folks who obviously know and love action movies.

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300 is proof that we are living in a bold new era of filmmaking.  An era where, thanks to the prevalence of technology, movie directors can have an almost godlike control over nearly every facet of their movie—right down to the very last strand of hair, bead of sweat, and, in the case of 300, drop of blood.  A director’s vision can now be captured and delivered on the silver screen to an extent that would’ve been inconceivable even five years ago.

Of course, even with that unbelievable level of power and technology, some truths of the artform remain the same.  All of that control is worthless if there isn’t a story lying somewhere at the heart of the astounding visuals, if those visuals aren’t populated by compelling characters.  And in the case of 300, that is painfully obvious from almost the very first frame.

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