All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy is a conundrum to me. I really admired his novel No Country For Old Men, and the movie the Coen Brothers made from it. I really disliked The Road, book and movie, even if it was on Oprah’s reading list. And I totally hated, hated, hated, hated his book Blood Meridian. It is the only book which I have ever actually thrown across the room in disgust. Literally, not figuratively. If it hadn’t been a library book I would have thrown it in a dumpster. I got maybe 60 pages into it and had never been so disgusted. Please understand, I have an almost infinite tolerance for ugliness and violence in books and movies …if they are in aid of something. In that book there was nothing at all going on except cruelty for its own sake. How anyone could like it is impossible for me to say, but people do. And McCarthy is lauded for it. I mean, to the extent that many literati rank it as one of the best novels of the 20th century, the equal of Moby Dick. And my friends, they all have their pointy little heads firmly lodged in their rectums. (Recti?)

Which is a long and basically irrelevant introduction to a fairly good movie. Sorry, I just had to get it off my chest.
This movie bombed in a big way. It stars Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, and is one of those movies that seems to just go on for a while, with some fairly interesting plot twists along the way, and then just stops for no real good reason. I wouldn’t call it a total waste of time, but I sure wouldn’t recommend it.