The Road I Avoid

Anyone who knows anything about my literary preferences knows about my problem with Cormac McCarthy. There are very few authors that bring me into severe panic and depression upon the mention of their name, McCarthy along with Virgina Woolf are a couple.

So, when I came across this article in Time magazine yesterday I nearly fainted. God thing I was close to the Counseling Center when I read it. It is a review of the new movie The Road based on a novel by McCarthy. Of course it's supposedly a very good film and does the book justice according to Steven James Snyder, author for Techland.com ( http://techland.com/2009/11/25/john-hillcoat-the-director-who-confronted-embraced-and-survived-the-road/ ) . But before you get all excited and go buy a ticket to see this let me just tell you I totally agree with Mary Pols from Time magazine when she asks "How do you lure people to a movie made from a book that itself probably should have borne a mental-health warning from the surgeon general?" Let me insert a little more of her article

The Man and his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a child of perhaps 11, raised in a postcivilized era in which a lone can of Coca-Cola is a treasure, encounter no miraculously budding tree in the wasted landscape, no fish jumping from a dead ocean. The best they get is a rheumy-eyed old man (the great Robert Duvall) who considers death a luxury. Bands of cannibals rule the land, favoring children as meals. It's hopeless except for, as in McCarthy's book, the driving force of the narrative: a father's fierce devotion to his child. "The child is the warrant," Mortensen tells us in voice-over, the only reason for being.

If you can handle this, I suggest you go see the movie and them come tell me about it. Ill be hovering in the corner with a bottle of xanax blowing my nose all over Blood Meridian. .. Keep your friends close and your enemies as kleenex.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940670-1,00.html#ixzz0ZLUmYAAu