No Country for Old Men

is easily one of the best movies of the year, provided your criteria for judging films do not include making you happy or upbeat, because it's also perhaps the bleakest Hollywood film of 2007. If you know the book, you won't find that fact surprising, but if you haven't read it, don't blame me if you see the movie and come away disturbed or depressed. The violence is graphic, the language is realistic--and thus sometimes crude, and the ending is downbeat. I wouldn't want a steady diet of this sort of thing, but everything else about this movie is so well done that I have to recommend it.

In unrelated news, I set a new world record for dessert eating by a man whose stomach has yet to explode.

If there's a blog entry tomorrow, you'll know I can change "yet to explode" to "did not explode."

Right now, that's still anyone's call.