Indeed Andrew. I am precisely where you are with this film! No, it’s no PEE WEE’S GREAT ADVENTURE, but there’s an often splendid and sublime visual design, and another wonderful Danny Elfman score to enjoy. I did not see it in 3D, but I doubt there would have been a major upgrade in opinion. There are some creativ eissues here in the rather disjointed narrative flow, but this was no failure at all.

But whatever I thought of the narrative of the film I agree with you wholeheartedly in one respect — Jia’s eye for photography is magnificent.

I think it’s a safe bet to assume that if you liked the novel, you’ll liked the film. I don’t the film is an unqualified success, for the reasons I elucidated in my review, but I would also add that time has made me come around to the notion that this may be the best “faithful” adaptation of McCarthy’s novel we could have hoped for: good but not great. There’s a better movie in the novel somewhere, but it would require quite a bit of rejiggering of the source material. The Coens took No Country For Old Men, a great novel, and turned it into a cinematic masterpiece precisely because they knew exactly where McCarthy’s sensibilities and their own overlapped, and where they complemented one another. Hillcoat isn’t doing anything so daring. His vision of the The Road is just a reverent filmic version of the novel’s substantive and emotional core. Good stuff, just not great.

I’m particularly interested in seeing Mortenson as the Man; he may very well be one of only a handful of actors who could pull off this role. It’s actually one of the reasons I’m so eager to see this film.

I hear it’s out on Blu-ray this spring; I’m waiting for it with both trepidation and excitement. Trepidation because it’s just so damn emotionally battering; excitement because this father and son love story is just so damn beautiful.