Darrell Hartman: The Walker

There's a time-honored tradition in the movies of casting the government as the bad guy, but it seems like Uncle Sam is doing overtime as the villain these days. It's a bit like the mid-'70s, when the excesses of the Nixon administration made for dark, paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor , and The Conversation . The main difference is, you know, those movies were actually good. Clumsy war-on-terror critiques like Lions for Lambs, Rendition , and the godawful Redacted aren't at that level. The films that have most successfully channeled the trauma of our current bad government have done so indirectly. Take Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men . It's set not in Washington, or the Middle East, but in Texas -- and in 1980, which is the justification for Javier Bardem's preposterous hairstyle. But as Alec Baldwin pointed out not long ago on HuffPo, this brilliant, brooding, and terrifying meditation on senseless violence definitely has something to do ... (link)