No Country for Old Men

I'm not sure if you have seen this film, but briefly if you haven't, it is the (rather bloody) story of a mass murderer, a policeman and a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is set against large and bleak landscapes with detailed characters for even small parts.

Although it made me wince, it is a really powerful film and I am glad I saw it.

The backstory, I feel, speaks of a feeling of hopelessness - that even good guys lose out in the end, that bad guys prevail and things don't work out neatly as they should. As a piece of post-modern, post gen-X theatre, I think it works well, with confusing dialogue, dead-ends and so on.

But ultimately I think this is how many people feel. Those within the radical community (which of course can be defined in any number of ways) are now starting to lose the plot. The past 'certainties' are gone (even where those are things that we discovered ourselves), the beliefs we started our earlier adult lives with now start to sound like nonsense. In spite of what others want to tell us, the world seems a dark place with few sparks of light, and whilst we try to rejoice about the light it seems curlish not to admit the darkness exists. Yet, no matter how much we want things to change, no matter how hard we change ourselves, things don't seem to change as fast as we want to, and it is really hard to keep going.