This weekend I saw an excellent new movie by the Cohn Brothers. It's called "No Country for Old Men" after the book by Cormic McCarthy. A short plot summary would be that a guy in west Texas is out hunting and stumbles across a drug deal gone bad. Several trucks are surrounded by dead bodies. One truck is loaded with Mexican heroin and one dead body has a satchel with 2.6 million dollars in cash. Our protagonist takes off with the cash and is eventually followed by very bad men who want the money.

There are several things I loved about the movie:

They followed the book very closely and didn't try to "improve" it.

The acting was above average – esp Tommie Lee Jones.

But what I wanted to point out to y'all was that there was no soundtrack music. And I can see that in some movies the lack of background music can make a film better. In this case I felt the audience was allowed to think for themselves. No heavy handed Hollywood types were telling us how we should feel - or that danger was afoot. In one scene our protagonist was holed up in a hotel. You know that a very bad man is in the hotel who wants to kill him and take the money. The audience is put in the position of having to listen very closely to what's happening on the screen. What was that sound? Was it a board creaking – or the footsteps of the killer outside the door? You could hear a pin drop in the theater. The tension was delicious. And music would have ruined it.

Trust me – see the movie for yourself. But be forewarned – it's a bloody and violent film.

I'm trying to think of other films that didn't have background music. "Failsafe" comes to mind. Can you think of any others? What are your thoughts?

I'm dying to see that movie. I'm a big Cormac McCarthy fan, I'm a big Tommie Lee Jones fan, and I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers. So I'm thinking this pretty much has to be the best movie ever. The book was great.

Castaway with Tom Hanks didn't have much of a soundtrack. I know there wasn't any music of any type while he was on the island. They wanted to add to the feel of loneliness and desolation while he was stranded. I felt like the lack of soundtrack really had a good effect there.

Two other recent films of which I'm very fond- Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, have no soundtracks. There's music, periodically, but it's part of the flow of the movie, not an overlay. It's almost all dialogue between two characters. So you manly men who want lots of explosions, car chases, and frontal nudity will be sorely disappointed. Shakespeare in Love does not have a sound track, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time. Of course, American Graffiti, another of my favorites, is all about the soundtrack (but, having grown up in central California (class of '64), I can tell you the details, Wolfman and all, are absolutely spot-on.