Step 1: Cast some f&*$@#$ AWESOME actors in your movie! Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem prove they have the acting chops to hang with anyone at any time on any script. The performances they all give are fantastic with Bardem’s bordering on staggeringly good (and I love his weapon of choice). Even the second tier supporting characters are great with Woody Harrelson, Barry Corbin, and Stephen Root all turning in very solid efforts.

Step 2: Make sure the script is as well written as any other that came before it. Stuff it full of intense cat-and-mouse sequences that drive up your adrenalin levels by tortuously playing out in their own sweet time. Create dialogue for the characters that both crackles with subdued energy and smolders with relentless deliberation.

Step 3: Using mad skilz as a director, combine the actors and their talents with the aforementioned dialogue and have a camera rolling. Create an engulfing sense of the proverbial ‘irresistable force’ chasing after the ‘immovable object’.

Step 4: Once the audience is completely enthralled, start beating them over the head with not-so-subtle metaphors and allegorical dialogue about life, getting old, and the inevitability of fate.

Step 5: Execute major character changes and action sequences “off-screen” so that the audience is left wondering what the heck they just missed…and why. Make it obvious that the reason for this was so that you can see the events from the point of view of an interesting but otherwise inconsequential character in the story.

Step 6: You’re almost there! You’ve got the audience quite confused and mildly annoyed so now is the time to just abruptly END THE MOVIE! Yes, just end it. Don’t resolve anything. Just make sure to throw in a few more metaphors and allegorical bits at the very end before you cut the camera off.

Step 7 (optional): Go sit in a theater so you can witness the abject astonishment on the faces of the moviegoers as the lights come up. Lean back and enjoy how it rapidly turns to righteous anger as everyone begins to realize how they’ve been shortchanged.

I had these same emotions as the credits rolled (as did pretty much everyone in the theater) and, as I sit here hours later, I’m *still* royally pissed off. This was a full 5-star movie up through the 2nd act. They had near perfection in their freakin’ hands and decided to f&*$ it up with a completely BS ending. I just don’t understand all the praise being heaped upon this movie by my fellow movie reviewers. Either I’m just missing something at a very basic level with this movie…or everyone else has an unnatural love of symbolism and metaphor. Either way, I have to ask to to avoid this one unless you plan on leaving the theater for the last part of the movie.

Florentino Ariza, played by Javier Bardem (who plays the stone-cold killer in the new movie by the Coen Brothers, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) is a lowly telegraph operator who falls for a rich man’s daughter, Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Forbidden to see each other, she instead marries a doctor. He meanwhile vows to pine for her until her husband dies. The tale of unconsummated love unwinds over the next fifty years.

But Florentino never took a vow of chastity. Over the next fifty years, despite his advancing years, he manages to bed more than 600 women, most of them beautiful and young (and often displaying their bare breasts).

I found this an interesting journey through another time and place. The period is meticulously reconstructed, and the age makeup on the two actors is convincing. This is a good date movie. Having never read the book, I’m not entirely sure what the point was; if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with, until you can be with the one you love, apparently. But it’s a funny, bittersweet film.