If you’ve had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we’ve culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren’t here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they’ll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

1. Clear eyes, full hearts, secret speech?: Entertainment Weekly has the mother of all Easter Eggs in the form of a special finale pep talk from Coach Taylor on “Friday Night Lights” that was supposed to play over the end sequence. Well, here it is, in all its gruff-but-lovable glory. (Though it is kind of awkward, the way he talks about never forgetting the feeling of “that hot breeze slapping my face.”)

2. All about the Bitcoins: If you haven’t heard about the Internet’s new form of currency that takes hundreds of dollars in computer equipment to “mine” and is vulnerable to hackers stealing all your fortune in fake (but kind of real?) money, count yourself lucky. Or just read this story.

3. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fashion icon and a really great guy:

I wonder if he had this shirt custom-made, or if he found it in a Salvation Army or something. Maybe Marie is the name of a new ride at Six Flags?

4. Paula Abdul wants to be the new Khaleesi: It’s common knowledge that Paula is a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs, so why anyone would take on a job as her assistant is beyond me. Maybe it’s so they can come back and report how the “X-Factor” judge needs to have her entourage constantly remind her that she’s a “warrior, survivor and gift.” Dragons!

5. Dissecting the Coens: David Haglund over at Slate watched every single Coen brothers movie. (Who hasn’t?) At first he thought they were self-indulgent. Then he thought they didn’t make any sense. Finally he came to the conclusion that we aren’t supposed to like these characters-bordering-on-caricatures, and it was all a broad, meandering metaphor for real life. Kind of like this article is for a Coen brothers film. Wait … brilliant!

6. Fergie, Duchess of York, can’t make it through a whole interview: I guess we’ll have to wait until Australia’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday to find out what made Fergie “go off the rails.” (Though we kind of already know it’s the infamous 2010 tape where she begs for money to see Prince Andrew.)

We can only hope the reporter didn’t try something akin to that Dalai Lama joke. You know how those Australian newscasters are. Where is Barbara Walters when you need her?

7. Mark Zuckerberg dares to call “Chill” Facebook app “lame”: Guys, not to freak you out, but the fallout from this could be devastating. Especially because the Zuck wasn’t talking about FarmVille.

8. Bizarro Twitterverse even scarier than the real thing: Check out “fake Twitter” site Heello. It’s by the same guy who founded Twitpic, but it’s a hell of a lot weirder. Though honestly Twitter is such a mess sometimes that reading a CNN tweet all in caps about Justin Bieber doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary.

9. Temporary teeth tattoos for everyone! (But mostly the Japanese):

At least they are a step up from those real teeth tattoos? Or maybe they are like a gateway drug for permanent images that look like red rot on your chompers. Moms, don’t let your kids start putting decals on their baby teeth, or else they will grow up to be this guy.

10. That “Russian Dolls” show actually happened and you missed it: You probably skipped the premiere to watch “Jersey Shore,” right? Shame on you! There is a whole world out there of trashy cultures you have yet to experience! Well, here’s the first episode in its entirety. Try to keep up, it moves fast. Brighton Beach forever!

So here are your choices for the best bad boy (and girl) roles, along with your reasoning for what made the portrayal so disturbing and/or awesome. If your vote didn’t make it on the list, I apologize. Feel free to aggressively champion them again in the comments. I also apologize for adding Keanu Reeves’ appearance in “Much Ado About Nothing” to the original list, which many of you pointed out was not a terribly great one: my point there was that sometimes this good cop/bad cop casting misfires horribly, and there was no better example of that than Neo from “The Matrix” trying to do Shakespeare.

Be aware, this list does contain some spoilers for older films.

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One way of explaining what happened last night is that the Oscar producers tried to tack young and hip, just as academy voters tried to tack mass and mainstream, correcting for several years of more audacious indie-style winners like “The Hurt Locker,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “No Country for Old Men.” The result was a great big middle-of-the-road splat, presided over by a monumentally uncomfortable pair of stars, the miffed-looking James Franco and the perky-like-a-little-coffeepot Anne Hathaway.

While the show galumphingly tried to incorporate bits of the Twitterverse snark that surrounds it (and has all but superseded it), the biggest prize of the evening went to a dignified, achingly sincere Masterpiece Theatre-style film about the suffering of the Queen of England’s late papa. I have no particular problem with “The King’s Speech”; in fact, I enjoyed it. But my colleague Matt Zoller Seitz was correct to note, last week, that it might be the fifth- or sixth-best of this year’s nominated films (after “Black Swan,” “True Grit,” “The Social Network,” “The Fighter” and “Winter’s Bone,” at the very least). Awarding “King’s Speech” the best-picture prize was at least predictable; giving Tom Hooper the directing award, in a category that included Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers, David Fincher and David O. Russell, feels more like criminal pandering. (If I had a video clip of Sen. Paul Tsongas and his “Pander Bear” from the 1992 presidential campaign I would stick it in right now. Anybody? No? Well, let’s just move on then.)

It wasn’t simply that Franco was baked or bored, or that his idiosyncratic blend of sincerity and authenticity are precisely out of sync with the combo demanded by the Bob Hope-Billy Crystal-Whoopi Goldberg Chair of American Toastmastership, although those are all plausible hypotheses. Franco was pissed. On a night when he could have been building a multimedia installation or running lines for “General Hospital” or getting busy with an NYU sophomore or working on a paper about Sir John Suckling, Franco had to hang out on a cold night in L.A. with all these dorks, presiding over a pseudo-event so miscellaneous it couldn’t be rescued through meta-ness or reframing or any other kind of mental gamesmanship.Was this “performance art” like your GH gig, Jimmy? No, it wasn’t, was it? It was just lame.

Oscar’s leaden attempt to rebrand its trademark telecast as young and hip and social media-savvy (just consider all those terms surrounded with scare quotes, in celebration of your/my/our/James Franco’s sense of detachment and superiority) was as awkward as such things generally are. Justin Timberlake pretending to use an iPhone app to change the bewildering background projections — ho ho ho! Nobody in the entire world thought that was funny. Not you, not me, not the people watching in India or equatorial Africa. Not Kirk Douglas and Melissa Leo. (Why the negativity, people? At least they seemed like human beings.) Not my mother-in-law who doesn’t know what an app is or my 6-year-old son (who does). Not the person who wrote it, and definitely not James Franco. That was more and different pandering, of the sort that makes everybody unhappy, like the time your grandfather gave you a quarter but all you can remember about it is the terrifying tuft of hair sticking out of his nose. (More Paul Tsongas video, please. I just want to keep typing that name: Paul Tsongas!)

Speaking of the 1990s, let’s talk about that set, shall we? A few puff pieces last week dutifully described the use of digital projections as a “radical departure” from Oscar tradition and even invoked the term “virtual reality,” a sure sign that whatever you’re talking about will resemble a sales conference hosted by a mid-level Fortune 500 corporation. I spent much of the evening trying to figure out what those illuminated hoops looked and felt like. A briefly hot Las Vegas resort hotel, now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy? The inside of a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox? A rejected design template for “TRON: Legacy”? Then, when we saw a black-and-white clip of Bob Hope cracking wise on the first Oscar telecast — and when Bob Hope is much, much funnier than your current hosts, your show is in trouble — I grasped that the set was sort of, halfway supposed to evoke the classic interior of the Pantages Theater, not far away on Hollywood Boulevard, where the ceremony was held in the ’50s. But evoke it for whom, and why? To make Kirk Douglas feel less confused? (I’m kidding; he did fine.) To give younger viewers and participants some vague, disembodied sense of being connected to history? Wait, yes, that’s it exactly.

Awards? Yes, they gave awards and I haven’t mentioned them, because except for Melissa Leo’s unhinged F-bomb outburst and the outrageous, even shameful selection of Hooper as best director, it all went according to plan. Natalie Portman and Colin Firth had been practicing their lines, and delivered them nicely. (Yes, Annette Bening deserved to win, but Portman became the ass-backward representative of “Black Swan,” which deserved to win all kinds of other awards but didn’t.) Christian Bale looked more like The Dude than Jeff Bridges did, and gave every impression of being intensely weird. Lots of people we’d never heard of before mentioned their parents and grandparents and children, which is always irresistible. That Carrot Top-Yahoo Serious looking guy who won the live-action short prize was hilarious (although his movie isn’t that great). Accepting an inevitable and thoroughly deserved screenwriting prize for “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin went on and on and on — shocker! — and ended with the words “guinea pig.”

We were all the guinea pigs last night, Aaron, and the experiment didn’t go well. After that prepackaged opening riff when Franco and Hathaway inserted themselves into the nominated films — which was silly but fun and actually involved their talents as, y’know, actors, instead of their limited ability for shtick — the whole evening felt more and more like a bad idea gone wrong. (Sen. Tsongas, please!) I’d compare it to, like, taking your aunt to the prom, except that James Franco would handle that situation with awesome suavity. Anyway, if he’s got an aunt I bet she’s hot. And I bet she’d rather see “Black Swan” than “The King’s Speech.”

Bardem is in town to talk about his magnificent starring performance in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film “Biutiful,” an Oscar contender that has already won Bardem the best-actor award (shared with Italian actor Elio Germano) at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. As I wrote at the time:

“Biutiful” is another of Iñárritu’s grandiose meditations on life and death, parents and children, the supernatural, the interconnectedness of the universe and everything else under the sun (or over it). But at least it’s mainly about one guy and one city. While it might run 20 minutes or so too long, and could stand to be thematically deflated as well, “Biutiful” is a major return to form for Iñárritu, closer to his riveting debut “Amores Perros” than to the ponderously noble “21 Grams” or the Hollywood-loves-the-world messaging of “Babel.”

Bardem plays Uxbal, a shaggy, soft-hearted Barcelona lowlife and single parent who makes his living by managing and renting gangs of illegal African and Chinese workers, and who’s been putting off going to the doctor because he expects some really bad news. As one friend of mine noted in Cannes, if you lay out Uxbal’s story, it sounds like way too much: He’s sick with cancer, he’s got two small children, his estranged wife (Maricel Álvarez) is a junkie nutjob and he’s got to deal with corrupt cops, organized crime lords and cheapskate employers. Oh, and he has a side business communicating with recently dead souls, whom he visualizes as human-shaped helium balloons huddled against the ceiling.

“Biutiful” is in danger throughout of collapsing into a sentimental omelet of pseudo-spiritual mush, and it’s Bardem (along with the spectacular photography of Rodrigo Prieto) who keeps it tethered to recognizable human experience. Despite his reputation as an international sex symbol and bon vivant, Bardem in person comes across as a serious student of acting and cinema, discussing the invisible similarities between his role in “Biutiful” and his Oscar-winning performance as cold-blooded, Ringo-haired Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men.” He also told me as much as he could about his just-completed role in an untitled Terrence Malick film (the one that will come out after “The Tree of Life”), and explained why he considers himself “retarded,” at least in comparison to John Malkovich.

So you’ve got a baby on the way, and some people are saying that you could get another Oscar nomination for “Biutiful.” This must be an exciting time.

Very, very exciting. If it were not for this cold, it would be even better.

You may not feel much like getting out right now, but do you like coming to New York? Do you have fun here?

I think New York is pretty amazing, in every sense. It has the best and the worst of any town in the world. The impulse that it has, the sensation, is unlike anyplace else. Everything on the street is a show. You have to pay attention, no? It’s very exciting, but also exhausting.

Talking about cities, you’ve made two movies in a row in Barcelona — “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” followed by “Biutiful” — and they could hardly be more different. It’s not like the same place!

I said the other day to the people in the city hall in Barcelona, “I brought a lot of tourism to you guys with ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ And now I’m taking it back.” So we’re even!

Yeah. In “Biutiful,” we see the side of Barcelona that Vicky and Cristina never visit.

No, they don’t. But I’ve been to the Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and it’s real too. Have you been there? It’s a beautiful town. Both of them are real, both of them have to live with each other. As in any major town like this one, I mean, there’s a backstage. A lot of people are trying to survive in that backstage, sometimes with the waste that we leave for them. That’s basically the Barcelona that Iñárritu shows there.

We were there shooting for five months, and that’s a very, very long shoot. For an emotional work like this, that was pretty tough. Prior to that, I prepared for three months, and the last month of my preparation was to be in Barcelona going to those places with those people, the immigration community. I knew about it, I read about it, I saw it on the news, but then I was in it.

So you saw things you hadn’t known about before.

Well, you go and see all these illegal factories. It’s very impressive to see that they are right in the middle of town. Like, right here, right there, that window. You wouldn’t ever expect that. So it’s not only the backstage. It’s also in the middle of town that things are going unnoticed. Big, big things that are affecting a lot of people are going on there.

Uxbal must be a tough character to spend five months with. I mean, he’s a decent man, but he’s a total mess. He’s sick with cancer, burdened with guilt, haunted by ghosts …

Yeah, he is. This is not a movie about delivering the lines and then going back home. This is a life experience, and a journey. I knew that. I knew since I read the script, and based on Alejandro’s previous work, that what he was proposing to me was to jump into the abyss. That’s why it took me a little bit of time to say yes, because I knew he wasn’t offering a job. He was proposing that we grab hands and go to the end of the world. We know where we have to go — we’ll see if we can come back. Five months, plus three months of preparation, working six days per week. Most of the time we worked Saturdays, and he likes to work 12 to 14 hours per day. Holding that emotional state for so long is not easy.

When you are in a movie you have to always be in focus. It’s not like doing a play. When you do a play, of course you warm up a few hours before, you live the play, and then you go back home and have a drink, whatever. You stay with him, but you don’t have to be in focus. The play is done in two or three hours, and then goodbye. On a movie set, you have to be totally in focus, because you never know when they’re going to say, “OK, now we got it. Let’s go!” When you’re doing a character like this, you can’t take a break from him. Otherwise it’s going to disappear.

I wonder whether being exhausted like that helped you play a guy who is terminally ill. Because I think it’s hard to play someone who’s dying — who knows he is dying — without lapsing into cliché.

Yes. This is the most powerful character I’ve played so far, and I’m not sure if I will ever play somebody like this again. There are so many layers to convey and so many circumstances to construct. Relationships of many different kinds — people that you use, people that you are used by, affectionate relationships, hate relationships. And then there’s the sickness. I felt there was no way I could do this without putting myself at risk. Because Alejandro’s work, the way I see it, is about being as honest as you can. The work of the actor has to be about taking off all these faces, social characters that you put on yourself in order to survive out there, and getting as naked as you can, in order not to interfere with the character.

This character needs to be as transparent as crystal, because there are so many things that have to be seen through his behavior, his voice. Those things have to be attached to the actor emotionally, otherwise you cannot portray them and it will be a fake performance. [Clutching chest and moaning.]“Oh, I’m sick!” No. All of that has to be within, so that when he’s not speaking, when he’s walking on the street, you will see that. That was the challenge, and that was the exhausting part. Bringing all that and putting it in there and saying, “I have to hold this for five months.”

I suppose preparing for “No Country for Old Men” must have been very different. That character is also intense, but almost in an opposite direction.

Yeah, it was very different. I didn’t know what I was doing there, man! [Laughter.] But it’s funny you mention that, because they are similar in a way. They are characters I had to work on with my acting coach, who I’ve worked with for 20 years. I go to my acting school every year, whether I’m working or not, I have to be there at least three months. My coach is named Juan Carlos Corazza, and I think he’s a genius. I think he reads material, characters and human beings in a way I haven’t seen before. In both cases, those roles have to do with how much you have to take out of yourself — it’s not about doing anything, it’s about, OK, let’s take things out of yourself so you can go to the character in a way that is more pure and simple.

Especially in “No Country for Old Men,” he is a very simple man, with simple ideas. But those ideas were pretty tough! Uxbal is the same, I think. I’ve done some other characters, like Reinaldo Arenas [in "Before Night Falls"], where you have to add things, add behavior, and then work around them until the moment those things are yours. These two guys are different — it’s like take out, take out, take out, until you are naked. And then you put that drama in, or you put that philosophy in, like in “No Country for Old Men.” They are simple statements, but very strong.

Of course language is only one part of a performance, and a lot of actors say it’s the last part. But it must be different for you, acting in Spanish, as in “Biutiful,” after all the recent films you’ve done in English.

Yeah, it makes a difference because it’s the mother tongue. You live your life in Spanish and you’ve suffered and enjoyed and had pleasures and pains in Spanish. Words have an emotional resonance in you, huge emotional echoes, when you’re speaking in your own language. You don’t think about what you’re saying; the words come out of a need to express yourself. When you’re speaking in a foreign language, there’s like an office in your brain, where people are throwing the words at you. “Give me that word — I need a verb! I need an adjective!” There’s a lot of people working in there, and you have to live with that.

Well, one of the funny things about Anton Chigurh, in “No Country,” is that he doesn’t seem to speak or understand Spanish. And he doesn’t seem to be a native speaker of English either. He’s, like, Hungarian. Or maybe from nowhere.

He’s something else. He doesn’t belong to anywhere. We don’t want to know. [Laughter.]

I’m sure you can’t really tell me anything about your role in Terrence Malick’s next film, but I still have to ask. You wrapped that recently, didn’t you?

We wrapped a month ago. I am not allowed to talk about it, as you know. Well, there are two things: I’m not allowed and I don’t have any idea. [Laughter.] So how’s that? It’s set in Oklahoma, and here’s the great thing about Terry: To my surprise — because I didn’t know him — he is as funny as hell. He has a great, great sense of humor. He made me laugh a lot. He is a great man, a philosopher. I’ve always been very grateful for his work, so when he gave me a call I said, yes, of course. It’s like with Woody Allen: He calls you and you go, “Where? When?” And of course they don’t pay you shit! They take advantage of that! But it’s OK, you go there and you want to be part of the experience. Will I end up in the movie? Maybe not! Or maybe I am the star of the movie. Who knows? But that is the less important thing. The most important thing is to be there, to go through the experience of shooting with him.

OK, so what’s that like? You can tell me what Terry is like as a director without really talking about the movie, I suppose.

Well, it’s unique. He sends you some notes, and that’s it. Then you show up and he takes the camera and you never know what’s going to happen, ever. What time, where, when, with who. So you have to be so alive, especially when you’re playing a character like mine. I cannot really tell you what my character is, but it’s definitely a character. It’s not just me being natural. Hopefully! Maybe you’ll see it and it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever done. But when you’re playing a character with certain behavior, with a very clear point of view, you have to be 24 hours with him. The way Terry combines reality and fiction is pretty amazing, very poetic. Things were coming out of the scenes unexpectedly, and some of them were amazing things, amazing reactions. Afterwards he would let me know, “That’s why I don’t write, because I would never have expected you or him to do and say that.” He’s like a hunter, and sometimes when you go hunting you don’t get shit. Sometimes you get a big buffalo, man, and I saw Terry hunting a lot of buffaloes. When it works it’s pretty fantastic.

Before I go, I wanted to ask about a movie of yours that’s one of my favorites, that people probably don’t ask you about that much: “The Dancer Upstairs,” which you made with John Malkovich directing. Hardly anyone saw it, but I love that movie.

Me too!

I think that was one of your first movies in English. What do you remember about making that film?

Oh — stress, nervousness, responsibility! Before that I had done “Before Night Falls,” because my dear friend Julian Schnabel had given me his trust, partly to see if I could more or less act in a foreign language, preparing for what would come later. And then working with John Malkovich was like a master class. He’s a very sweet man, a very, deeply, extremely clever and smart and intelligent guy who I will never have anything to talk about with. It doesn’t matter what I say, I will always look, like, retarded next to him. He knows a lot about a lot of things, but he never makes you feel stupid about it. I think that film is very powerful, I loved the story. I have nothing but good memories of that one.

“Biutiful” opens Dec. 29 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

But it’s silly to suggest that the Coens’ entire career has consisted of snark and nihilistic bloodletting; these are also the guys who made “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “Raising Arizona” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (all comedies, rated PG or PG-13) along with the classic L.A. shaggy-dog farce “The Big Lebowski.” (If your family doesn’t enjoy spending some holiday time with Jeff Bridges as The Dude, I suggest you get a different family.) Far more to the point, the Coens are formalists first and foremost; I sometimes wonder whether film historians of the future will decide that’s the only thing they are. With each new movie, they dive into a specific conception of genre and go all-out, striving to make it their own without violating its terms and conventions. If “A Serious Man” was a knotty, fatalistic Jewish fable, “Burn After Reading” was a spy farce and “No Country” was a dark-hearted, ’70s-style neo-noir, then “True Grit” is a western in the John Ford style, informed by the ideology of Manifest Destiny and American Protestant conceptions of morality and justice.

Now, it’s also true that the Coens are coming at this classic western yarn from a 21st-century perspective that might misleadingly be called “ironic,” but it’s better not to get hung up on that. Let’s put it this way: Like most Coen films, “True Grit” works on multiple levels and will reward repeat viewings. It’s an impressive widescreen spectacle set on the 19th-century American frontier and built around a memorably ferocious performance by 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld. For reasons having to do with posters and contracts and award nominations, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are listed as the movie’s stars. But as indomitable orphan Mattie Ross, determined to forge into lawless Indian territory in search of Tom Chaney (Brolin), the drifter who murdered her father, Steinfeld is the movie’s everything: narrator, conscience, moral and visual center, driving force.

Whatever the opposite of “waif” is, that’s Mattie. Following her father’s death she travels to the dusty frontier town of Fort Smith, Ark. (in those post-Civil War days, that was still the “West”), in search of a man with “true grit” to help her hunt down the perfidious Chaney. In general, Mattie finds the adult male of the species disappointing (and the adult female virtually useless). In Portis’ novel and both film versions, it’s perfectly clear whom the title is meant to describe. At least at first, she holds out hope for Rooster Cogburn (Bridges), a drunken, one-eyed United States marshal with a reputation for shooting first and worrying about the legal niceties later. Bridges is great, of course — but he’s really and truly not the star of the movie, and Cogburn is such a growly, crotchety Jeff Bridges type that it’s hard to tell whether he’s doing any acting.

Perhaps the best thing about “True Grit” (other than watching Mattie stare down the mercantile population of Fort Smith, I mean) is the comic-horrifying way it captures the collision between brutality and civilization in this flyspeck outpost of the American social order. Mattie isn’t cowed by witnessing a grotesque hanging in the public square — one during which an Indian convict is publicly humiliated — but we may well be. I don’t need to tell any student of the Coens that they’re masters of idiomatic dialogue, and they rise to the challenge of dense but slangy 19th-century American speech with vigor. When Mattie asks an old woman to point out the sheriff, the lady replies, “Him — with the mustaches,” and it’s both hilarious and absolutely right. When Mattie tries to roust Cogburn from a mid-afternoon session in the outhouse, he informs her, “The jakes is occupied. Will be for some time.” This may tell us more about the character’s digestive well-being and overall health than we want to know, but the 19th century, one suspects, was often a realm of Too Much Information.

For reasons both venal and understandable, Cogburn doesn’t want to take a teenage girl into the Choctaw Nation, where he suspects Chaney is hiding out with a band of known ruffians. He forges an uneasy alliance with a cocksure Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf — it’s Matt Damon, very funny with an overcooked gentlemanly demeanor and a set of bristling mustaches — who is also after Chaney, and the two of them aim to ditch the girl, catch the scalawag and split the reward money. Needless to say, getting rid of Mattie isn’t that easy. Hell, it’s impossible, and of course as they travel into this mythic landscape beyond the bounds of law, the true grit of all three of these misfits will be tested. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, a longtime Coen collaborator, begins to back away from the characters as they become figures in a bleached-out, majestic landscape.

On balance, I think “True Grit” is much better in its first half, when the focus is most strongly on Mattie’s fearlessness and forcefulness, than in its second half, which describes an archetypal and almost spiritual odyssey into the wilderness and back again, with a requisite number of battles and adventures along the way. Without giving away anything significant, let me suggest that Mattie’s homeward journey back to Fort Smith, after her fateful meeting with Chaney and his band, is perhaps the most beautiful and heartbreaking passage in any Coen film, and should put to rest any notion that they’re incapable of sentiment or lyricism. (This is lyricism demanded by the form, of course. If the Coens made a children’s movie … hey! I wish they would already!)

For now, I’m going to suggest that “True Grit” is a winning western with just a few dark eddies beneath the surface, one that features a star-making lead performance and some spectacular photography, but falls just short of being great. But I’ve been down this road before with Coen movies, so let me attach an asterisk to that verdict. (Here’s what I wrote after my first viewing of “No Country for Old Men,” and mea maxima culpa on that one.) No one can tell you whether to like or dislike a film, of course, but I think grasping what the Coens are up to, in “True Grit” or anything else they’ve ever made, almost always requires multiple viewings. Form is content and meaning for them, which is why they resist talking about those things in isolation. To suggest that “True Grit” is a commentary about race and the social role of women and the relationship between self-reliance and community in American history is essentially to insult the Coens’ intelligence, and yours. It’s a western movie, which is a shorter way of saying all that stuff.