Regarding 1a, I think I knew Josh Brolin was Chaney from the trailer, but there's also another bit of set-up: Cogburn asks someone (maybe the guy in the bear suit) whether he's seen Chaney, and he identifies him by saying he has a powder burn on his cheek. When Mattie sees Chaney in the creek, the camera moves in on his face so that we can see the powder burn clearly. Pretty subtle, and another example of expecting the audience to be alert. (Which reminds me of a review I read yesterday complaining that in Inception everything is explained three times.)
My own take on why modern movies can expect audiences to be alert to small details is that audiences have learned how to read movie language in more sophisticated ways over time. I think that's behind some of the fast editing too, where fewer frames of film are dedicated to getting information across. (Often derisively called MTV editing.) You see something similar in the evolution of exposition in science fiction from early days to, say, Heinlein, who was capable of tossing out little shards of information that conveyed big ideas to sophisticated readers.
Regarding the visuals being more realistic in this movie than in the old version, I'd say that this was a trend well under way even when the old True Grit came out in 1969. It was a throwback even then, compared to what directors like Peckinpah were doing at the time. The Coen Bros. version is more in the visual tradition of something like Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980).
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My own take on why modern movies can expect audiences to be alert to small details is that audiences have learned how to read movie language in more sophisticated ways over time. I think that's behind some of the fast editing too, where fewer frames of film are dedicated to getting information across. (Often derisively called MTV editing.) You see something similar in the evolution of exposition in science fiction from early days to, say, Heinlein, who was capable of tossing out little shards of information that conveyed big ideas to sophisticated readers.
Regarding the visuals being more realistic in this movie than in the old version, I'd say that this was a trend well under way even when the old True Grit came out in 1969. It was a throwback even then, compared to what directors like Peckinpah were doing at the time. The Coen Bros. version is more in the visual tradition of something like Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980).