One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Tammy,

You pegged Burn After Reading’s key feature: its length. Just as 2 minutes, 30 seconds seems to be the ideal length for a pop song, 90 minutes seems to be the ideal length for a movie. The Coen Brothers are officially The World’s Cleverest Film Students. Among other things, they nearly always adhere to the 90-minute rule.

Burn After Reading is brisk, entertaining and, like about half the Coen-Bro films, dispensable. As I said, the joy is in watching it all unfold in its wry visual glory. The Coens must know this too. The very title is absurd; the plot hinges on secret digital files which can be copied instantly and infinitely. What’s to burn?

The title is an inside joke. The movie’s biggest jokes are more inside jokes:

– The highest levels of spookdom could care less of about “a conspiracy so vast” hoopla found in all other CIA movie

– George Clooney riffs hilariously on his own celerebrity persona

– What George does to Brad, and what happens to that Clooney cool, is script-meeting comedy gold

– Frances McDormand’s ruthless quest for store-bought physical perfection is the personification of celebrity-style shallowness made epidemic by the Military-Industrial-Newsfotainment Complex.

Burn After Reading is light, funny, silly.

Monsieur David-

Well, Pard–You are off to the land of the big orange rocks and I’m settin’ here in the misty mountains. Took in  the Coen Brothers’ latest stab at society, “Burn After Reading.” This compact film’s previews rolled at 4:30 pm, and I left the theater just shy of 6:15 pm .

As a review I read last night notes, the characters in “Burn” are all screwing each other over, and you’re not sure how the heck any of them hooked up in the first place!   There’s a lot of screwball action and comedy.   The story takes place in Washington D.C. and Georgetown, and concerns a purloined disk of data belonging to Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA analyst fired for drinking too much.

“Burn” moves along at a fast clip and it’s a pretty mean take on our often hollow and greedy existence…not to mention our penchant for stupidity.  Brad Pitt, though not a great actor, is funny in his role as a hyper, empty headed, bottle-sucking personal trainer.   Frances McDormand, Pitt’s co-worker and friend, works as a gym administrator obsessed with finding the money to pay for a series of plastic surgeries.   A bearded, oiled up George Clooney is D.C.’s most adroit seducer – he’s building a ‘present’ for his wife in the basement that features a giant dildo and black leather easy chair.   After every tryst, George goes for a run. Tilda Swinton’s ice cold bitch pediatrician intimidates her young patients ( Moms cower in the examining room ) and is married to John Malkovich’s sexually ambiguous Cox.

There’s bungled blackmail, cheating and more cheating, surveillance vehicles, botched break-ins and lots of chase scenes throughout “Burn,” and all the characters, save one, have less than honorable agendas.  Everyone crashes into each other near the end of the movie, and a lot of bodies pile up in the river.  The CIA knows bodies are piling up, but they aren’t sure why.  J.K. Simmons is pitch perfect funny as the top-level CIA agent who just wants it to all go away, whatever “it” is.    Nobody else really knows what’s going on either, except the audience.

Despite the Coens’ condemning us, we can’t help but chuckle.

T.