Very Funny
"Burn After Reading," the Coen Brothers latest movie is not their best (Nothing will ever top "Fargo," a movie for the ages.) but it is very, very funny.
It is the kind of movie you don't want to examine too deeply or it will slip through your fingers, but with this huge stellar cast and its raw satire of contemporary morals and government ineptitude, it keeps you laughing from start to finish.
Malkovich is at his best, especially in the opening scene, which, unto itself, is a lesson in acting.
And while Clooney and Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins and the rest of the gang are all first-rate, it is Brad Pitt who steals the show right from under their talented noses with his completely perfect impression of a goofy fitness instructor.
This one will play on TV and on DVD for years and we will watch it.
1 comment:
Dear readers, the Coen Bros hate each and every one of you….…and your family, and humanity.
That’s right. In case you, reader, needed to be reminded, you are not a critically-lauded writer or director of a highly-respected filmography. You are a normal, hardworking person, and the Coen Bros want to tear you to pieces for the moviegoing public…who they also hate. What sort of genius do you suspect it takes to write a character like Linda Litzke, the middle-aged, under-loved, desperate divorcee willing to indulge in blackmail to pay for a buffet of plastic surgery operations (when her health insurance fails to cover them). Aside from the criminal aspect, it takes very little imagination to create that character. It takes even less to slice and dice it in the ruthless manner that these condescending golden boys put into gear for an entire movie.
And to you, a duo that has single-handedly excised any meening from the word “genius”…for fuck’s sake, you wallowing ingrates, you’re inviting the entire world to make fun of the woman that just passed you in a Mercury Mystique, that just cooked your lunch, that just accepted your receipt-less return at Target, that has to fight a daily urge not to stick a goddamned shotgun in her mouth, that is proud of her two-bedroom apartment, that gave birth to the prosaic Generation Y shithead that’s going to call this their favorite movie, and that unwittingly makes up a giant portion of the demographic that paid for you to make Burn After Reading, a steaming, corn-studded coil of one-dimensional, short-sighted hatred.
That’s just one of them. Never has a cast of such unlikeable characters graced a movie screen. It’s so easy. Go ahead, look down those bird noses and take aim at hopelessly single gym managers that unwittingly own a leaf-wilting ugliness and aging, insecure, alcoholic intellectuals driven by their life mistakes to hate everything and everyone and soul-sucking bitches with spines of ice and whatever other demographic that swims around in very tiny barrels but nonetheless DOES NOT deserve to be on the receiving end of your heartless, uninspired bullshit.
Perhaps I’ll write a hilarious screenplay about a terminal case of cancer that gradually eats a critically-lauded filmmaker alive. The audience will roar with laughter as he becomes too sick to slide down the fireman’s pole that shines in the distance, piercing the middle of his three-story Manhattan penthouse.
And since when did the you decide to craft scripts that Neil LaBute probably left scattered on the floor sometime between In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors? Am I the only person that doesn’t want to watch another movie about men and women in committed relationships that can’t help but pounce onto each swinging dick or dive into every bearded clam that comes-a-whistlin’ down the alley?
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