The Hollywood Reporter has reviewed Burn After Reading. I can’t really tell if the reviewer liked it or not. He calls it a “minor piece of silliness” and then says “signs look good for a solid North American opening”. Hmmmm…

“In “Burn After Reading,” the Coen brothers have taken some of cinema’s top and most expensive actors and chucked them into Looney Tunes roles in a thriller set in and about Washington.It takes awhile to adjust to the rhythms and subversive humor of “Burn” because this is really an anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly.

As a follow-up to last year’s multiple-Oscar winner “No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen clearly are in a prankish mood, knocking out a minor piece of silliness with all the trappings of an A-list studio movie. Those who relish this movie might treat it as the second coming of “The Big Lebowski”; those who don’t might wonder at a story in which no character has a level head. Signs look good, though, for a solid North American opening Sept. 12 following Wednesday’s opening-night debut at the Venice Film Festival.

The linchpin to the shenanigans comes in a particularly funny scene in which a CIA analyst, played by a caustic John Malkovich, gets summarily fired. He retreats to write a tell-all memoir amid bouts of heavy drinking. Under the circumstances, his wife (an anal-retentive Tilda Swinton) schemes to divorce him in favor of her married lover, federal marshal George Clooney, under the false assumption Clooney will leave his author-wife (Elizabeth Marvel).

Meanwhile, seemingly in another universe, sports gym employee Frances McDormand’s forlorn love life causes her to obsess over expensive plastic surgeries, oblivious to the fact that her boss (a moon-eyed Richard Jenkins) is obsessed with her. When a computer disk containing the cashiered CIA analyst’s first draft falls into her hands, she and her pickle-brained colleague (Brad Pitt) scheme to blackmail the author.

Everyone here is suffering from a full-blown midlife crisis. All operate in a morality-free zone. The conviction that the grass is greener anywhere but here is rampant. Curiously, everyone looks over his shoulder, certain he is being followed. This is the one and only time the characters are right about something.

The Coens, assuming triple roles of writers, directors and producers, give each person a special eccentricity. Pitt moves his body as if in a marathon aerobics session. Clooney never walks into a new lover’s abode without commenting on the flooring. Jenkins is a push-me-pull-you doll, fatally lured by McDormand’s charms but repelled by her online dating and involvement in blackmail. Malkovich has a lifetime’s supply of cynicism. Swinton fails to “read” anyone.

The key thing is that every actor is riffing on his or her screen persona. The guys who pulled off all those casino heists, the smart-cookie Minnesota police officer, the stars of many Sundance films — yep, they’re all idiots. One of the film’s funniest lines comes when a CIA officer listens to a report of everyone’s behavior, including murder and an attempt to leak the memoirs to the Russian embassy — rather prescient that last plot point.

He shakes his head and asks an agent, “Report back to me” — he pauses with a frown — “when it makes sense.” – Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter”

Below is a very brief clip from the Burn After Reading press conference from the Venice Film Festival. Unfortunatley it focuses on the stooopid stuff George Clooney and Brad Pitt are always asked and the frankly insane questioning by one female reporter in particular. Still, great come back from Clooney…

Here’s another, longer, clip with a bit of Joel Coen at the end suggesting they could just as easily have a made a “dog movie” or an “outer space movie”…

Another one. This time Clooney cheekily suggests that the Coens are not actually brothers and that the actors were chosen because they were the cheapest the Coens could find. Annnnd the crazy woman is back too…

The UK’s finest and most respected film magazine, Empire, has sent their reporter, Damon Wise, to the Venice Film Festival to blog on all happeneings there. Of course he too checked out Burn After Reading yesterday and, while it doesn’t sound like he had a very nice time, he did seem to enjoy the movie. Here are his thoughts…

“The Venice film festival opened today with its usual farrago: ineptitude and shambles. Luckily, I’d been at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland, on the Italian border, just the other week, so I felt like I’d eased myself into the way of life here, but it still gets some getting used to. For the daily press, the day started with a screening of Burn After Reading, the new film by the Coen brothers, starring John Malkovich, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt (I put them in that order because it pretty much reflects their screentime). For “Periodici” (an Italian euphemism for “Get to the back of the queue and stay there”) media people like me, however, it began with a very weird press conference that, as it turns out, rather perfectly reflected the themes of the film. Because it was such a bunfight, I retired to a quiet area of the press area to watch it on a TV feed. I say quiet because nobody had thought to turn the sound up.

If you’ve never been to a press conference in Venice, or anywhere, they’re frighteningly amateurish. As a journalist, I’m terrified that my friends and family – who don’t know what I do at the best of times – will, for some reason, turn up at one of these things and say after, “Is that IT??? Is THAT what you DO???” Well, for the record, no, I don’t ask George Clooney when he’s going to settle down and get married. Or Brad Pitt whether he’s thinking of having more children. And I don’t, before you even think about it, change into a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and ask Brad whether, if I joined a gym that he might hypothetically own (which he doesn’t), he would chase me. So no, these are not my people, and, come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure who would claim them.

Anyhoo… if I’d seen Burn After Reading beforehand, the whole surreal (and not in a good way) affair would have made a berserk kind of sense. As it was, the film was a little anti-climactic, even though it is far and away the most (broadly) anticipated film in Venice this year. I cannot reveal my sources, because Working Title have sniffer dogs, and men in black, and half-octopus nuclear ski-tractor devices (perhaps), but I’d been given to believe that their follow-up to the (excuse my French) fucking brilliant No Country For Old Men was something of a screwball comedy, or perhaps a satire of America’s heightened post-9/11 paranoia. But to me, though, neither of those things rang very true: for a while (about half an hour), all I could see was the film’s bleakness.

The one correct piece of information I’d been given is that it plays like Fargo without a Marge (well, there is the Marge, but she’s not, like, you know, Marge). But the thing about Fargo is that, for a while, it led you down the garden path, and here it seems that there are several garden paths, and whose garden path do we go down? Do we follow that of Osbourne Cox (Malkovich), a fired, boozy CIA agent whose wife is playing away? Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), the lonely hearts-stalking lawman who’s having an affair with Cox’s wife? Chad Feldheimer (Pitt), the dim-bulb gym manager who finds Cox’s less-than-earth-shattering memoirs in the ladies’ locker room and thinks they’re sellable government secrets? Or Linda Litzke (McDormand), Chad’s surgery-obsessed co-worker, who, after failing to blackmail Cox, tries to sell them to anyone who might be interested?

I think you can see from this outline that this film is very much about the games people play, and even after that first half-hour passed I’m afraid I struggled a bit to find much humanity in it. Though there are elements of their other comedies (The Hudsucker Proxy’s “You know, for kids” becomes a filthy “You know, for adults” here), this is more like one of the Coens’ dramas, especially Miller’s Crossing, with which it shares a similarly detached vision of self-preservation in the face of desperation. Stories collide and intertwine, but they don’t add up (this is not a criticism, believe it or not!) or become anything other than strands of a convoluted plot, and even the government, whose secrets these are, don’t seem to care much (as JK Simmons’ baffled CIA chief puts it wearily, “Follow them, watch what they do, and tell me when it all makes sense”).

HOWEVER!

I’m sorry I shouted then, but I had to get your attention: these are just tonal complaints. If I hadn’t seen The Ladykillers I’d say the Coens were incapable of making a bad movie. Now, this may no longer still strictly be the case, but they certainly do know what they’re doing, and what they do in Burn After Reading, they still do very well. Dialogue, as ever, is beautifully written, with an excellent sense of the absurd, especially the insane, hilarious repetition of the name “Osbourne Cox”. It might actually be the sweariest of their films too, outpacing even Mamet and Tarantino with its rat-a-tat f-words and s-words, and the cast, as ever, are outstanding. The Visitor’s Richard Jenkins deserves a nod as Ted Treffon, “the soulful manager of the Hard Bodies gym” (as it apparently said in the script), but though Clooney gives another great performance in the third of his ‘idiot’ trilogy with the Coens (after O Brother Where Art Thou and the unfairly maligned Intolerable Cruelty), for me the standout is Brad Pitt, who totally commits to his nerdy supporting role, stoopid hairdo an’ all.

I don’t want to spoil things, or sound like a US test-screening audience, but I wanted to see more of him, and that hair, and the fragmented nature of the film doesn’t really allow that to happen. Still, like all Coen brothers movies, it’s a deceptively rich feast, and long after they’ve laughed off any suggestions that it’s, like, you know, about something, it’ll become apparent that actually is. But don’t worry, though. As this Burn After Reading sort of portends, we’ll all be long dead by then.”

Interesting to read about the subversion of the Hudsucker line from which this site takes it’s name (“You know, for kids”) and, since I’ve read the screenplay, I know what it’s in reference to and cannot wait to see how it’s applied.

…or maybe Todd McCarthy from Variety just plain didn’t like Burn After Reading  Read on for his negative review…

“After their triumphant dramatic success with “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers revert to sophomoric snarky mode in “Burn After Reading.” A dark goofball comedy about assorted doofuses in Washington, D.C., only some of whom work for the government, the short, snappy picture tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller, with arch and ungainly results. Major star names might stoke some mild B.O. heat with older upscale viewers upon U.S. release Sept. 12, but no one should expect this reunion of George Clooney and Brad Pitt to remotely resemble an “Ocean’s” film commercially.

A seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters in this tale of desperation, mutual suspicion and vigorous musical beds, all in the name of laughs that only sporadically ensue. Everything here, from the thesps’ heavy mugging to the uncustomarily overbearing score by Carter Burwell and the artificially augmented vulgarities in the dialogue, has been dialed up to an almost grotesquely exaggerated extent, making for a film that feels misjudged from the opening scene and thereafter only occasionally hits the right note.

Ironically, said curtain-raiser shows the CIA actually getting something right. Career analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is shoved out, and his subsequent obscene tantrum demonstrates he has all the decorum and self-control of a 5-year-old. Lying to his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), that he quit, Osborne sets about writing an explosive memoir, while no-nonsense Katie now seriously begins considering leaving her unhinged husband for her happy-go-lucky lover Harry (Clooney), a federal marshal none too committed to wife Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel).

In an utterly unrelated orbit of D.C. life, desperately middle-aged Linda (Frances McDormand) is pissed that the insurance company for the fitness center where she works won’t cover the extensive plastic surgery she urgently wants done. So antic and frantic you wonder if anesthesia would ever work on her, she suddenly steps into merde with gym trainer Chad (Pitt), who’s even more hyperactive than she is, when the latter finds a disc they think is loaded with ultra-classified information.

With frosted blond hair, and appearing so dense he may as well have his low-double-digit IQ pasted to his forehead, Pitt’s Chad is what passes for a riot here. Film’s funniest scene may be that in which Chad, having traced the disc to Osborne, phones the latter in the middle of the night to initiate the blackmail scheme that will net Linda the coin she needs to transform her bod. Pitt slices the ham very thick indeed, but uniquely emerges as endearing in doing so.

Coincidentally, Internet dater Linda starts shagging Harry, who, amusingly, likes to go for long runs after sex, and just past the one-hour mark, one major character gets blown away in an accident, a development that’s supposed to be funny as well as startling.

The Coens’ script, which feels immature but was evidently written around the same time as that for “No Country,” is just too fundamentally silly, without the grounding of a serious substructure that would make the sudden turn to violence catch the viewer up short. Nothing about the project’s execution inspires the feeling that this was ever intended as anything more than a lark, which would be fine if it were a good one. As it is, audience teeth-grinding sets in early and never lets up.

Incidental niceties crop up, to be sure. The Coens’ economy of storytelling is in evidence, as is their unerring visual sense, this time in league with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki; a low-angle shot of Harry, knife in hand, lingers especially. The date montages are cute, and the facial reactions of JK Simmons, playing a CIA boss more dedicated to avoiding fuss and bother than to getting to the bottom of things, are once again priceless. But on any more substantive level, “Burn After Reading” is a flame-out.”

I don’t know how they’ve seen it already when the Venice Film Festival starts its opening ceremony at 7pm local time this evening (8pm to us in the UK) and, according to its site, the movie is showing AFTER that. Anyhoo UK newspapers The Times and The Guardian both have four star reviews up already. Guess they showed it early… Here they are…

“Joel and Ethan Coen call upon a heavyweight cast of regular collaborators (George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins) and newcomers to the Coen repertory group (Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton) for their follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men. And then the brothers gleefully despatch half of their stars in a hail of bullets and blunt weapons.

This is the Coens’ first self-penned original screenplay since The Man Who Wasn’t There in 2001, and it has in common with some of their earlier pictures, specifically Raising Arizona and Fargo, a savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail. It also shares with these films one of the Coen Brothers preferred themes: that of inept criminals, or more specifically the ordinary Joe who thinks he or she can pull off one ingenious heist that will turn their luck around.

It’s hard to think of anyone less suited to a life of crime than Pitt’s character Chad. Most toddlers have better extortion skills. Chad is a bouncing puppy of a man; a fitness trainer at Hard Bodies gym and the best buddy of fellow Hard Bodies employee Linda (McDormand). Linda has an aching loneliness inside which she attempts to fill with unrewarding hook ups on internet dating sites and the dream of a new life bought through extensive cosmetic surgery. But all the butt-sculpting and face-stretching that she requires comes at a price, so when the gym cleaner finds a disk that appears to contain what Chad describes as “top secret sensitive shit”, Linda scents the chance of a windfall and Chad skips happily along beside her.

The disk in fact contains the whiskey-sodden ramblings that former CIA agent Osbourne Cox (Malkovich, who ties with Pitt for the film’s funniest performance) considers to be the beginnings of his memoir. Cox is struggling from the wreckage of a motorway pile-up of personal crises – he has quit his job, his wife (Swinton, delivering her lines with a scrotum-shrivelling ferocity) is tired of him and two imbeciles are trying to blackmail him. Little does Cox know but his wife is having an affair with a man he despises: married family friend and federal marshal Harry (Clooney). And in a coincidence that only the Coen brothers are audacious enough to pull off, Harry is also seeing Linda, having met her while sleazing around internet dating sites.

Carter Burwell’s brilliant score is the most paranoid piece of film music since Quincy Jones’s neurotic soundtrack for The Anderson Tapes – it’s particularly well-judged as it brings a gravity to a collection of characters who we could otherwise dismiss as numbskulls and nincompoops. The attention to detail is impeccable: the Coens can even raise a laugh with something as simple as a well-placed photograph of Vladimir Putin (the Russian Prime Minister gazes down from wall at Pitt and McDormand with the murderous expression of a tiger shark about to chew its way through a mouth full of particularly stupid herrings).

If the film does lack something, it’s warmth. The affection you felt from the Coens for the misguided fools in Fargo or Raising Arizona is lacking here for everyone except Jenkins’ hapless and hopelessly love sick gym manager. And while the film carries the audience with its entertaining, if somewhat ludicrous, blend of high level espionage and ab-toning exercises, it would perhaps be more rewarding if we could like the characters as well as laugh at them.- Wendy Ide, The Times”

“The Venice film festival got off to a rousing and star-studded start with the latest offering from the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading finds room for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich – along with Tilda Swinton who, improbable as it may seem after all those years slogging it out for low-budget avant-gardists like Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and John Maybury, is now supping at the high table of Hollywood aristocracy. And the Coens themselves are new enough to the big leagues for them to still feel they are blinking owlishly in the spotlight.

The film itself may be a bit of an afterthought down here on the Lido. Clocking in at a crisp 95 minutes, Burn After Reading is a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy that couldn’t be in bigger contrast to the Coens’ last film, the bloodsoaked, brooding No Country for Old Men. Burn, in comparison, is bit of a bantamweight: fast moving, lots of attitude, and uncorking a killer punch when it can.

Set in Washington DC, at the heart of America’s political establishment, it moves in four directions at the same time. Osbourne Cox (Malkovich) is a superannunated CIA analyst who is given the push and rancorously starts writing his memoirs. A computer disc containing his alarming-sounding background material falls out of a bag in a gym locker-room, where it ends up in the gormless clutches of Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) who run the place; their instant reaction is to try a little blackmail. The cosmetic surgery-obsessed Litzke is also scouring internet dating sites and starts something with serial adulterer Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), who has an unspecified job in the Treasury dept, but is overly proud of his past in “PP” (that’s “personal protection” to the likes of us). But he is already having an affair with Cox’s wife Katie (Swinton) – and it’s the latter’s sneaky investigation of her husband’s financial resources as she gears up for a divorce that triggers the whole information-loss plot-thread.

With such a profusion of attention-grabbing performers, it’s hardly surprising that the first narrative motor – the fools-after-money trope of which the Coens appear so fond – is swiftly subordinated to backstabbing emotional shenanigans; we soon find ourselves watching a particularly murderous account of marital high-jinks among moneyed social elites. (In this regard, the Coen film it most resembles is the divorce-lawyer comedy Intolerable Cruelty.) It’s also stuffed with the usual throwaway brilliancies: McDormand, for example, has a running gag with a computerised switchboard that can’t recognise she is speaking English, while Swinton does a very subtle bit of eye-acting to suggest she’s actually turned on by the thought of rooting through her husband’s bank records. Pitt, in fact, gets the best of the funny stuff, but has by some way the least screen time of all the principal cast.

Where does this film leave the Coens? Their unique position, as darlings of both the Hollywood set and the festival circuit, is unchanged. What they have managed to come up with here, somehow, is a light-as-fluff flipside to hardcore “insider” films like All the President’s Men, Michael Clayton or, indeed, The Insider: it paints the powers-that-be as goofy, chaotic and definitively non-sinister. This lot, you feel, couldn’t bug their way out of a paper bag.

Burn After Reading may also go down as arguably the Coens’ happiest engagement with the demands of the Hollywood A-list – but this bit of career development may also be contributing to a diminishing of their particular film-making strengths. Or perhaps they are simply evolving. The highly-wrought grotesqueries with which they made their name seem well in the past; stars find it difficult to merge with the scenery. For better or worse, their films are now more simply natural to look at and experience. Whether it will pay off again at the Oscar ceremony or box-office remains to be seen.- Andrew Pulver, The Guardian”

At the risk of going a bit Perez Hilton, click here if you feel there’s enough of a celebrity stalker lurking inside you and you can see a bunch of pics of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton at a photo call for the opening of the Venice Film Festival where, I don’t think I need to remind you, Burn After Reading is having its WORLD PREMIERE tonight!
EDIT: Here’s a couple of pics from the shoot with the boys Coen in ‘em- don’t Joel and Ethan look happy to be there …

 Left to right: Joel Coen, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, some guy and Ethan Coen

Ethan with Joel doing his best Leon impression…

Just a quick note to let you know that the official site for Burn After Reading has been updated. You are now granted access to the “Cast & Filmmakers”, “Gallery” and “Downloads” sections. The gallery contains all of the pictures any regular reader of YKFK will have already seen but no new ones at all! You can download two different wallpapers, one of which is the excellent Saul Bass style poster image, the other looks much like the site itself. On top of those are a screensaver and AIM icons. In the cast and filmmakers section you get the usual fluff about each person however, when you highlight Elizabeth Marvel you get Ethan Coen’s write up. A bug I’m sure but what is interesting is that there appears to be no intentional write up at all for either Coen…

That’s right everyone- the Coen’s hilarious looking new movie, Burn After Reading has its WORLD PREMIERE today at the Venice Film Festival. Hopefully some of those lucky enough to be seeing it this evening will post some reviews onto the internet. I am confident it will live up to the excellent trailers and clips.

Hi, just a quick note to remind you that the poll is still running. If you are yet to cast a vote please do (the poll is also a persistent part of the sidebar on the right). As you can see The Big Lebowski is now clearly in the lead over Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink, which isn’t much of a surprise. The real surprise is that three (3, count ‘em) people have voted The Ladykillers as their favourite Coen brothers movie. It takes all sorts…

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So, Burn After Reading is having it’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 27th August, and now, it has been announced, the movie will have its North American premiere during the Toronto Film Festival, Friday September 5th to be precise. The festival itself takes place between the 4th and 13th of September and the theatrical release of the film is 12th of September. The movie’s runtime is also confirmed as 96 minutes.