Web magazine, Splice Today, has given Burn After Reading quite a positive review. Read it below and don’t forget- those of you lucky enough to be in the US- the movie opens tomorrow. That’s right – TOMORROW!!! Go see it and send me a review. In the meantime let this whet your appetite…

“Just as the Coen Brothers followed up their critically-adored breakthroughFargo with the gleeful stoner-noir bowling comedy The Big Lebowski, they’ve reached deep into their anarchic toolkit for the follow-up to Best Picture winner No Country For Old Men. Rightfully ignoring the implications and expectations that accompany Academy nods, the Coens have forged right ahead and made Burn After Reading, a technically perfect, dark-hearted farce that includes a handful of pitch-perfect performances and illustrates what a truly iconoclastic American treasure the so-called “two-headed director” really is. 

The closest Coen analogue for Burn After Reading is in fact The Big Lebowski, and not only because a divorce lawyer in the new movie echoes some of John Goodman’s immortal lines from the earlier film. Both movies are loose re-workings of classic genres—Chandler-style noir in Lebowski’s case, D.C.-set paranoia thrillers here—that have no discernable “point”; they’re just shaggy dog stories that use familiar genres as a frame in which to display wacky characters and vignettes. Burn After Reading’s motley crew is perhaps a little more “realistic” than Lebowski’s Jesus the bowler or the gang of roving nihilists, but they’re no less cartoony, and the film feels accordingly meaner.

John Malkovich plays Osborne Cox, a disgraced CIA man who has to consistently assert that he doesn’t have a drinking problem. He’s unhappily married to pediatrician Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton) and decides to write a tell-all government memoir after losing his job. When that unfinished document purportedly falls into the hands of bumbling fitness center employees Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt), a web of self-importance and unnecessary paranoia ensues that—this is a Coen picture, after all—includes plenty of profanity and the occasional grisly death. Most of the Brothers’ films have a lone character in over their head at the center of the action; Burn After Reading has about five.

The fifth is Harry Pfarrer, a semi-retired bodyguard and serial womanizer played by George Clooney. It’s a shame that Clooney’s GQ-ready looks have gotten him pigeonholed as a serious dramatic leading man, because he does infinitely better work in screwball comedies like this and the other Coen films he’s done, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the underrated Intolerable Cruelty. In his “serious” roles, Clooney always feels a little one-note and stiff; here, even more than in previous Coen collaborations, he’s positively unhinged. Saddled with a recurring verbal tic and mild hypochondria, he talks fast and uses the same cheesy lines to every woman he meets; he handles kitchen knives and handguns with equal disregard for safety; and he builds a machine in his basement that’s too hilariously perverted (and unexpected) to give away here. He’s nearly matched by Malkovich, who gives one of his characteristically over-the-top performances replete with brow massaging, screaming, and a painful over-enunciation of French words. 

There are couple moments and characterizations that can’t help seeming overzealous, however, even within Burn After Reading’s consistently hysterical tone. Brad Pitt isn’t a graceful enough comic actor to pull off a walking cliché like Chad, and he isn’t helped by the ham-handed costuming decisions—did the Coens really need to give him a skunk-toned pompadour, iPod headphones, a rearview mirror on his bike helmet, and a constant Jamba Juice smoothie cup? Or give him multiple instances in which to dance buffoonishly to bad techno? If anything, the Chad character is too recognizable a type (the immaculately accessorized gym employee nincompoop) for the film’s go-for-broke tone. The other characters, quintessentially Washingtonian as they may be, exist in their individual self-important vacuums within the Coen universe.

That universe is so stuffed with inventive details and characters (there are great, emotionally succinct supporting performances in Burn After Readingby Richard Jenkins and J.K. Simmons) that it’s no wonder even a “minor” movie like this one is made (and the Coens wrote it, too) with such verve and artfulness. Burn After Reading has a narrative economy that’s lamentably foreign in today’s cinema; watch the way entire relationships are believably built on scenes, many featuring Clooney, that last mere seconds and include only one word. Or watch how even the drab federal architecture and interior decorating of gray Washington are made visually compelling—a feast of sharp angles, rich colors, and sleek gym fluorescence—by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Observe how the humor sneaks in on multiple levels, from slapstick violence and sexual embarrassment right on down to the soundtrack; frequent Coen collaborator Carter Burwell takes the traditional espionage thriller route and scores the film mainly in pounding, relentless drums that occasionally lapse into “I Want Candy.”

Burn After Reading is a celebration of all things Coen, and a reminder, as if one was needed, that they are truly, defiantly American artists. Their slapstick and satire again recall Preston Sturges (the title of Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? was a nod to his Sullivan’s Travels); their obsession with genre and willingness to indulge personal eccentricities recall Robert Altman; and their tidy visual sense and narrative economy recall Howard Hawks. I anticipate that Burn After Reading will be misunderstood as overly cynical or, worse still, as pointless (David Denby has already initiated the charge). Such a judgment would be a disservice to the Coens’ place in this legacy of American filmmakers, since one could just as easily (and ignorantly) saddle the same adjectives on Bringing Up Baby, Monkey Business, The Lady Eve,A Wedding, or The Long Goodbye. Rather than merely supplying their characters with eccentricities and mocking them for relative unhipness or inability to succeed (as is the current Little Miss Sunshine/Garden State/Margot at the Wedding vogue), the Coens’ movies are populated with moments of disarming personal realism: Jeff Lebowski taking language from TV news; Barton Fink or Ulysses McGill or The Hudsucker Proxy’s Norville Barnes taking refuge in repetitive catch phrases; their women’s routinely unfulfilled desires for children or respect, as in Raising Arizona andMiller’s Crossing. In Burn After Reading, McDormand’s Linda explores a man’s wallet after sleeping with him on their first date, and the objects therein—a 7-11 gift card, a note from his wife—reveal depths of both their underhanded D.C. social setting and Linda’s ability to self-delude in her search for intimacy.

Burn After Reading is the equivalent of that shot within the Coen body of work—it’s not a technical leap forward like Oh Brother or a self-evidently important moral inquiry like Fargo or No Country For Old Men. Rather, it’s another eccentric entry in a career filled with them, and a movie that proves the filmmakers’ commitment to their ongoing, comprehensive personal vision. It’s a great film, and thorough. – John Lingan”

Elbow have won this year’s Mercury Music Prize. This is quite a big, annual deal for the UK’s music industry. Elbow won it for their album The Seldom Seen Kid which includes the song Grounds For Divorce which features in the Burn After Reading trailer. Yeah, I know it’s kind of a tenuous link to the Coen brothers but…

Good on them!

Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer reckons you should see Burn After Reading “at your own peril” and that it has hit “rock bottom”. He really didn’t like it…

“Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, from their own screenplay, strikes me as one of the most willfully awful movies I’ve ever seen. What makes it even worse is that every one of the “name” performances—George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton—seem determined to best each other in projecting the idiocy of their caricatured middle-aged losers. Yet the early scenes are not intended for middle-aged audiences, but, rather, for teenage viewers and listeners who can be expected to howl with laughter at every gratuitous use of the F and S four-letter words. Don’t get me wrong. I have lobbied as a libertarian in the cause of anti-censorship and anti-ratings. Still, I reserve the right as a critic to question the excessive use of expletives at the expense of sociological and conversational probability. And here the Coen brothers have repeatedly crossed the line to get some easy laughs out of otherwise witlessly malignant dialogue.

Their particularly nasty litany of losers begins right off the bat at a C.I.A. meeting at which analyst Osbourne Cox (Mr. Malkovich) is about to be kicked downstairs to another branch of the government, with lower security clearance, because of his untreated problems with alcoholism. Osbourne decides to quit the government altogether and write a tell-all memoir about his years with the C.I.A.

Osbourne tells his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), about the radical change in his life’s work, but she is too preoccupied with her clandestine affair with a federal marshal, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), to pay much attention to her husband’s problems. Mr. Clooney has never played goofier than he does here as Harry, who has been virtually infantilized by his successful career woman wife (Elizabeth Marvel), who is always traveling overseas to promote her children’s books. Still, the bumbling Harry is not all that comfortable with Katie, who is as demanding with him as she is with her own husband.

Despite the frequent references to the C.I.A., Burn After Reading is not at all a political movie in this politically contentious year, though it is true that the Washington, D.C., suburbs seem to constitute the homeland of imbecility at every level. Indeed, when the focus shifts from C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia to another suburb housing a Hardbodies Fitness Center, the film seems to become apolitical to a fault. The fitness center happens to be the workplace of Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), her dim-witted buddy, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), and the gym’s manager, Ted Treffon (Richard Jenkins). By the way, you may have noticed the invariably peculiar names given to the main characters, as if the names themselves are designed to elicit guffaws.

Linda is shown as having a fixation on expensive cosmetic surgery to make her into a new woman. When Chad accidentally discovers a misplaced disc containing C.I.A. analyst Osbourne’s memoirist musings about C.I.A. secrets, Linda and Chad decide to approach Osbourne and sell the disc back at a hefty price to pay for Linda’s surgery. Instead, Osbourne gets violent with Chad, and gives him a bloody nose. Outraged by Osbourne’s rejection, Linda leads Chad to the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., where they hope to sell the disc for a heap of rubles or dollars. This I found a little hard to believe even in these mercenary times. Meanwhile, Linda’s manager, Ted, has been nursing a crush on Linda, despite her dalliance with the endlessly fickle Harry. Soon the conflicting aspirations of these clownish figures lead to violence-filled misunderstandings and even a few killings.

In the final cop-out of the script, the last stages of the bloodbath are reported verbally by a C.I.A. officer (David Rasche) to his C.I.A. supervisor (J. K. Simmons) who puts a lid on the whole mess, after even the Russians have dismissed Osbourne’s C.I.A. disc as “drivel.”

Except for Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Fargo (1996), the Coen brothers have generally left me with the impression of mean-spirited academic film nuts with little feeling for their hapless victims of terminal clumsiness and ineptitude. No Country for Old Men (2007) was at least ultra-competent in its villainous nihilism, but I did not share in the general enthusiasm for the film, except for its cast of virtuosos. But Burn After Reading has hit rock bottom for me. See it at your own peril.”

Nothing to say here other than I found this awesome photo of the Coens with some of the cast of Burn After Reading.

I don’t think anyone needs telling but- top row left to right; Ethan Coen, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton. Front row left to right; Joel Coen, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt.

Jacqui Landrum is a name that may not be familiar to most of you but she worked on four of the Coen brothers movies in the capacity of choreographer. Sadly she has died of cancer almost two weeks ago aged 64 and is survived by her husband.  She worked on Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Man Who Wasn’t There. RIP.

From Variety. Thanks to Bunnie for notifying me.

WCCO.com has a brief report on the first day of shooting on the Coen’s next movie, A Serious Man. The piece is about the transformation of the local Key’s Cafe to fit with the movie’s setting of the late 60’s. The extras are all in period dress and there’s a lot of 60’s cars too. You can watch the video segment here and see 12 on-set photos below. Ethan seems to be busy but no sign of Joel…

Just a wee reminder that the the 10th Anniversary DVD of The Big Lebowski is out today.

Another positive review this time from ace movie blog Cinematical;

“When the worlds of Washington, DC political intrigue, infidelity, fitness centers and internet dating intersect and collide in a darkly hilarious fashion, you must be watching a film by the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading, Joel and Ethan Coen’s follow-up to last year’s critically lauded award winner, No Country for Old Men, was actually written by the duo as they were adapting No Country, but the two films couldn’t be more different.

The colliding worlds in Burn After Reading involve a CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who’s summoned to a top-secret meeting only to find out that the secret is he’s being demoted due to his drinking problem. Cox blows a gasket and quits rather than taking the demotion, planning to spend his new-found spare time working on his memoirs and refining his drinking. Cox is married to Katie (Tilda Swinton), a icy pediatrician with the worst bedside manner imaginable, and she’s less than sympathetic to her husband’s life crisis.

Katie’s having an affair with married federal marshal Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney); in addition to his affair with Katie, Harry’s been trolling an internet dating site looking for more women to fill his spare time, of which he seems to have an abundance. Katie, of course, doesn’t know about Harry’s side affairs, and now that her husband has left his job and is thus, by her estimation, even more of a loser than he previously was, she’s ready to ditch him for Harry. Her lawyer advises her to make copies of all her husband’s financial records, so she copies his computer files to a disk.

Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, Linda Litzke (Coen frequent flier Frances McDormand) is desperately seeking love on the internet, and she’s obsessed with having multiple plastic surgeries to reinvent herself. Like so many older women in our youth-obsessed culture, Linda’s convinced herself that her tragically flawed love life is something that can be fixed with a nip here and a tuck there. Her manager, kind-hearted, bumbling Ted (Richard Jenkins) pines for Linda from afar, while Linda, relentlessly self-immersed in her quest for medical science to heal flaws that don’t really exist, while ignoring those that do, fails to see the love that’s right in front of her.

Linda’s desire for superficial self-improvement escalates to obsession when her company’s HMO refuses to pay for her surgery. When the CD containing all the files of former CIA agent Cox falls into the hands of Linda and her chipper, can-do coworker Chad (Brad Pitt), Linda enlists Chad’s help in a quest to blackmail Cox for “reward” money, thereby securing the needed funds.

The Coens intertwine all these separate lives into one piece of storytelling that’s quickly paced, twisted and often laugh-out-loud funny. With their deft understanding of human nature, the Coens create characters who tread close to being caricatures with enough humanity to keep them grounded in reality. We can see bits of ourselves in each of them, and this has the effect of making us laugh at the people in the story we’re watching, while perhaps uncomfortably wondering if we’re laughing a bit at ourselves as well.

Perhaps in part because the script for Burn After Reading was written specifically for the actors the Coens wanted to work with, the performances are all top-notch. Malkovich, working for the first time with the Coens, brings a manically funny vibe to his ex-CIA guy on the verge of unraveling, while Swinton, as his bitter wife who’s disappointed in him, her life, and perhaps most of all herself, is all razor edges and sharp corners, while underscoring Katie with a wry humor that lets us peek at the sadness and desperation beneath the angry surface.

The Coens once again have written Clooney a role as vapid, addle-brained everyguy. Harry has so few original thoughts in his head that he keeps recycling the same lines and stories over and over again with every woman he meets; hey, it works, Harry seems to think, so why reach beyond what you know? But for all his bravado about being a federal marshal with killer instincts, when he’s faced with realities that don’t fit his carefully constructed script, he falls apart; Clooney’s scenes in the latter half are some of the best in the film.

McDormand, of course, had her first role with the Coens in their first film, Blood Simple, and they keep casting her in their films for a simple reason: she’s just a fantastic actress. She imbues this role with so much that’s true about people searching desperately for that one thing that will make everything better; when Linda’s browsing internet dating ads, she methodically ticks men off as losers while never looking beyond her own sags and bags to address the real baggage that’s keeping her from genuine happiness.

As for Pitt, this is his first time working with the Coens after years of wanting to be in one of their films, and this role’s brought out the dorky little kid in him in a delightful way. He plays Chad as an effusive man-boy, whose entire life up to until the intrigue takes place has revolved around working out, biking, hydrating with bottled water and Gatorade, and bopping around to his iPod. There are countless Chads biking around the streets of L.A., New York, Seattle, and all points in between, blissfully unaware of their lack of self-awareness. Pitt lends Chad’s vapid distraction an air of purity and innocence that nicely foils Linda’s obsessiveness. He’s like an obedient Golden Retriever puppy following her around and eagerly fetching the bones she tosses, and he’s funnier than we’ve ever seen him.

I expect critics who favor the Coens when they’re working in the realm of the heavily artsy, ala No Country for Old Men, will like Burn After Reading, but it won’t be their favorite Coen film. For me, I would rank it up there with my two favorite Coen films,Fargo and O, Brother Where Art Thou?. Burn After Reading is a sharply written film that revolves around intrigues and deceptions, where most of the darkly comedic moments happen when a character’s flaws collide with reality; most of all, its a fun ride down the roller coaster of the dark side of human nature as only the Coens can explore it. – Kim Yovnar”

Another [very] positive review of Burn After Reading this time from one of the major movie geeks over at Ain’t It Cool, the mysterious “Moriarty”. He seems to genuinely love the movie even postulating that it could, in time, become a grower to the extent that it will be remembered as one of the Coen’s finest. I hope he’s right because I am looking forward to this movie so, so much. Here’s his review…

“Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.

Loved it.

Let’s just get that out of the way. Liked it a whoooole lot while I was watching it. Started really liking it as I drove home talking to Mr. Beaks about it. And I think I sort of love it now that it’s had a while to sink in.

I love the funny Coen Bros movies for the most part, which is why I am so saddened by my distaste for INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and THE LADYKILLERS. They both feel like epic stumbles to me, and I’ve tried watching them again. I like THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, but I haven’t felt compelled to rewatch it. I was one of the very first people to profess my undying love for THE BIG LEBOWSKI, and that film’s ever-expanding cult following pleases me endlessly. I wish some of that love got funneled over to THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, which deserves far better treatment than it got when it was released…

For me, my love affair with the Coens started with RAISING ARIZONA. I read a review of the film, and although the review was largely negative, the reviewer convinced me to hunt the movie down when he quoted what he claimed was an example of the “awful” dialogue: “Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.” The music of that line, even just written out on a page, made me interested in these guys and their worldview, and I ended up going to see RAISING ARIZONA. It was me, my girlfriend, and about three other people in that theater, and I was the only one laughing. Not just laughing, either, but gasping for air as I laughed, amazed by what I was seeing.

I have a feeling this is going to be another of those moments where some people are laughing, and other people are staring at them in the theatre wondering what, exactly, they are laughing at. BURN AFTER READING is wildly funny, but it’s also very sly and subversive as a piece of filmmaking, and it’s not an obvious comedy in any way. From the score to the cinematography to the overall mood, the film feels like something entirely different, and that’s part of why it makes me laugh so hard.

Carter Burwell’s always been one of the best collaborators for the Coens, a guy whose own warped sensibility is totally in synch with theirs. Try to imagine RAISING ARIZONA without his score. It’s impossible. Burwell’s music is the engine that drives that incredible pre-title sequence, as much as the language of it or Barry Sonnenfeld’s exceptional cartoon cinematography. That yodeling was so bizarre, such a wild choice, that it practically redefined for me how far you could push a score in service of a film. I’d never heard anything that sounded like that for a whole movie. And then to hear the quiet, meditative beauty of his work on MILLER’S CROSSING a few years later… it just shows you how rich Burwell’s imagination is. One of the reasons I think he isn’t quite as frequently name-checked by film nerds as guys like Elfman or Williams is because his work doesn’t have just one sound. He seems to be able to do almost anything, each time figuring out what the character of that film is, his work and his style bending to suit the picture instead of him trying to make everything sound the same way. Even when the Coens used no score at all for last year’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, with just one minimalist track at the end, that was a choice that Burwell was part of, and he got the same credit on the film he always does. I love what he did for BURN AFTER READING. It sounds like he got hired to write this for some giant-budget action-drama about the CIA, and Emmanuel Lubezki seems totally in on the joke as well. He shoots this in the same jittery hyperclarity he brought to ALI or Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. This isn’t shot like a “comedy” at all. Normally audiences take their cue from that obnoxious sunshiney overbright color in studio comedies. That’s what tells them that what they’re watching is “funny,” and it’s surprising just how much of an impact it has on audience expectation. They may not ever notice the cinematography or the score overtly… many audiences don’t. But it has a huge subliminal impact on what they think they’re watching versus what the film actually delivers, and that dissonance, part of the joke, may make some people very uncomfortable. The story is profoundly silly, a roundelay of morons bouncing off of each other in little fits and starts of stupidity. In some ways, there is no real story to the film. You keep waiting for everything to add up, and when it doesn’t, that also might frustrate audiences who expect certain sorts of narrative beats to occur every single time. The Coens have a habit of frustrating those expectations, though, and BURN AFTER READING is no exception.

The film starts with Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a low-level CIA analyst, being called into his boss’s office to be demoted. He reacts badly, quitting instead of letting himself get moved, and when he tells his wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), she takes it badly, too. She’s been having an affair, anyway, with the amiable doofus Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), and she’s ready to leave Osborne. Harry’s a bit of a cad, though, constantly cycling through encounters with women he meets on the Internet. Things would probably be bad enough with just these people in the mix, but then Osborne makes a few serious errors. First, he starts writing a book, a fiction based loosely on his experiences in the Agency and things he’s heard over the years. Then he leaves it on his computer, where Katie downloads it while trying to get his financial records. She gives it to her lawyer, who gives it to his secretary, who puts it on a disc that she takes with her to the gym where she works out. Hardbodies. It’s a cookie cutter chain of gyms, like a 24 Hour Fitness or a Bally’s, and when that disc gets lost, then discovered by the Hardbodies staff, it sets off a chain of events that is both breathtaking in its stupidity and hilarious because of how seriously these ridiculous people take all of this.

I think the Coens have always loved the characters they create. For a while, they got a reputation as being chilly, emotionless, clever without really meaning it. I think that’s unfair. ARIZONA is a film positively brimming over with love for its characters, and I think MILLER’S CROSSING is rich with eccentric humanity, as is LEBOWSKI. There are a few of their films where things tipped a bit to the smug “look at the dummies” side of things, but with this film, they once again have created a group of people absolutely ripe with faults and foibles who the Coens love because of their flaws, not in spite of them. Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) gradually emerges as the real center of the film. She’s one of the gym employees, constantly surrounded by people in pursuit of better bodies all day long, and she’s become determined that plastic surgery is the only way she’s going to move forward in life. Unfortunately, she can’t afford the surgeries she wants, and so she’s slowly drowning in self-pity. Like Harry, she spends her time on Internet dating sites, but she’s not just looking for sex; she’s looking for something lasting, some sort of real love.

Brad Pitt is… well, come on. You know by now whether you admire the kind of madness Pitt brings to his most interesting work. 12 MONKEYS. FIGHT CLUB. SE7EN. And, yes, this film. Chad Feldheimer is the new Greatest Coen Bros Character Ever. He’s not the main character in the movie. He has a few big sequences, but for the most part, he’s a supporting player. But in grand Coen Bros tradition, he kills every single moment he is onscreen. Just kills. He’s a personal trainer, constantly moving, constantly dancing to his own iPod soundtrack, helping out a friend simply because that’s what you do and it’s sort of exciting. He doesn’t really think he’s blackmailing anyone when he tries to get money from Cox. He’s just expecting a reward for doing the right thing. Like any decent person should expect. And when Cox won’t pay, things get ugly. And stupid. People make very, very bad decisions.

I think Clooney’s work is fascinating. I like his O BROTHER performance. It’s crazy, but it works. I’m less enchanted by the bland romantic comedy lead work in CRUELTY, a film that is what it aims to skewer, toothless. The concept has no follow-through. MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR THE DAY does a better job of capturing the pulse of a genuine screwball comedy than CRUELTY does, and it’s a shame. It’s rare when Clooney doesn’t have a chemical spark with someone, but I think he was mismatched with Zeta-Jones. Honestly, this is my favorite Clooney performance since OUT OF SIGHT and THREE KINGS back to back. He’s a bundle of quirks in his early scenes, these big scripted conversational tics. He’s obsessed with people’s floors and exercising after sex. He’s paranoid. He’s phony. And as the film unfolds, the quirks become cumulatively funnier. Without ruining things, I’ll just say that I love the way the first half of the film plays like the third act of GOODFELLAS, with Clooney on edge, sure he’s being shadowed, waiting for the bullet he knows is coming. And then things change. And things happen. And the payoff for him is the best comic material in the film, I think. It’s another twist on the gentleman spy work he’s been doing now in films like CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND and SYRIANA. He’s able to make the sleaziest guy… and Harry’s certainly sleazy… somehow charming.

McDormand is, as always, best served by the Coens. Nobody writes more interesting roles for her, or offer her such deliciously twisted characters.

She’s the MIRROR MIRROR version of Margie Gunderson. Margie simply was a positive person, secure in her faith that good somehow sorts itself out in the universe. The events in FARGO test that belief, but she’s so decent that you have to believe that after that, she was still that same good person. Linda’s not a particularly good person. She’s very positive, but she’s also blind. She wants a man to love her, but she has no idea how much her boss Ted (the great great great Richard Jenkins) wants her, just as she is. He tells her. No hesitation. But she never registers it, just shrugs him off. She wants surgery, and she can’t understand why that’s nobody else’s problem. She seems to expect it. After all, she’s the one reinventing herself. She’s got faith that the world will give her what she deserves, and she doesn’t seem to care what she has to do to make it happen. She makes some truly horrific decisions in the film, and Chad’s the one who really takes the brunt of it, so determined to help her and so excited to be part of the “spy shit.”

I also really loved the stuff between David Rasche and J.K. Simmons as two C.I.A. officers, junior and senior, sort of serving as a Greek chorus to the various bits of insane bad behavior. These two could do a weekly show, just giving reports and reacting to them, and I’d watch it every single week. They’re that funny together.

I don’t think it’s the tidiest wrap-up, but that’s also sort of the point of this one, just as it was with LEBOWSKI. It’s more the collision of people like primal forces that interests the Coens, and it always has been. BURN AFTER READING may divide viewers at first, but I think it’s got a shot at being part of the pantheon for the Coens. I’ve been thinking about it constantly since seeing it. It’s the sort of Coen Bros. film I want to talk about with my friends who are also Coen Bros. fans, because I think there are about five or six moments that are immediate “Oh my god, did you see that?” moments, and two that are so remarkable you wish you could take the DVD home with you. It’s a whole different flavor than what is normally called “comedy” these days, and that alone makes it worth sampling. I suspect this one will be a grower, not a shower, and if it doesn’t really connect at the box-office, it’s no doubt because the guys once again zigged when anyone else would have zagged.

And really… if you love their work… would you have it any other way?”

Thanks to JD for letting me know this was up.

Star of the Coen’s No Country For Old Men, Tommy Lee Jones, has filed a lawsuit against Paramount Pictures claiming he is owed around $10m in royalties having taken a reduced fee up front for starring in the movie. This from Press Association…

“Tommy Lee Jones is suing the makers of No Country For Old Men for more than 10 million dollars which the actor claims he is owed for starring in the 2007 Oscar-winning crime thriller.

The lawsuit against Paramount Pictures claims that Jones was promised “significant box-office bonuses” and other compensation depending on the success of the film, which went on to take in more than 160 million dollars at the box office.

The movie, which is set in Texas and is based on a critically acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel, scooped four Academy awards, including best picture.

No-one from Paramount was immediately available for comment. Jones declined to comment through his publicist, Jennifer Allen, the San Antonio Express-News reported.

“The paperwork stands for itself,” Ms Allen said.

The lawsuit was filed on Thursday in Bexar County in San Antonio. Netherlands-based NM Classics Inc, a Paramount subsidiary, is also named in the lawsuit.

Jones, who played Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the film, claims he was not paid promised bonuses and had expenses wrongly deducted.

The lawsuit says Jones was paid a reduced upfront fee in joining the film, and that his contract had known errors not corrected before the movie was made.

The 61-year-old star is asking that an auditor be named to review financial records to determine how much he should be paid.”

What kind of crazy person gambles on taking a points deal on a Coen brothers film? Anyway, good luck to him. He was terrific in the movie and deserves to get what he’s owed.

Thanks to Sean and Bunnie for letting me know.