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Pop on over to Sky TV’s website to see their Burn After Reading mini-site (which is already better than the official UK one). Mike from Sky, who reached out to me said that for the moment it is based around Burn but will mutate into a Coen site later in the year. Anyhoo, they have a lot of pictures and clips from BAR along with stuff from other Coen brothers movies. Could be worth keeping an eye on.
Hmmm, competition…
Total Film, which is a distant 2nd to Empire magazine in terms of both sales and quality (in my opinion at least), has reviewed Burn After Reading giving it three stars (only 4 days till I see it for myself- yay!!!)…
“Intelligence is relative,” runs the tagline for Burn After Reading. So is impact. If this were the work of some self-taught young tyro, there’d be headlines cheerleading its wit and zip; its slippery subversiveness and antic spirit. As it is, coming from the Coen brothers, off the back of a masterpiece, it feels a bit slight. A bit knocked-off. Not as good as you’d expect, basically.
But then, Joel and Ethan aren’t ones for playing to expectation. From the get-go they’ve wryly eluded the pigeonholers. So their neo-noir bow Blood Simple was chased by the live-action Looney Tunery of Raising Arizona; while wintry, cautionary noir Fargo gave way to The Big Lebowski’s sun-baked, acid-fried goosing of Raymond Chandler. Same genre, different states of mind. Skipping into UK cinemas a mere nine months after No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading stokes hopes of pulling off another of the bros’ tricksy, ballsy, serious-to-silly one-twos. Not to be, alas. Don’t bank on the consistent, kaleidoscopic inspiration of Arizona or Lebowski. Rather, Reading is of a piece with that worrying pre-No Country phase where the siblings were in danger of becoming slapstuck: Intolerable Cruelty, the Ladykillers remake.
As in those water-treaders, the presence of A-listers adds a certain smugness to the sense of goofing off. Especially when it’s golden boys George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Mind you, the Ocean’s duo make an effort to shed some sheen in playing such bumbling, uncool characters. Clooney is Harry Pfarrer, a married federal marshal with a cheese allergy and an unhealthy habit of bedding women he meets online – including loser-in-love Linda Litze (Frances McDormand), a fitness centre worker obsessed with undergoing plastic surgeries she can ill afford. Litze works with Pitt’s Chad Feldheimer – a knucklehead with nothing on his mind except perhaps the wackiest hairdo the actor’s worn since Johnny Suede in ’91.
The macguffin gluing these oddballs – and the ramshackle narrative – together is a disc that contains the combustible memoirs of Osborne Cox ( John Malkovich), a freshly fired CIA analyst unhappily wed to another of Harry’s shag-mates, Katie (Tilda Swinton). When the disc falls into Linda and Chad’s hands, their thoughts turn to blackmail… or something like it, the duo’s inept scheming destined to end in disaster (“No good can come of this…” frets Linda’s smitten boss Ted, played by Richard Jenkins). So… any Fargo-esque pathos as things unravel? Nope. Not a bean. Burn After Reading is one big joke – and that’s all it’s meant to be. It’s not a film about nothing; it’s about delusion, deceit, bad decisions, sheer fucking human idiocy. Equally, though, it’s no more than a lark, a wheeze, a rampant piss-take; the sly mockery of Hollywood mores kicking in with the opening titles tapped across the screen in spy thriller-style computer type.
Just like Brad’s barnet, Burn After Reading has some outstanding comic highlights – many of them courtesy of Pitt himself. Loose-limbed and absent-minded, his hyper performance stays the right side of mannered. It’s a shame the same can’t be said of Clooney, who over-hams the head-bobbing and eye-popping (though you’ll pull a comedy shock-face yourself when he unveils his obscenely amusing secret basement project). But those seeking subtlety need only look to JK Simmons, twig-dry as a blissfully ignorant CIA boss who cadges the script’s tell-tell signature line: “Report back to me when it all makes sense.”
Funny guy. But the problem with all these characters is that they’re self-absorbed without self-awareness, which makes them easy to laugh at but hard to love (unlike, say, The Dude). Finding distraction in the visuals proves tough, too. Set in Washington DC but lensed mainly in New York, this is the most functional and anonymous-looking of all the sibs’ pics. Like we said though, it’s all relative. Burn After Reading may emerge free of consequence, but it’s also without flab, filler or faffing, its trim 96 mins a bit of a blessing after the Apatow-instigated trend for bloated running times. And with ’08 hardly shaping up as a vintage year for the Holly-com, its sleek combo of zigzag plotting, nimble pratfalls and random, blithe zaniness makes it burn all the brighter.
Verdict:
The title says it all. Seemingly eager to show us that they’re still pranksters rather than players, the post-Oscar Coens whip up a screwball soufflé that only the perverse will ponder at length. Snappy, snarky and full of big stars being very, very silly.- Sam Ashursh”
Nothing much to say other than I’ve just booked my tickets to see Burn After Reading on Friday, which is opening night here in the UK! I cannot wait! Hopefully I’ll enjoy is this much…
In time with The Big Lebowski’s 10th Anniversary, the BBC wesbite has an article discussing the movie’s cultural impact. You can read it here.
Thanks to Marc and Michael for mailing this in.
I went to see Tropic Thunder last week (I though it was great but got a bit soggy in the middle, incidentally it was co-written by one Etan Coen- not to be confused with Ethan Coen) and I was getting seated just as a Burn After Reading trailer began playing and I noticed immediately that it was different than the one I was familiar with. One scene in particular stood out which shows clearly (and graphically) what Harry (George Clooney) has been making in his basement, so if you don’t want to see this hilarious reveal till you see the movie- do not watch the trailer. You can see this trailer (Trailer 2) over at the official UK Burn After Reading site.
Ponders the Guardian’s Joe Queenan using the fact that the Coens are yet to make a tear-jerker as evidence that they are not fit to be so highly regarded. Once again a journalist bemoaning the fact that the Coens have gone from making a serious, Oscar-winning movie (No Country For Old Men) to a light, knock about comedy (Burn After Reading). Like that’s a bad thing! His comment that “the Coen brothers revert to being smart-alecks making films for snarky college students” is so boring, so well-trodden and so wrong that I almost stopped reading the article right there. And again the line about the Coen brothers “creative slump” is regurgitated, only this time, to fit the theme of his article, Queenan, has decided to make that slump a lot longer than the period in which the much maligned (unfairly, or at least overly harshly, in my opinion) Intolerable Cruelty (“a real horror”) and The Ladykillers (“a gabby, klutzy reworking of the 1955 British classic of the same name”). He extends it to include the period 1998-2006, a period in which he claims the Coen brothers “hit the skids”, conveniently beginning after most people’s favourite Coen movie, The Big Lebowski to the aforementioned serious, worthy movie, No Country For Old Men. This merely gives him the [false] evidence to back up his claims and overlooks two truly tremendous movie offerings in O Brother, Where Art Thou? ,which, in his esteemed opinion, has nothing to recommend it but (you guessed it) the multi-million selling, award winning soundtrack, and The Man Who Wasn’t There.
He also contends that- “Everything the Coen brothers do is clever, eye-opening, and stylish. That puts them in a class with Salvador Dalí. It doesn’t put them in a class with Rembrandt”. Suits me, I much prefer the work of the surrealist master over that of Rembrandt.
In my opinion it is Queenan’s article that is a “recycling – more like a regurgitation” displaying for all to see how easy it is to write from a grumpy stand point. Of course, much like this post, his article is merely one man’s opinion to which he is entitled, however wrong it may be.
The New Zealand Herald’s website is carrying an article with a brief interview with Joel and Ethan Coen. In the main it’s about the release of Burn After Reading but contains this interesing part about A Serious Man…
Set in a Jewish community in the midwest in 1967, A Serious Man is again their own story. Drama or comedy?
“I don’t know,” replies Ethan. “Was this one a comedy? Well, if it is then I suppose A Serious Man is a comedy too.” Is it a black comedy perhaps? “Not so much, but it’s not Tropic Thunder either. Our movies are hard to describe. It’s about a family. Not much happens. There are a few laughs. We have a few actors in mind but there’s nobody in it you’ve ever heard of.”
Was that deliberate after the star-studded Burn After Reading?
“Only in the sense that with some movies you want that movie star thing and some you don’t.”
Thanks to Nick for mailing this one in.
WCCO.com has a brief news report about the shooting of A Serious Man dealing with some of the Minnesota residents who have given over their homes to the production. It’s a fun and interesting piece outlining how the crew have been able to make the modern houses and streets look like they’re in the 1960’s. The clip shows Larry Gopnick (the serious man of the title played by Michael Stuhlbarg) having a little fender bender, talks about a nude scene taking place on a porch (ooo-err!), shows the Coen brothers at work and also mentions that the procudtion is three days ahead of schedule, which is ace.
You can watch the clip here (don’t bother reading the article as it’s pretty much just a transcription of the video).