According to the Minnesota Film and TV Board the Coens are due to start shooing A Serious Man on 9th September, and they should know since the Coens (and Focus Features) have agreed to shoot in their home state rather than in Milwaukee. The $500,000 sweetener from the Minnsesota Legislature might have helped this decision. Bear in mind also that only THREE DAYS later Burn After Reading opens in the US. They certainly are in the midst of a prolific period.

After the awesome “red band” trailer for Burn After Reading comes the regular, for all audiences trailer. Do we call these “green band”? Who knows? Anyway here it is. It has quite a few shots that weren’t in the original trailer and some ridiculous examples of cuss words being edited out. Pitt calling Malkovich a “dick wad” is now merely a silence and ”secret CIA stuff” isn’t near as funny as “secret CIA shit“. Pah! Anyway, it’s a good laugh, especially McDormand’s reaction to Clooney’s invention which, if you don’t know what it is you will crease up when you find out (I won’t spoil it). Enjoy.

In addition there’s the International Teaser Trailer which you can watch here. Again this has one or two brief new shots.

Thanks to Blake for mailing me the links.

Cinematical.com has been fortunate enough to exclusively reveal the poster for the Coen brother’s forthcoming spy comedy, Burn After Reading. Obviously that exclusivity ended the second they published it as it spread like wild fire across the many pages of the internet and blogosphere. Enough with the preamble, here it is (click for full size image)…

I like it. Reminds me of a Saul Bass credit sequence or poster (most notably this one for Hitchcock’s Vertigo) and the intros to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Catch Me If You Can. I also like the fact that it isn’t just a collection of big, floating faces of it’s stars.

Carter Burwell, long time Coen composor, has updated the Burn After Reading section of his site and included two tracks from the score for free download. The tracks are called “Earth Zoom In” and “How Is This Possible?”, go check them out here. God bless him.

In his synopsis of the movie he intriguingly refers to the movie as a “sex comedy of errors” and he has included an image with the file name “BAR_title_card” and, along with one of the tracks being called “Earth Zoom In” I’m guessing this is how the movie starts…

Enjoy- and thanks for sharing Mr. Burwell!

Just a very quick note to let you know that I’ve updated the Burn After Reading Mulitmedia page with some images I grabbed from the recently released trailer. Why not pop over and take a peek. It’s interesting to compare both versions of the movie’s logo – one from the apple.com trailer page and the other from the trailer itself. I know which I prefer- the Top Secret folder style from the trailer.

I’m getting VERY excited about this movie now.

The keen-eyed amongst you might also notice one or two other minor changes to the site, such as the re-naming of the “On DVD” section to “At Home” to more accurately reflect the fact that DVD is no longer the sole choice of the home cinema connoisseur. I will be working on that particular section in the coming weeks including a review of the beautiful Blu-ray version of No Country For Old Men.

Oh my! You read right- the first trailer for Burn After Reading is available for your viewing pleasure in lovely HD Quicktime format! What are you waiting for- CLICK THIS! Unfortunately you have to install iTunes first- the wait was AGONISING but it’s worth it! Do it then come back to read the rest of the post.

EDIT: You can see and download the trailer without the need for iTunes at Dave’s Trailer Page. Check it out.

EDIT 2: Or simply watch it here;

Nice to see some Coen regulars in there. Besides the obvious Clooney and McDormand, there is Richard Jenkins and J.K. Simmons, also nice to see David Rasche who I will always remember fondly as TV’s Sledgehammer – “trust me, I know what I’m doing!”

Cannot wait!

My copy of Empire (July 2008) arrived today and the first article in it (after the reader’s letter page) is a four-pager on the Coen’s next movie, Burn After Reading. It confirmed the UK release date of October 17th and also contains five new images which I will scan in and post on YKFK in the next few days. Here is the text from said article lovingly transcribed by yours truly…

“After the (relative) seriousness of No Country For Old Men, it seems the Coens are back to more traditional turf for their next. It’s a thriller that’s kind of a comedy (or the other way around) born of one of their own brainstorming sessions (and not a famous novel), where the characters go by such typically syllable-torturing Coen-esque monikers as Harry Pfarrer, Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer.

“It’s in the vein of Fargo and Lebowski,” delights Eric Fellner from Working Title, completing his sixth film with the brothers. “Somebody comes across something they shouldn’t, they completely misinterpret what they’ve got, and because they are fairly stupid, everything spirals horribly out of control. Mayhem and dead bodies ensue.”

More precisely, it is a spy caper about boozy CIA operative Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), so incensed at being fired he writes some inflammatory memoirs, the disc of which he accidentally leaves in a gym. It is discovered by less-than-intellectual instructor Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt), who attempts to blackmail Ozzie, while his boss Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) meets smooth-talking Harry Pfarrer (George Clooneey) via online dating. He’s the CIA lug assigned to clear the whole matter up, who also ends up sleeping with Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton), estranged wife of Ozzie.

“I’m a guy that goes around killing people,” says Clooney, who would happily play a corpse for the Coens. “It looks really fun. This will be my third idiot – the Coens call it my trilogy of idiots.”

Shooting with typical zest (taking only 50 days) between No Country’s debut in Cannes 2007 and its rapturous US release last autumn, the New York boys stuck fairly close to home: Brooklyn Heights and Washington, DC are the main locations. And despite regular cinematographer Roger Deakins missing his first gig since Barton Fink (due to prior commitments) – Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men) replaces him - the production ran as smoothly as ever.

“They are so brilliant, Joel and Ethan, they just know what they want,” continues Fellner. “Most of the techs and craftsmen have all worked with Joel and Ethan many times. There is never a panic on set. You are never running out of time.”

However, the film, which will open this year’s Venice Film Festival (it wasn’t ready for Cannes 2008), finds its makers at something of a crossroads. Does the Oscar victory and box-office success of No Country For Old Men (a best ever $160 million worldwide) mean they are now a mainstream act and no longer the clever-cloging wiseacres only deciphearable by their army of delirious fans?

“That is the issue – how do you sell the Coens?” agrees Fellner. “Our experience at Working Title is that the point where we’re made mistakes is when we’ve not sold the film to the real audience. You have to start with the real audience and then go bolder. With some of their recent films made with studios (Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were both studio-based films not produced by Working Title) , that could be where they went wrong: looking for too big an audience. This is quite mainstream, but not too mainstream.”

The Coens have been very busy of late. They will soon start another comedy, A Serious Man (also with Working Title), which Ethan has claimed will be ever-so slightly autobiographical: “It’s about a family of four in the Midwest, in 1967, and one of the kids is about to be Bar Mitzvahed. Horrible things happen…” After which they will get going on an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a couldn’t-be-more-Coens noir pastiche set in a reimagined Jewish state in Alaska. Meanwhile, Ethan has also found time to write a trilogy of short plays currenlty being staged together off-Broadway under the title Almost An Evening, produced with the help of Coens’ regular composor, Carter Burwell. The plays, one of which involves two opposing versions of God having a scrap, are helpfully described as Camus-meets-Kafka-meets-the Marx Brothers. Definitely not too mainstream.”

So there you have it. I found this article to put my mind at ease about their two next projects, both of which I’m looking forward to temendously, especially The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which, like the article says, is perfectly suited to the Coen brothers. If you haven’t read the book yet, I cannot recommend it enough.

According to launchingfilms.co.uk Burn After Reading will be out here in the UK on October 17th. Not too far behind its US bow of September 12th.

Have a peek here- a Flickr photoset from the set of Burn After Reading and another one. There are some more pics to be found there too, do a search for “burn after reading” and sort by relevance.

Thanks to Alberto for sending this in.

MTV.com has a brief interview with George Clooney primarily about Burn After Reading but he also goes on to mention that he may NOT be directing the Coen-penned Suburbicon as previously reported. Here’s what he had to say;

“No, no, I wanted to do that, [but] I haven’t stolen that one away from them yet. I think they are going to do it, I think they are going to direct it, but I love that project. I have a part in it that I would love to play.”

Thanks to Bunnie for emailing this in.