With an impressive opening weekend haul of $19.4m from 2,651 cinemas (or theaters if you prefer) Burn After Reading took the top spot at the US box office, beating off competition from The Righteous Kill starring both Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. To put this into perspective The Dark Knight made $148.4m on its opening weekend while showing on almost twice as many screens (4,366). The Coen brother’s previous highest grossing movie, No Country For Old Men, made a paltry £7.7m on it’s opening weekend on only 860 screens. 

Looks like Burn After Reading is a shoe in for the Coen brother’s biggest box office hit yet!

In light of the release of Burn After Reading movie site ReelzChannel.com has a top 10 countdown of what they consider to be the best minor characters in the Coen pantheon. Of course, John Turturro’s incredible turn as Jesus Quintana in The Big Lebowski wins out. Check it out here.

Also Metromix has a photo gallery countdown of the quirkiest characters from Coen brothers movies. Many of the same characters make both lists.

Thanks to Marc for mailing both of these in.

USA Today has a brief, lighthearted interview with Joel and Ethan Coen from the Toronto Film Festival about Burn After Reading. Also there’s a great photo gallery with some new ones to peruse. You can read the interview below (it really is quite short) or follow the link to USA Today’s site. Really, it’s up to you, freedom of choice and all that…

Q. Do you each get your own Oscar for every win?

Ethan: Yes. They look good all together. It’s more impressive.

Q. Where do you keep them?

Joel: They’re at the office. They’re just all piled up.

Q. Did you at least get a lot of free dinners at the pre-Oscars awards ceremonies?

Ethan: Yeah, dinner and drinks.

Joel: If you can call that a dinner. The food isn’t great at those things, let’s face it. It’s better to eat ahead of time.

Q. Where did this plot come from?

Joel: We started with the cast, thinking about parts. We thought about what would be fun to see from these various actors, some of whom we worked with before, some of whom we hadn’t. What would be fun to see them play? We just thought, for want of a better description, a spy story. It’s not really a spy story. It became something else.

Q. You tailored the roles to the actors. As a result, the ex-CIA analyst is the most John Malkovich-y part ever.

Ethan: John angry is good. John was a man on fire.

Q. Do either one of you have a gym membership?

Joel (emphatically): Yeah. You live in New York City and, you know, when there is snow on the ground and you can’t go to the park, you better have a gym membership. Unless you have a really big apartment.

Q. Do you work out regularly?

Ethan: No, I don’t really like it (guffaws loudly).

Joel: I said I had a gym membership. I didn’t say I worked out.

Q. Burn After Reading has been described as silly. But there is a serious futility in each character’s obsession.

Ethan: It’s pretty bleak. I watched a football game last night, and it was the first time I’d seen a commercial for it, since I don’t watch much TV. I thought, “Hmm, it looks like a comedy.”

Q. Have either one of you engaged in Internet dating?

Joel: (Expletive)! Well, we’re married.

Q: Were you wed before there was the Internet?

Joel: Yes, I was. Well, practically.

Ethan: We’ve been married since before electricity.

Q: I like the clip from the fake romantic comedy you invented, Coming Up Daisy.

Ethan: Try to see the film again because the print on the poster is actually so funny. On the poster, we filled in all the credits.

Q: Who directed it.?

Joel: Sam Raimi (of Spider-Man fame and an old cohort).

Ethan: And it’s based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy. (author of No Country for Old Men).

Q: Now Dermott Mulroney, the star of Coming Up Daisy, can say he has been in a Coen brothers film. Sort of.

Joel: Dermott, we’ve known forever. It was great of him to come by and do that little cameo.

Q: You wrote Linda the plastic surgery nut for your wife, Frances McDormand. Is that really her naked butt in the opening scene?

Joel: Sure. She does her own stunts, so she says.

Q: Who is the better idiot — Pitt or Clooney?

Joel: They are running neck and neck now. It’s going to be a photo finish.

Thanks to Bunnie for sending it in.

Not very interesting this one but if there are any iPhone techie fans out there…

“NEW YORK USA Today is rolling out rich media advertising ad units for Apple’s iPhone. PointRoll, a wholly owned subsidiary of Gannett, created the ad units for campaigns. 
The national newspaper will feature ads from Ford and the new Joel and Ethan Coen film “Burn After Reading.”

“The new Ford Flex marketing campaign is all about engaging consumers in the most relevant and technologically advanced way possible,” Usha Raghavachari, Ford communications manager, said in a statement. “Mobile is the most interactive way of engaging potential and existing customers, and we are excited to provide wireless devices with the same rich media advertising capabilities that we currently use online.”

The PointRoll ads are expandable upon user initiation and have features like click-to-play video and coupon downloads. Users do no have to download applications or plug-ins to see the ads. ”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Click this link right here to be whisked electonically off to a 12 question/slideshow interview with the Coen brothers mainly discussing Burn After Reading. They also big up (in a jokey way) Michael Stuhlbarg, recently announced star of the now shooting A Serious Man. It’s a very quick, but interesting read.

I was a little disappointed with question #11…

11. You recently signed up for the adaptation of ‘Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’ What can you tell me about that?

Joel: Well, the rights are owned by Scott Rudin, who we made ‘No Country’ with. And we had a really good experience working with him on that, and he had this Michael Chabon book and he asked us if we were interested in doing the adaptation of it. So where we’re at with it now is the same place we were when we did the adaptation of ‘No Country,’ which is that we’re writing the screenplay, but I don’t know whether or not we’re going to make the movie. It’s possible. It’s possible not.

I will be absolutely gutted if Joel and Ethan do not end up writing AND directing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I think it is perfect for them and is such a great novel. Fingers crossed!

Thanks to Andie for emailing this one in.

Thanks to Amy who commented on an earlier post we can now all watch this YouTube find. Basically it’s a 10 minute clip of Tilda Swinton on Letterman where she discusses her hometown of Nairn in Scotland (where she recently held her film festival), her twin kids, visiting with George Clooney and, of course, Burn After Reading which, to be honest, is barely touched upon but does show a great clip with her and Malkovich which I’d not seen before (skip to 6 mins if that’s all you’re interested in).

Thought you guys might like this little promo widget thingie…

STOP READING THIS NOW! Get thee to a cinema, or a theater as you Americans like to call them. GO! What are you waiting for?

When you get back let us all know what it was like.

ABC has a video of quite a revealing and interesting interview given by Peter Travers, movie critic for Rolling Stone, with John Malkovich, star of the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading which opens in the US tomorrow. In it you will also see some clips and behind the scenes footage as well as get an insight from Malkovich as to what it’s like to work on a Coen brothers movie. Click here.

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”