Now that the Coens’ latest is almost out here in the UK (17 days but who’s counting?) reviews are beginning to appear on this side of the Atlantic. First one I’ve seen is this from Empire magazine…

“Ask Ethan Coen to explain his latest fable, and he will scratch his thinning hair and summarise its strange ponderings thus: “It is about the covert world of the CIA and internet dating.” Ask Joel Coen to unravel Burn After Reading, and he’ll stroke his well-trimmed goatee and define its unusual formula thus: “This is our version of a Tony Scott/Jason Bourne kind of movie – without the explosions.” Indeed, to this previously untapped combo of inert espionage and modern dating rituals, they could add the perils of alcoholism, ’70s conspiracy thrillers, computer malfunction and personal training. Not to forget sexual deviancy. In a career steeped in oddity, this is another polished example of the brothers’ predilection for tossing a pile of wacky ideas and multiple movie references into the juicer to see what flavour emerges.

Following that most un-Coen of eventualities, an Oscar triumph, at first glance you might see their latest as an effort to paddle away from the threatening currents of the mainstream and back into the reassuring calm of the left bank – although, given it was made prior to the release of No Country For Old Men, that would require some nifty clairvoyance on their Brillo-haired behalf. Perhaps they just wanted to reawaken the zany in their filmmaking. Compared to the moody poetry of that classy neo-Western, Burn After Reading has the wild abandon of a punk-rock song – it’s all jibs and jabs, the rope-a-dope moves of a boxer. A slighter, less obviously showy piece that will grow and grow with repeated viewing.

So what’s the rumpus? Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich), a low-level data analyst at the CIA’s voluminous headquarters at Langley, has quit in a fit of pique. He didn’t take too kindly to being demoted. Truth be told, he doesn’t take too kindly to anything. However, a disc of what appears to be his hastily penned revenge memoirs turns up in the ladies’ changing room of Hardbodies Fitness Center. Naturally, personal trainer Linda (Frances McDormand), desperate to fund her forthcoming surgical work, together with her eager-beaver underling Chad (Brad Pitt), decide to sell the intelligence to the Russians. Did we mention overly horny Harry (George Clooney), currently schtupping Ozzie’s wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) and soon preying upon lonely Linda through the avenue of internet dating? We should. He’s relevant. All of it is played at the amphetamine pace of Raising Arizona.

Cut from similar cloth to Fargo and Lebowski, this is not quite a thriller, and not fully a comedy, but it is very funny and plotted to within an inch of incomprehensible – just like their beloved Chandler. God knows, it errs on the dark side, but the noir is bleached out in the leafy sprawl of Washington DC. Members of the anti-Coen club (unresponsive to the Muncie song, indifferent to bowling) tend to cite the superficial glaze of their art; the tart, unlikable characters; and the smug self-satisfaction at their own cleverness. There will be no swaying even the floaters this time round. If anything, Burn After Reading plays right into the calloused hands of the naysayers. It lacks the immediate charm of classical Coen: there’s no Marge or Dude – good-natured if unconventional counterpoints to the monopoly of jerks, saddos and crazies. Here it’s pretty much just jerks, saddos and crazies.

Ethan, always the more talkative of the brethren, would remind us that most of the characters were written with exactly these actors in mind. Malkovich’s pouting arrogance is a perfect fit for huffy clown Ozzie. McDormand’s disjointed smile and genius for body-language are ideal for nervy, jabbering Linda. Swinton’s snooty grace is primed for Ozzie’s untrustworthy spouse. Out of the crowd, however, it’s the pretty boys who enjoy themselves the most, defiantly mocking their swish Ocean’s Umpteen images. Pitt uncorks his hyperactive loon, blissfully ensconced in the hollow brain-space of a gym-cute bubble-head bounding into the world of espionage like a puppy. Clooney has a wonderful line in smarm he reserves for just these Coen-arranged occasions. Harry is a true-blue sleazebag – wait ’til you see what he’s got in his basement – who emerges out of the chaos as near enough the leading man.

This is precision-built madness. Beneath these chattering lunatics and the pinballing plot lies an intricacy worthy of Kubrick. The sound-editing alone is exquisite: the squeak of a wardrobe door triggering a blast of violence; the hallways of Langley reverberating to the clip-clop of fraught footsteps, rhythmically muffled by carpeting in sonic tribute to The Shining’s zooming trike. Regular cinematographer Roger Deakins may have been on his holidays, but replacement Emmanuel Lubezki (a real person) proves adept at tight, shapely frames and creepy angles.

True Coen fanciers can take solace in such familiar comforts as astonishingly bad highlights in Pitt’s sticky-up hair, the smart-aleck language (although it’s got nothing on the charged patter of Fargo or Lebowski) and a leading character wielding an axe in his dressing gown. And, as is the Coens’ curious wont, the film never quite fits its assumed reality: while we’re darting about contemporary Washington, concerned with such recent preoccupations as social networking and gym regimes, it has the lean, grumbly look of ’70s cinema and the dotty bedlam of trouser-plunging British farce, as if Seven Days In May had been rewritten by Alan Ayckbourn. It is also one of those movies that won’t leave you alone. Percolating away in your brain, its off-centre wit will take shape. The day after, even a week later, one of its peculiar set-pieces will spring to mind.

Ethan might remonstrate, but there runs a theory in certain circles that all Coen films are ultimately about American foreign policy. While it takes work to figure out exactly how that fits The Ladykillers, it is written through Burn After Reading like a stick of rock. Curiously, it’s the schmoes rather than the bureaucrats in the firing line. The CIA suits (led by a too-brief appearance from J. K. Simmons) are benign, bemused and rather gormless; it’s the knuckleheaded plebs who are out of control. America’s troubles, it titters, are of their own making.

As Linda tries to offload the improbable secrets to the very confused Russians, the Agency is baffled. Why the Russians?

The idiots simply can’t think of anywhere else. Farce by its nature is a matter of escalation: each stage of the ever-increasing anarchy is entirely logical, but the net result is insanity. What is Iraq, if not a great, big, terrible farce? Then again, it could just be a big joke on celebrity. There’s nothing that tickles those pesky brothers more than casting a gaggle of gigantic Hollywood stars – including one’s wife – as total nitwits. It’s a high old tale about unintelligent intelligence. That’s the Coens for you.

Verdict
If No Country For Old Men was vintage port, Burn After Reading is a shot of tequila: eye watering and hard to swallow, but the after-effect is terrific.” – Ian Nathan, Empire magazine, issue #233, November 2008 – 4/5 stars

For those still reticent about triple-dipping with the 10th Anniversary DVD release of The Big Lebowski, DVD Beaver may help you make your decision. They have compiled their usual indepth review, complete with screengrab comparisons between the various releases- they’re a good DVD review site, and thorough. The most interesting part, for me, was that the image quality is improved over the previous release which had a rather “soft” appearance. 

Personally, I’m going to hold off for the inevitable Blu-ray release. It was previsouly released on the doomed HD-DVD format and Universal seem to be working their way through those early HD-DVD releases for Blu-ray so, hopefully, it won’t be too long.

Thanks to Blake for the alert.

Err, that’s supposed to be a heart up there…

Anyway, remember how much Premiere* film critic, Glenn Kenny, loved No Country For Old Men? Well, he loves Burn After Reading too! Here’s his review…

“Complaining that the Coen Brothers can be a little too smart-alecky is like bitching that de Sica was excessively humanistic: more than a little obvious, and completely beside the point. They am what they am, and putting aside the proposition that there’s some moral/ethical prerogative to privilege humanism over smart-aleck-ness, how well you’ll appreciate/enjoy these filmmakers’ works depends on how readily you’re willing to key into (which doesn’t necessarily mean agree with) their perspectives. For myself, I found the Coens’ latest, Burn After Reading, to be their most perfectly constructed live-action-cartoon film since Raising Arizona. (And no, since you asked, I don’t consider the greatLebowski to be among their live-action-cartoon films. More like a takeoff on a Powell-Pressburger film on acid, among other things. I’ll get into it another time.)

I imagine you’ve already read at least a dozen or so synposes of the film’s plot, which saves me some work (ain’t blogging grand?), but I haven’t seen enough love given to the very deft way the Coens juggle a bunch of narrative balls here; for all its briskness of pace, the knotty plot of Burn reveals itself very deliberately, but without any flagging of energy. The doofus would-be blackmailers played by Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand (whose monstrous single-mindedness is both the movie’s secret weapon and punchline) don’t even turn up until almost a half-hour in. The zingers are, it seemed to me, even more plentiful and knowing than in an average Coen picture; I loved the indignance with which Malkovich’s impossibly affected kneecapped CIA guy fumes “I have a drinking problem,” and the thoroughly unimaginative stuff he drawls into his tape recorder as he improvises his “memwas”: “George Kennan, a personal hero of mine…” Ouch.

No, you don’t really “care” about any of these characters, just as you don’t really “care” about Daffy Duck. I rather doubt that the Coen brothers aren’t aware, when they do films such as these, that their characters lack depth. The caricaturing is the point. George Clooney’s compulsive stud is kind of a special treat, augmenting the dimwit Gable he essayed in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty with touches of Patrick Warburton’s dumbass sex toy David Puddy fromSeinfeld; tell me you don’t hear it in his character’s post-coital mantra, “I should try to get in a run.” To underscore the live-action-cartoon-ness, Clooney’s climactic freakout almost explicitly recalls the meltdown suffered by Steve Brodie (“Everybody’s turning into rabbits!!”) in the 1949 Looney Tune Bowery Bugs. No, really. It does. Trust me. I’m a film critic.

In its way, though—in its incredibly goofy, nasty, and, let’s say, smart-alecky way—Burn evokes a fallen world just as strongly as the Coen’s previous film, No Country For Old Men, did. The signs of the apocalypes are everywhere here. Among them: People who say they’re out to “reinvent” themselves, voice-activated HMO “help” lines, perky morning TV hosts, and, perhaps Dermot Mulroney (who is, in a sense, the most game of all the very game players here). And just as (possible spoiler alert here, although I don’t necessarily think so, but then, saying “why don’t you read it and decide yourself?” won’t solve the problem either, so…) the Coens showed their viewers some mercy by not showing the awful way Moss met his fate in No Country, here they cut away from the action just as it’s eddying into what would have been roiling grotesquerie, leaving two subordinate characters to provide the exposition, and, yes, do a little philosophizing. Which is much funnier than Uncle Ennis’ .

Good stuff. Check it out.”

Thanks to Billy for mailing this in.

*That’s the magazine/website Premiere, I’m not implying Kenney is the greatest movie critic in the world

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”

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.”

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.

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”

…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”