Burn After Reading is fucking funny! –Slugtron

The Coen Brothers have chosen to follow up their Best Picture winning No Country For Old Men with the hilarious screw-ball farce Burn After Reading.

These two films couldn’t be more different, and it’s a good thing, too.  I don’t think the Coen’s could have followed up an artistic masterpiece with another artistic masterpiece, and it was good to see they didn’t even try.  Burn After Reading is much more reminiscent of The Big Lebowski than No Country For Old Men.  In fact, it has a shared structure with Lebowski, though not as good.  The structure is that of creating a zany sort of mad-cap adventure in which to hang the most preposterous and humerous characters possible onto.

And the characters in this adventure are some of the most preposterous and humerous characters in the Coen Brothers lexicon.  In fact, they’re all so solidly put together in this film, it’s hard to pick a favorite.  John Malkovich might be the funniest though, as an angry ex-CIA agent (though agent is probably too strong a word) who repeats just about every sentence he says once more, adding in a well-placed “Fuck”.  But George Clooney is fantastic to watch, as well, as a sex-addled fornicator who sleeps with just about every female character in the movie and devises a sexual contraption so funny that…  well…  Anyway…

As if everything the Coen Brothers did, didn’t show how good they were with characters, this certainly would. –Slugtron

But the rest of the characters are pitch perfect for this film as well, from an airheaded Brad Pitt to a confused JK Simmons and a cold and evil Tilda Swinton to the rest of the cast who is just as confused by what’s going on as everyone else is.

The story revolves around a disc of memoirs written by Malkovich’s character that falls into the hands of Brad Pitt and Francess McDormand.  Unfortunately they’re idiots and don’t realize the disc is practically worthless but want to blackmail everyone anyway, and when that doesn’t work, they try to sell it to the Russians.

The story doesn’t really matter so much as the hilarity that ensues because of it.

I was belly-laughing through most of the film.  The writing was snappy, the jokes were sharp, the characters were witty and everything was to be liked about this movie.

No, it wasn’t as good as some of their other movies, but it was just drop-dead funny and for that, it’s worth seeing.  Not too many good comedies come out these days, so we need to take them when we can get them.

(As a sidenote, that great Saul Bass looking poster above says so much about the movie…  Really.)