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'Johnny Thanatos' flips through the Coens' BURN AFTER READING!!
SPOILER ALERT !!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Did I mention I'm a Coen Bros completist? And did I mention I'm a Coen Bros apologist? Totally. I will defend INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and THE LADYKILLERS. Yeah, I will. I know! I'm kinda pathetic.
But I love The Coens. And this review started... interestingly. I can't wait to see the flick and I love the non-spoiler parts to your review, Johnny Thanatos and I will come back to read the spoiler sections after I see the flick. Be warned of spoilers, but they should be marked. Enjoy!
First-time submitting anything other than the occasional snarky comment in the talk backs. If you use this refer to me as Johnny Thanatos.
That was just terrible. Awwwful. I want to give them a piece on my mind and make sure they know just how awful that movie was. What was the point of it? I want to forget that I ever saw it!
Those were the first comments I heard behind me as the credits began to roll at the end of the new Coen brothers movie Burn After Reading. It should be noted that throughout the course of the movie I found myself constantly distracted by the gently descending stench-cloud of cat litter and stale, ready-to-be-changed Depends from directly behind myself. I'm not quite sure what they were expecting. Well, also I think that part of the problem was that the audio had some kind of problem in which we had a few dropped voice segments and there was a near constant "hiss-whump" noise coming from the print for the entire movie, which I'm sure played hell with a whole bunch of Miracle Ears. Perhaps they were expecting that nice boy George Clooney in another Sauve, romantic role. Or that good-looking Brad Pitt fella could entertain them with his boyish charm. But we are talking about the Coen brothers here. If there is anyone that can put an actor in a role that plays exactly to an actor's type, while making the performance feel as if the actor is playing against type, it is them. I only wondered going in whether I would be getting "Big Lebowsi" Coen Brothers or "Hudsucker Proxy" Coen Brothers. I wasn't expecting "Blood Simple" Coen brothers stirred into the mix.
I'm always happy to see David Rasche on-screen. I can't help it, Sledge Hammer holds a warm place in my heart right next to my holster. I think it was brilliant casting having Rasche and J.K. Simmons hilariously understated roles. Simmons and Rasche ground the plot in their few scenes and pace the action. They also serve to remind the audience of how absurd and disjointed everything is, but anyone that has seen the ads for this movie should be well-prepared for the “wacky hijinks” this kind of ensemble piece always seems to bring about, with actors trying to “out wacky” each other.
Malkovich is assigned to a movie-long personal hell that you aren't sure he deserves. He plays a self pitying CIA analyst who opens the movie by being demoted by Rashce. He quits his job in protest much to the chagrin of his ice cold cunt of a wife, played by Tilda Swanson - a pediatrician with the bedside manner of a frozen puppy. Clooney is introduced as a rather pathetic pathological liar who just happens to be banging Swanson and is starting to feel concerned about getting caught by her (now ex) CIA analyst husband. For the rest of the movie he serves as a bridge between parties, and the audience spends the first two thirds of the movie wondering how much more there is to his character than what you are being shown. The Coens do a good job keeping you guessing with a couple of Hitchcockian plot. We watch George manufacturing Something Evil in his basement. You don't know what it is, but you know that it has to be evil. He's also suspicious that he is under surveillance. We don't know by who, or why until much later in the movie. But we know he's right to be worried, it's only paranoia if you're *wrong*.
Pitt and McDormand play employees of Hardbodies, the kind of gym that you never find real body builders working out at. McDormand plays a 40 something health club employee desperate for plastic surgery that she believes will allow her to reinvent herself, and Pitt plays “Chad”, and goddamned if he isn’t funny as *hell* in this movie. Every scene he was in had the audience cracking up. He was definitely hamming it up, but that's a good thing. He wins at funny in this movie. They play the clueless innocents who find a CD of documents taken off of Malcovich’s computer by his wife, and is accidentally dropped in the locker room of Hardbodies by Swanson's divorce attorney’s assistant. The CD contains a draft of Malkovich’s memoirs, and Pitt and McDormand believed the CD to be full of top secret goods that must be worth enough for McDormand to get her desperately wanted silicone tits. The two of them end up trying to return the CD to Malkovich for a reward, who reacts as you would expect a character played by John Malkovich to react, and reward becomes ransom. To which Malkovich again reacts as expected.
We are introduced to the manager of Hardbodies, played by Richard Jenkins as the movie's sole sympathetic character. He's obviously in love with McDormand's “Linda” but can never quite express it. The Coens make sure to give him an interesting back story that we never hear, and give him ample screen time to establish him as The Guy you Hope Gets the Girl at the end of the romantic movie. McDormand is too obsessed with Internet dating to notice, and after letting herself be used by one troll, she tries again and ends up with Clooney, who is revealed to be an Internet troll as well.
For the next hour we watch the parties come together, and though there weren't very many “crap your pants” laughs, there was an almost constant chuckling from the audience. I never found myself bored for one second in this movie. Then... the film cranks up the "omfg" factor into Tropic Thunder territory.
***Spoiler alert.
Clooney takes McDormand to his house while his wife is away on a book tour (she’s a children’s book author) and we finally see the evil invention he’s spent the first half of the movie working on. I'm not sure, but I think I saw two ladies leave the screening when he rocked the chair and an enormous dildo began thrusting up and down through the seat. I think the old lady behind me dropped a deuce because there was a sudden increase in the amount of ass stink rolling down from behind me, which I got several lungfulls of as I caught my breath from laughing so hard. I'm sitting here at home with a Sharper Image ionic air purifier pointed at my head, knowing that particles of cat food based shit that were hours ago confined inside the protective walls of this old lady's diaper are now lining the walls of my nasal passages, and I'm hoping that the magic of positive ions will counteract the effects of the that assfog I had to sit through.
***Even bigger spoiler alert. Seriously - you’ll wish you hadn’t.
Pitt breaks into Malkovich's house, which Malkovich has been locked out of after being served with divorce papers. McDormand and Pitt are trying to get more CIA data from Malkovich’s computer to sell to the Russians so that McDormand can afford her 4 plastic surgeries (If I had one problem with the movie, it was the ludicrous lengths to which McDormand's character would go to get enough money for cosmic surgery, even knowingly attempting to commit treason). Since Clooney was tapping the ass of Malcovich’s wife, he has a key to the house and enters to catch Pitt hiding in the closet - and just as Brad gets halfway through flashing that big friendly grin a very surprised George shoots him dead in the face in a full framed closeup, the smile still on his Brad's face as the contents of his brainpan paint the back wall of the closet. It's a total "Sam Jackson in Deep Blue Sea" moment. A third of the audience laughed, a third of the audience laughed nervously, and a third were in full “WTF!?” denial. "Did they just blow Brad Pitt's head up?! That's.. I mean it's Brad Pitt? Isn't he... the star or something?"
***End Spoiler
The rest of the movie plays out with everyone trying to figure out what is going on with everyone else, with no one ever actually figuring it out except the audience. By the end you start expecting the cliché operatic climax with everything falling into place so that the evil are punished, the just rewarded, and romance found all while something appropriately musical and over-the-top plays in the background. Again, the audience was reminded that this was a Coen Brothers movie - instead of what you expect by pavlovian conditioning you get a rather cynical but funny Whisper following the rather shocking Bang that I think alienated more than the few members of the audience with it’s very graphic violence. Even I found myself a little disturbed by this and I’m a trauma-specific medical illustrator by day. I won't spoil it, I'll let you see it at the screening.
The cat urine lady’s opinions aside, I very much liked this movie. Even the people who walked out of the theater saying that they hated it can't deny that were laughing for most of the movie, even if they didn't like the ending. I think this will play very well with fans of the Coens, and the inspired casting will draw plenty of people into the theater. Yes, it's disjointed and suffers from some very serious mood swings, but what is a movie if not a roller coaster in which you sit still and let the pictures in front of you carry you up and down, even if it has to rattle you a little on the trip?
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+ Expand All
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Even their misses are better than most hits !
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Sep 05, 2008 2:58:21 AM CDT
Great. But AVATAR will be fucking our eyeballs in 2009...
by motoko kusanagi
...and nothing else matters.
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Sep 05, 2008 3:11:35 AM CDT
I really hope Richard Jenkins is nominated for The Visitor
by industrykiller!
just beautiful understated work. The best lead actor performance I've seen so far this year. it's about time Jenkins came into his own. With The Visitor he proved that he's interesting enough an actor to say very little and still be completely riveting. I hope the film is recognized too, that final image of him beating the drum still sticks with me.
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Think Fargo meets Intolerable Cruelty. I'm fairly positive it will be disregarded as one of their weaker efforts, but the script is classic Coen lunacy.
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I'll see it. I wish it was opening this weekend.
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... I hope you keep it up every day until the actual release of AVATAR, and then I hope you just spend every day of the theatrical release signing off with "AVATAR IS FUCKING OUR EYEBALLS! AVATAR IS FUCKING OUR EYEBALLS!"
Please? For me? -
...never heard of her.
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Yes that was a great movie and Jenkins was superb. The best movie of the year for me so far.
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But yeah, Intolerable Cruelty was pretty bad.
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apparently intentionally unsatisfying endings from the Coen Bros. comes from some enlightened artistic genius, and how much from just some perverse need to be different and fuck with the audience (and are there people who consider that art in itself). Like most everyone else here, I loved Raising Arizona and Fargo, and Miller's Crossing had its good moments, but I can't for the life of me understand how anyone could look at No Country for Old Men -- especially its empty, random excuse for a conclusion -- and think it's a great movie. Great performance by Bardem, sure, but the movie itself was hollow. Oh, wait, maybe I'm just not artsy and cool enough to appreciate how the suburban car crash thing at the end had anything to do with anything, considering it had no effect on the story or characters at all. Not trying to bait the movie's many defenders, by the way, just saying what I think.
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I love me some Coen brothers as well. But lately they strike out about as often as then hit it out of the park.
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Agreed, I'm there. This will be a treat. There is Chaplin, and then the Coens. Everyone else is rehashing their youth.
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Your enthusiasm is infectious. Like you, Dec 09 cannot come soon enough for me.
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Do you expect us to believe nobody's already explained to you that the No Country film ends just as the book does? Bitch about McCarthy, not the Coens.
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This been said: Can't wait for a new Coen movie!
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my thoughts exactly... i know its like slapping the pope in vatican city to speak ill of the coen brothers on this site but shit... their 'genius' borders on pretention. and the way they are fully aware of this 'genius' kind of irritates me. no country beating there will be blood was just a case of the coens being critical darlings
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yeah i read the book... its terrible... mccarthy is the literary equivilant of the coens... i don't understand why people think totally fucking with grammar and punctuation, or ignoring it completely, demonstrates some kind of mastery of written word... once again - pretentious
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from reading my posts it looks like i hate the coens... i don't, i like lebowski, o brother, fargo etc... i just think they're overated
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the fuck did I read the spoiler section? I was even warned. I am a dumb shit.
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gotta work that into conversation, man. I’m a trauma-specific medical illustrator by day, a love machine by night.
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that bullshit! still, seeing brad shot = me watching.. but not on the big screen.
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Assbag
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at least they try different things. If they were like other directors they would just make dark crime dramas for about 10 years now to milk the shit out of no country. and the man who wasnt there is brilliant. the most existential movie of the modern era. If it was French, people would put it in top lists of all time.
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Sep 05, 2008 8:25:55 AM CDT
this is a fucking spoiler sec - we're here to discuss this
by ironic_name
and it sounds like a dumbass concept.. I'll still see it, but it sounds a little too "cute".. a fucking FUCKING MACHINE? WTF COENS?
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i meant to write.
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Sep 05, 2008 8:50:14 AM CDT
Interesting how this site/talkback has changed over the years...
by rameses
about 6 or so years ago , during a talk back about the Coen Bros , nearly every talk backer was positive , and because I posted, that I wasn't 100% struck all all their films and that there was something *smug* about their movies...I nearly got torn a new one !Now talk backers seem a lot less happy with the C Bros.i thought No Country was brillient , even with the strange ending {which is oddly close ,to the ending of the more obscure movie American Perfect }and I liked Big Lowbroski , Raising Arizona Blood simple and Fargo.But the trailer to *Don't Burn* looked like shit, of the most unfunny Ladykillers kind possible.
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I don't even know why i'm on this talkback.. this review is kind of pointless for me. It's a Coen brothers' movie, buy your tickets already...
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Sep 05, 2008 9:01:55 AM CDT
for every hudsucker or fink theres a cruelty or man who wasn't t
by ironic_name
the coens should stick to thrillers, they seem better at them than comedy, IMO.
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For instance, how does it differ from a frozen full-grown dog's bedside manner? I'm just trying to get a sense of what Swinton was going for.
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The ending is jarring, abrupt and anticlimactic, and that’s precisely what it is supposed to be. People thought they were watching some sort of thriller/action flick about a drug deal gone bad but under the surface there was a much more thoughtful and methodical deliberation on mortality, morality, the nature of evil and how each generation confronts that darkness. The ending is constructed to illustrate that life isn’t an action flick with a large, bombastic climax and a saccharine resolution but rather shows that death can come swiftly and without warning, taking the decent man just as easily as the criminal. I was shaken by the ending as well, but it really does promote introspection and discussion, which is why I think it’s so brilliant. Also, The Cohens don’t make bad films, ever. They’ve simply made some failed experiments that were not as successful as their more shinning works. Incidentally, the Lady Killers is an underrated gem; funny as hell and some of Hank’s finest work.
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Tilda may be an ice queen, but she's got a certain something.
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Sep 05, 2008 10:16:11 AM CDT
Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers are GREAT.
by stereotypical evil archer
I love those films. I like the Coens' comedy stuff. No Country For Old Men was cool, but give me Raising Arizona, Hudsucker, and Lebowski any day.I didn't read the spoilers, I always read spoilers. Not this time. I'll be seeing this at a midnight showing for sure.The Big Lebowski is their greatest moment.
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Sep 05, 2008 10:27:05 AM CDT
There's no reason to apologize for liking IT and Ladykillers
by nasty in the pasty
The former was a great screwball comedy in the classic Hollywood tradition, and the latter was full of great Looney Tunes physical mayhem and had a GREAT performance from Tom Hanks. I still say the weakest Coen movie was the agonizingly pretentious Barton Fink.
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But the ones who called it out have sure turned it into a spoiler. his comment says 'building a fucking machine'. Somehow I read the fucking as in 'gimme a fucking break' and I don't mean it in a 'break so that I can go fuck'
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Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, No Country, The Ladykillers...i enjoyed the hell out of all of those. i dig their movies for the characters, dark humor, and turn-on-a-dime stories...so more than likely ill enjoy this movie.
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Yeah, cause if McCarthy used punctuation, nobody would be digging his stuff. I'm glad I don't let what I consider overrated bother me so damn much.
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I was very excited for this movie. Glad to hear you liked it, can't wait for it to hit theatres.
And Motogo I agree....Avatar will fuck the shit out of our eyeballs. -
That is all.
Good day. -
Read the whole post and you will see why people harped on him.
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I did mean it, because I thought everyone would've read the spoiler. I should've thought about it, and posted my "WTF? clooney - in a coen brothers movie - builds a mechanical dildo??" in the main area, but I put it in the header, because I guess you're gonna hafta read it at some point, and it just sounded like thanatos was making it up,or the coens have lost the plot. anyways, if I ruined the movie for anyone apologies.
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Sep 05, 2008 12:52:44 PM CDT
Ladykillers was great, but the only thing good in IT was rush
by ironic_name
and from what I remember billy bob.
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And here I was debating on whether or not to post Spoilers... I suppose next time my spoiler heading should read "SPOILERS! Please don't repeat the following in the talkback, since some talkbackers actually avoid reading the spoilers, hence the REASON for this warning's existence."
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Can't wait to see it :)
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"spoilers! don't READ the following if you don't wanna know!"
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IMO the Coens' best picture. Funny and dramatic in equal measure, beautiful cinematography, pitch-perfect twisted logic. Lebowski is second and then perhaps Hudsucker third, which is amazing except for the deadly dull "rich" party that Robbins and Leigh attend and he talks about gazelles -- it could have worked, but it always grinds the movie to a dead halt for me.
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And the ending to No Country is great for all the reasons LastCleric said, but also because of what it means for Bardem's character. Sometimes the coin gets flipped on him, and he doesn't have the option of going to a hospital or crying about it, its an incredibly lonely existence his path. And the character Barton Fink is pretentious not the movie, there is a difference idiot. John Goodman is great in that movie and so is Turturro.
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don't know how that movie got its cult status, it was terrible.
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I read the spoiler, and now I wish I hadn't.I got the feeling from the trailer that it was Clooney that died, so I just had to see if I was right.
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Sep 05, 2008 7:10:17 PM CDT
The trailer was cute....But looked scarily like...
by whinynegativebitch
...Intolerable Cruelty or Ladykillers territory. This review seems to have staved off my fears.
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What film does "IT" refer to?
You're Killing me with that. -
I'm a moron*, IC not IT *well, dyslexic, I hear theres a dyslexia for cure
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You know...for kids!
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[smacks forehead]
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Expectations will be too high from the general movie-going public NOT familiar with the Coen Bros filmography that they will be expecting something totally different...this is being marketed wrong...Nonetheless I will be in line.
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