Burn After Reading
Sep. 13th, 2008 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI saw the new Coen brothers film yesterday.
First off, "Burn After Reading" is a very funny film. The cast is all-star, even the cameos, and everyone is given a chance to really stretch their comedic abilities. (I particularly liked the chorus of old men bursting into a round of "Old Nassau," with the original lyrics. They didn't do the hand gestures, though. I suspect some studio executive somewhere rightly pointed out that it looks an awful lot like Sieg Heil.) But it's also incredibly dark.
What the movie demonstrates is that really awful shit happens, but it happens, not because of dumb luck, but because of the petty, short-sighted selfishness of people. It suckers you in by making the flaws of all the characters look comic and innocuous, then reveals them as the monstrosities they are. And nobody learns anything and none of it has any meaning. It's really one of the most cynical films I've ever seen. It makes "Dr. Strangelove" look optimistic.
So I enjoyed it, yes, but I'm left with a sense of general malaise. God. People are such morons. Perhaps that's the most important message you can put in a film right now, fifty-something days before the election.
First off, "Burn After Reading" is a very funny film. The cast is all-star, even the cameos, and everyone is given a chance to really stretch their comedic abilities. (I particularly liked the chorus of old men bursting into a round of "Old Nassau," with the original lyrics. They didn't do the hand gestures, though. I suspect some studio executive somewhere rightly pointed out that it looks an awful lot like Sieg Heil.) But it's also incredibly dark.
What the movie demonstrates is that really awful shit happens, but it happens, not because of dumb luck, but because of the petty, short-sighted selfishness of people. It suckers you in by making the flaws of all the characters look comic and innocuous, then reveals them as the monstrosities they are. And nobody learns anything and none of it has any meaning. It's really one of the most cynical films I've ever seen. It makes "Dr. Strangelove" look optimistic.
So I enjoyed it, yes, but I'm left with a sense of general malaise. God. People are such morons. Perhaps that's the most important message you can put in a film right now, fifty-something days before the election.
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Date: 2008-09-14 07:05 am (UTC)My favorites of theirs are still Blood Simple and The Hudsucker Proxy.
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Date: 2008-09-14 02:41 pm (UTC)What I find interesting about the reviews is how many of them call it a "screwball comedy," which is what it is advertised as, and what you think it is for the first hour of the movie. Then, as I said, it turns a little monstrous. I think even in screwball comedies you expect some amount of social justice and catharsis, and there just isn't any of that in this movie.