Adventures in Loving Things: BURN AFTER READING

I saw BURN AFTER READING on Friday and I could not have asked for a better opening shot for the Fall Movie Season. Ignore all the humorless critics with their bad reviews who seem to be riding a post-Best-Picture backlash - I liked Burn After Reading even more than No Country For Old Men (take THAT Manohla Dargis)!

The film is an anarchic comedy, which is my favorite kind. There are a half-dozen major characters and they're all complete messes, and the film just tears them up and spits them out one by one. The cast is just immense: Malkovich, McDormand, Swinton, Clooney, Pitt, not to mention Richard Jenkins and JK Simmons. Everybody's on their A-game.

I'm trying to think of how to describe how good the film is without giving anything way. The best I can come up with: did you ever see the movie Be Cool? Sequel to Get Shorty? Terrible, terrible film. One of the worst films I've ever seen. BUT: it nevertheless contains one of my favorite moments in ALL OF FILM. And, no, I'm not talking about The Rock's Bring it On bit. That's great, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a very brief moment near the beginning of the film, and there may be no way for me to convey it over the internet, but here goes:

John Travolta was just a witness to the murder of James Woods, who was married to Uma Thurman. Travolta is visiting the distraught Thurman, who is very "emotional", and Travolta is completely sedate and casual. The dialogue goes something like this:

UMA

I... l've had him cremated, and I wanted to
do something special with his ashes, you
know. Do you got any ideas?

TRAVOLTA

Well, nothing that makes sense.
(pause)
Say, is that an Aerosmith tattoo?

Then they just move on from there. I love it. The line is just tossed out there, never commented upon again, and they just roll on with their dumb movie. And the delivery - Travolta is AWFUL in that movie, but the delivery on that line is perfect. "Nothing that makes sense." Just one great throwaway moment that I think about at least once a week. And Burn After Reading is full of moments just like that.

There are just so many little things about the movie that crack me up, even more than the big jokes (which is not to say the big moments don't work too - Clooney alone has three or four just epic bits that work like gangbusters). There's a line early on, delivered by Malkovich, and his delivery, what he does with his hand gestures, just fantastic. Tilda Swinton at her place of work, that scene - it's a small scene, but it killed me. There are ideas or bits brought up and never returned to, tossed out just for the moment. YET, it all holds together as a piece. It's beautiful.

It's got some rough chuckles in it - a lot of the film is not for people who don't like their comedy to be mean. Rough Chuckles is the name of the game these days, though - FACT: Rough Chuckles is actually the title of the book that will be written in 2020 about the two-and-three-quarters terms of President Sarah Palin, from John McCain's slipping away after lasting for One More Christmas in 2009 to the 2012 and 2016 elections that Sarah will win by shooting her opponents from a helicopter. Ha ha, just kidding - by 2020 President Sarah Palin will have succesfully banned all books except for a judiciously edited Bible.

Anyway...

BURN goes right up alongside Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski in the competition for Best Coen Comedy. Knocks O Brother Where Art Thou right out of the running. Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers were, obviously, not even eligible.

Thank you, Coen Bros., for getting me as excited about Fall Movies as I am dreading Fall Elections.