Nonsense

Rating: Null/10 (17 September 2008)

What happens when the world you live in no longer makes any sense? What happens when your own life no longer makes sense and looses its meaning? What happens in a world inhabited by people that are so alienated from one another, so self-absorbed in their own little private worlds, that they are totally disconnected, a world where people no longer communicate with one another, notice I did not say miscommunicate for that still implies a kind of communication, albeit erroneous, any kind of direct, face-to-face communication? Well, what happens is a ridiculous and absurd chain of events which makes up "Burn After Reading", a comedy of circumstance, or as I would like to call it a thinking-man's screwball comedy. The cast is really great and dead on, with a deliciously frustrated and raging John Malkovitch, a pretty-boy meat-head Brad Pitt, a paranoid-philanderer George Clooney, a self-obsessed basket-case Frances McDormand, a decent-yet-too negative-and-self-restrained Richard Jenkins, a cold-stuck-up bitch Tilda Swinton and a permanently s*it-faced J.K. Simmons.
"Burn After Reading" is one of the best movies I have seen so far this year (and there haven't been many of those), and quite a successful comeback for the Cohen brothers after their last great piece "No Country For Old Men". This is the Cohen Brothers on their lighter side, when I mean lighter side, I mean that in as far as the Cohens go, you make your own deduction from that! So Cohen brothers fans fret not for this is not "Intolerable Cruelty" or "O Brother Where Art Thou". "Burn After Reading" is more in the vein of "The Big Lebowsky" or "Barton Fink", with a bit more realism if I may say so.
The saying goes "No man is an island", well in this movie the world portrayed is full of little islands, islands drifting apart rather than together. In hindsight, I think this film has more in common, or at lest shares some common threads with Sam Mendes's "American Beauty" than even with previous Cohen comedies...perhaps, perhaps not, at least that is just my own worthless opinion.
Coldplay had a song on their album, "Parachutes", I cannot remember what track it was, either "Don't Panic" or "Troubles", where one line goes something like "We've been living in a bubble", well watch this movie and see what you make of it.