A Bunch of Jerks Make a Movie About What They Think Your Cheap Little Life is Like

Rating: 4/10 (17 December 2008)

The Coen bros. impressed me with their offering last year, and, as a longtime fan, I was eagerly anticipating Burn After Reading to give me a Fargo-like chuckle. But, sadly, Burn After Reading feels rushed and loose, as if they simply decided that star power could hold together a weakly comic plot.
This movie portrays a strange view of people, one that feels immediately elitist and pretentious. It seems to say that when people lack a sense of importance they spend their time looking for sex or drugs or some way to make themselves feel better about being insignificant. Such as Frances MacDormand's pursuit of cosmetic surgery.
The Coens, riding on the success of No Country for Old Men, seem to have written this script in a matter of hours, called all of their friends who want to win awards, and filmed this mess.
This movie feels like a parody of No Country for Old Men that didn't have a good understanding of what that movie was about.
I know I'm in the minority here, but this movie is a throw-away that will inevitably end up earning some sort of "classic" status along side of that Wes Anderson garbage polluting people's indie-rock obsessed minds.
I hate that this thing was made. It gets a 4 because Brad Pitt and Richard Jenkins were wonderful, everyone else was "meh."