fantastic but not a comedy

Rating: 10/10 (8 November 2008)

This crime, thriller comedy is another coen film found hard to categorise by critics. Burn after reading is once again a brilliant crime based film by the coens. The film stars; Frances Mcdormad as the clueless gym employee looking for some plastic surgery money, George Clooney as CIA treasurer and womaniser Harry pfarrer. When Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) is fired from the CIA and his wife (tilda Swinton)(who is having an affair with married man Pfarrer) searches for a divorce, cox's memoirs go missing. Pfarrer is also seeing Linda Litzke (Mcdormad) who is friends with other 'moron'/gym employee Chad Feldhiemer (Brad Pitt). Chad and Linda attempt to blackmail Cox without Linda Knowing Pfarrer's full story. The story line as you may have guessed is complex yet very enjoyably tied up by smaller performances from; J.K Simmons and Richard Jenkins etc. However every performance from the cast was great and the characters created by the genius of the Coen brothers and stylishly shown by their bizarre yet amazingly independent. I think every Coen film is a jewel in movie making but this one is definitely one of their bigger jewels. Also Brad Pitt was hilarious in this and so was everyone else. 10 out of 10