burn after reading. a 2008 film by ethan and joel coen. with an all star cast that include george clooney, brad pitt, john malkovich, tilda swinton and frances mcdormand, a moviegoer would expect an award-winning plot and script. unlike their previous film in 2007, `no country for old men' which has been highly praised by critics and was recognised with four awards at the oscars, this one was not deemed even for a nomination.
i dont quite know how to rate this movie, not because it seemed like a total mess but because i cant quite understand what the coens wanted to achieve with the audience. i dont really subsribe to movies with happy endings, i am more into a dash of reality in films therefore by right i should have rated this as a star movie, but then, strangely it sort of falls short on being a movie one can relate to.
having said that, i still think the coens must have this crazy distinctive humour to have produced a silly, quirky yet dark comedy in the best traditions of cinematic farce with a couple of surprising moments of random violence thrown in for good measure.
osbourne cox (malkovich) and his wife, katie (swinton) live offbeat lives close to separation. he is supposedly sacked from his job for being an alcoholic while katie is having an affair with harry (clooney) who is about to file for a divorce. katie is advised by her lawyer to get a complete record of cox's financial situation so she copies the files from the computer onto a disk which gets accidentally left on the floor in the gymn where linda (mcdormand) and chad (pitt) discover it and think of a plan where they can make money from ox if they were to return the disk to him. phew...all that in one breath!!
ox has absolutely no idea what these two are talking about when they call him up for a meeting and the `ransom' money that they are demanding. ox, however meets up with them and when he refuses to pay them, they take the disk to the russians thinking perhaps some confidential cia information is in it as most of the information has names and financial details, along with unimportant memoirs that ox had recorded.
it is absurdly hilarious watching the cia agents struggling to figure out who is doing what to whom and how they deal with the trail of destructions idiotically left by a those people who are involved. one gets used to the idiocy and cranky humour, but is sometimes shocked with certain scenes which spell murder, even though it is by accident. for a while one wonders if a situation like that could occur in real life, but beyond that thought, one does not linger anymore.
despite the reviews, i wouldnt have missed it mainly because of the cast and directors. worth watching a coen brothers movie despite the inspites.
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