Burn After Reading

[chronovore]

Yesterday was Mom's Day here in Japan, so I did everything for the entire day... cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids. This was more because The Wife is still down with something that was on its way to becoming pneumonia than it was about "tee-hee, see daddy try to do what mommy usually does!" -- we have a reasonable split on household duties.
A.
Ny.
Way...

In the evening we went out to see a movie; I think we may have managed this one other time in the last year's span, but the occasions are all too rare. We decided on Burn After Reading, because she likes Clooney and Pitt, and I had heard it was a comedy.

I didn't know it was a Coen Brothers' film until the end credits, but that single fact explains SO MUCH about the movie, in retrospect. I'm a pretty big fan of the Coens, having started with a first-run viewing of Blood Simple back when I was a junior in h.s. Raising Arizona is one of my favorite films. I'm not as hung up on the Big Lebowski as many are, and I've missed the last couple of their films. Can't even name them.

This movie seems about oblique and meandering as Barton Fink. When the end is reached, there's closure, but I'm not sure what the message was. In Barton Fink, it seemed to be about entering a personal hell when one sells out personal artistic goals folar widespread recognition or money. 

The Wife and I spent an hour or so discussing the movie afterward, always a good feeling to have enjoyed a movie and thought enough during it to engender discussion, but we were really unable to come to any solid conclusion. Is it a treatise on the lack of responsibility and misplaced sense of entitlement in American culture? Is it about the danger of following through on someone else's Really Bad Plan? 

I'd like to discuss this with those of you who've seen the movie, so those who care to comment but haven't seen the movie, there will probably be spoilers galore, beware.

Comments

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

No thoughts on the movie, but I hope your wife is feeling better. "On the way to pneumonia" doesn't sound at all good.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks. She's still got a cough, but she's looking much better than last week. She's going to be fine... she's been to the doctor's now. It's just unusual for (a) her to become sick and (b) for it to last this long. It's related to work exhaustion, so we've agreed that she needs to back the hell off from getting up at 2 a.m. to "finish" her work.

[lynchwalker.livejournal.com]

Oi! I'm up at 2am finishing my work.

...and eating a brownie, which are to pneumonia what rails are to skaters' crotches. Fact.

The movie was a hard call for me. I sort of felt they were pulling another Barton Fink, in the vein of, "You asked for fake tits? How's 'bout a side of THE WORST THING EVER?!"

Seriously. Brad Pitt dying was like watching a puppy get drowned.

But, I think it was mocking his character a bit, too. Just the idea of being fluffy-headed and overreaching. That the characters should've been happy with what they had and not tried to find happiness in lipo, other people, and getting lipo for other people.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

I love brownies. Love. Them.

I brought 5 packages back from the US with me, by hand. The weight of the boxes contributed to my need to redistribute the weight in my check-in baggage (apparently United only hires undernourished 12-year-olds for baggage handlers now).

I think the Chad thing, it was interesting, because it's like they were trying to kill any joy the audience might have felt. "Oh, what a lark! Look at that little snappy-pop dance he does! He's like a big kid!" and he's all goofy and you just feel like, maybe, this is one of those comedies where God favors the fools. He's the comedy. And then the Coens shoot the comedy right in the fucking head.

Your conclusion is pretty close to where I've gone. I think it's about entitlement and selfishness.

It's about the danger of buying into clichés. From the moment Chad gets the information, he thinks in terms of "this is how things SHOULD go" -- he gets hung up in thinking of himself as a Good Samaritan, but he also expects to be rewarded, not only smooshing any good intentions he had as a good sam, but also making assumptions about cause-and-effect which fail to account for the larger picture. Then he gets on the phone, uses that goofy "I'm doing something big here" voice, and things turn to shit. He says, "I'm VERY surprised he didn't offer a reward." It's a harbinger of his critical failure to re-evaluate his position, what the situation is, based on new evidence. He is constantly trying to reconcile the situation against what he thinks he knows, rather than pay attention to all the evidence.

And where does Litzki end up? She's the last one standing, likely still has no idea that Chad is dead, doesn't know what has happened with Ed, yet she is willing to walk away from the whole thing if she can just get her surgeries out of it, because all she wants to do is REINVENT herself. Maybe it's about self-hatred?

[jjgalahad.livejournal.com]

Hrrm. I accidentally saw this film with my grandmother. Awkward.

If you haven't seen No Country For Old Men, do so immediately. It's a Coen Bros. film but it's also a classic. I feel like Burn After Reading was them indulging in all their worst "funny" quirks after the disciplined, measured and brilliant No Country For Old Men. I enjoyed it mildly but didn't feel especially drawn in for a second viewing.

If I had to ascribe a theme to the film, I would say it was about how the process of "information gathering" was impossible. How we, as human beings, fail to communicate and understand one another; that even the most intelligent among us will end up incapable of seeing the bigger picture. That zoom out at the end seemed like a final cherry on the sundae in that regard. I know what the spy reference is but the title itself implies that information is transitory at best and that which we comprehend is fleeting. Not exactly a theme that people would rally around, I'd wager. Just my pretentious thoughts on the matter, anyways.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

I accidentally once rented NAKED LUNCH to watch over pizza with a Mormon friend. Oops.

I didn't remember that No Country for Old Men was a Coen Bros. film. Actually, man, I always get its title confused with There Will Be Blood. Weird, I know.

I've posted a number of other thoughts, just above. I'm not sure if I buy the ephemeralness of information as a main theme, but I come closer to believing it when I think of the CIA Superior's reaction to the situation. With each report, he's on a knife's edge of being overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of it, but his only plan is to "stand back and observe it until we know what's going on."