BURN AFTER READING Commentary in THE GUARDIAN
Ronald Bergan’s "Burn after watching" in The Guardian:
"’Whenever people agree with me, I feel that I must be wrong,’ said Oscar Wilde. As I feel the same way, I was pleased that when I came out of Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers‘ feeble comedy-thriller which opened this year’s Venice film festival, I was surrounded by a number of critics and lesser mortals who expressed their liking for the film.
"Wilde also said, ‘Everything popular is wrong.’ You have only to look at the international box office list to see that he was right. … You have to go down the list to number 35 — Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra — before you can find a film that was not made for 12-year-olds or adults with the same mentality."
…
"The Cannes and Venice festivals, among others, have the misguided idea that you have to open a festival with a ‘crowd pleaser,’ preferably an American one. Burn After Reading is a ‘crowd pleaser,’ another attempt by the Coen Brothers to live down the time when their films were more personal, quirky and less commercial. Despite some strained attempts at contemporary relevance, their latest is really a very old-fashioned juvenile farce, with crude elements of the 70s paranoia films which — except for the stream of ‘fucks,’ it could have been made decades ago."
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“Because it is a comedy, the Coens’ new film … is something of a palate cleanser for the brothers after the rigors of the Academy Award-winning No Country for Old Men,” Kenneth Turan writes in the Los Angeles Times. “But because it’s a Coen brothers film before it’s anything else, this is about as dark and nihilistic as comedies are allowed to get before the laughter dies bitterly on your lips.”
Read more Reviews for Burn After Reading, and watch the Movie Trailer -
http://www.walrusfilms.com/movies/burn-after-reading.html