Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-02-09
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Format: PAL
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 92 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
After the dark brilliance of No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading may seem like a trifle, but few filmmakers elevate the trivial to art quite like Joel and Ethan Coen. Inspired by Stansfield Turner's Burn Before Reading, the comically convoluted plot clicks into gear when the CIA gives analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) the boot. Little does Cox know his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton, riffing on her Michael Clayton character), is seeing married federal marshal Harry (George Clooney, Swinton's Clayton co-star, playing off his Syriana role). To get back at the Agency, Cox works on his memoirs. Through a twist of fate, fitness club workers Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt in a pompadour that recalls Johnny Suede) find the disc and try to wrangle a "Samaratin tax" out of the surly alcoholic. An avid Internet dater, Linda plans to use the money for plastic surgery, oblivious that her manager, Ted (The Visitor's Richard Jenkins), likes her just the way she is. Though it sounds like a Beltway remake of The Big Lebowski, the Coen entry it most closely resembles, this time the brothers concentrate their energies on the myriad insecurities endemic to the mid-life crisis--with the exception of Chad, who's too dense to share such concerns, leading to the funniest performance of Pitt's career. If Lebowski represented the Coen's unique approach to film noir, Burn sees them putting their irresistibly absurdist stamp on paranoid thrillers from Enemy of the State to The Bourne Identity. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Synopsis
The Coen Brothers re-team with George Clooney for this blackly comic film set in the world of a former spy. John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, and Tilda Swinton are along for the sure-to-be wild ride filled with the Coens' trademark humour. With their overtly comedic follow-up Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers return from the dark, dank recesses of the human psyche they traversed in their Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men. For those unfamiliar with the landscape of modern movie psychoanalysis, this puts the fraternal filmmakers square in the cruel, misanthropic, and farcical realm of their 1990s-era body of work, somewhere between the tragicomic crime thriller of Fargo and the disconnected noir-homage anti-storytelling of The Big Lebowski, with 2007's No Country retroactively adding new nihilism-tinged dimensions of smart scepticism to the proceedings. In a more linear trajectory, Burn After Reading also stands as the third entry, after Blood Simple and Fargo, in what could be an unofficial Tragedy of Human Idiocy trilogy, wherein characters make the most outlandishly moronic moves to devastating consequences simply by adhering to true human behaviour. Indeed, Carter Burwell's emotionally weighty score, which washes over biting scenes of explosive, anesthetizing belly laughs, is very reminiscent of his Fargo work. Burn After Reading is ostensibly structured and propelled by a spy-thriller plotline involving a classified CD lost by a disgraced CIA spook and found by two simple gym employees. The CIA superior who learns of the film's events (always second-hand and sometimes along with the viewer) doesn't know what to make of it, and why would he? This is the first Coen film in almost 20 years not shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, yet the ‘new’ guy, Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men), has created as visceral and emotionally fraught a high-definition cartoon as any since Barton Fink.

DVD features English and Spanish language soundtracks.

Customer Reviews

Coen Brothers classic
Like KM I had read the mixed reviews of Burn After Reading and perhaps my expectations were lowered because of that. It's not in the same class as No Country For Old Men - which I thought was absolutely brilliant - and it lacks sympathetic characters, but it is very good, well observed and funny in the black humoured way that Coen Brothers films such as Blood Simple and Raising Arizona are funny.

The opening shot leads us down from the stratosphere into the CIA offices in Virginia to witness the demotion of John Malkovich's character, Osbourne Cox - but these are not the all powerful intelligence services of 24 and the like. In Burn Afer Reading the intelligence services are bumbling and inefficient. Osbourne Cox is perhaps the most intelligent character in the film and it does him no good - he is completely ineffectual and his inability to deal with people leads the inter-twining stories towards horrible results.

Tilda Swinton is superb as his cold wife. She is terrifying and controlling as Clooney's character's lover and her decision to divorce and burn her husband's information onto hard disc precipitates the rest of the action. Pitt, McDormand and Clooney have fun with their single minded characters. Pitt is very very funny as the gym's personal trainer.

The theme of hidden intelligence is key throughout the film. The senior CIA men observe all and understand and care about nothing. That seemed the most credible part of all.

The humour is in the tragedy/farce as it plays out between the characters
This is a Coen brothers movie, and one of their comedies, so:

1. don't expect any jokes - the humour is in the tragedy/farce as it plays out between the characters
2. don't expect a simple, linear, story-line with a happy ending - the whole theme of the movie, as many of their movies, is the futility of life in a post modern world.

I won't go over a précis of the movie, as other reviewers have done this, suffice to say that the movie is a mix of a man in personal meltdown (John Malkovich is superb): career, marriage, personal life - striving for some sense of meaning and that he has made a difference - with overwhelming feelings of rejection and being cast aside by the system, in a loveless marriage with the calculating, freezingly cold yet trapped (Tilda Swinton). The first interaction between them is her saying `Did you find Jesus?' which causes a double take from Malkovich - then she explains, did you get the cheeses... and humiliates him further for his ineptitude.

The other key characters are George Cloony as a narcissistic dilettante/womaniser (Cloony - who is often brilliant in Coen Brothers movies, he is just so willing to send himself up), an air head personal trainer (Brad Pitt - who also does a great job of sending himself up in this movie), and Frances McDormand who plays a tragic character who becomes convinced that cosmetic surgery will lead to love and happiness. And will do anything to get the surgery...

It's like watching a car crash in slow motion... you just know it's going to turn out bad, and of course it does. It all spirals out of control with a hapless 'intelligence' agency looking on trying to figure out what to do with what seems to be unfolding.

Brilliant.

Brilliant!
`Burn After Reading' is the new black comedy from the Coen Brothers where two gym workers find a CD which has a CIA agent's memoirs containing top secret information. To help them both through their financial difficulties they decide to then blackmail the agent for cash.

I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers other films such as No Country For Old Men, Fargo, Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, to name a few, and this one is by far one of the best. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from it after all of the mixed reviews it had gotten, but when I finished watching this film I got the refreshed feeling I usually get from their movies and thought that this was an instant classic.

As well as the excellent script, production and direction, the acting is easily some of the best that I've seen from the actors in this movie. Brad Pitt, George Clooney and John Malkovich all deserve award nominations for their performances in this as they were nothing short of spectacular.

This film has enough comedy, suspense and drama to please most film watchers and I highly recommend this to anyone. Definitely one of the best films of 2008 and one that I'll be buying as soon as it comes out.