Burn After Reading - Released (Various Dates - but first premiered on 12 September 2008)

When you have George Clooney (Oceans 11), Frances McDormand (Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day), John Malkovich (Eragon), Tilda Swinton (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Brad Pitt (Oceans 11) in your movie, one would think that cinema tickets will sell and the movie would turn out magnificient. For Burn After Reading, the former is definitely true with initial production budget at just about $30 million with gross ticket sales of about $130 million. The movie, however, did not turn out well enough for me. There are movies with bad scenes and there are movies with good scenes. This one's a no brainer. There was neither.

The whole movie was a boring nodding-off-fest. I can understand why people was attarcted to buy tickets for the film but I wasn't sure what so many people saw in it. I simply just felt like packing the movie projector, drive it to a lake and dumping the whole damn roll into the water! In saying that however, the film was consistently amusing. It kept me interested enough to want to see what happens next, well, it was Brad Pitt's role who kept me going literally. Watching him play an idiot seems to amaze me much (sorry angie :p). His hyper-activeness and geeky attitude just got the best of my giggleness.

Performances was very satisfying - for the script that is. Malkovich, McDormand, Clooney, and Swinton all manage to define their characters through individualised quirks without ever going over the top, however, there were too much talent wasted. Whoever did the casting did their job completely, overly well. The script did not do the cast justice. You have Golden Globe nominees and winners in there, not to say Oscar winners as well as nominees. But what do you get out of them? Pure stupidity acts, which I can safely say, they did extremely well anyways. I feel sad for them and for the Coen brothers to make a mish-mash drama/dark comedy/satire that was uninspiring at best and boring at its worst simply adds insult to an open wound.

Overall-I had mixed feelings with this production. I salute the Coens in doing that to me. All I can say is that I had little good laughs and now I'm off to bed.
3/5 stars for the cast-not the script.