Courier-Post from Camden, New Jersey • Page 90

courierpostonline.com/yourlife COURIER-POST, Sunday, August 31, 2008 17SJL SOUTH JERSEY LIVING The Coens dumb it down with 'Burn After Reading' By SUSAN WLOSZCZYNA Gannett News Service A new entry in Joel and Ethan Coen's cinematic canon of human foibles and folly always arrives loaded with fan expectations. Do the characters have crazy names? Check. Is there a botched crime, maybe involving a large sum of money? Check. Are sudden, often gruesome acts of violence committed? Check. Does at least one actor sport a wack-job hairdo? Check.

The white-hot anticipation for "Burn After Reading," in theaters Sept. 12, is smoking almost every other early fall release this year, starting with a splashy world premiere at the Venice Film Festival before heading to the Toronto festival starting next week. That's what happens when your previous effort Country for Old takes home four Oscars including best picture and becomes your best box-office showing at $74.3 million. Still, it might be smart to turn down the heat a few degrees. While "No Country's" neo-Western acts of brutality were balanced by a moral backbone courtesy of Cormac McCarthy's novel, "Burn After Reading" is a different sort of Coen escapade.

Set in Washington, D.C., the espionage-inspired story is more like "No City for Smart People." With its ridiculous misunderstandings and sense of place, "It's a cousin of 'The Big Lebowski' and says Eric Fellner of Working Title, which has produced five other Coen outings starting with 1994's courierpostonline WEB EXTRA see a trailer of 'Burn After visit our Web site and add "The Hudsucker Proxy." "No Country for Old Men" was epic. This is a different, contemporary milieu. "Burn After Reading's" tragicomic web of intrigue manages to ensnare the CIA, Internet dating, gym workouts, plastic surgery and outright idiocy that borders on black-hearted burlesque. There's laughter, but the price paid for it is dear. With a first-class cast that mixes and matches Coen regulars Frances McDormand, George Clooney and Richard Jenkins with newbies Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich, the pseudo-thriller is described this way in the press notes by Ethan Coen: "Like 'Advise and this is about the personal meeting the political, with melodrama.

'Burn After Reading' is also our version of a Tony Bourne kind of movie without the explosions." Maybe, but no "Bourne" movie ever had clips of a fake romantic comedy, "Coming Up Daisy," complete with a Dermot Mulroney cameo. Or a super-secret invention being built in the basement by Clooney's Harry Pfarrer, a sex-addict federal marshal who suffers from bouts of "lactose" reflux and paranoia. "I think there is something random at the heart of this one," says Swinton, who plays Katie, Malkovich's disgruntled Dentures Made In Our Own Locations DENTURES WHILE YOU WAIT IN MARLTON OR SAME DAY IN A AUDUBON OR HADDONFIELD Insurance Accepted Visa Mastercard I Special Consideration Senior Citizens Three Convenient Locations to Serve You afd MARLTON DENTAL CENTER AUDUBON FAMILY DENTISTRY -DR. RUDOLPH J. CHAO ASSOCIATES DR.

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look "On the one hand, it really is bleak and scary. On the other, it takes." is really funny. It's the whatever-ness of it. You feel that at any asked minute of any day in any town, this could happen." The leads were written by the Coens with the actors specifically in mind, and Malkovich invests his bitter ex-CIA analyst Osborne Cox with all the raging bull he can summon after a disc containing his memoirs lands in the hands of Pitt's dim-bulb gym trainer. "Osborne is a sad and deluded character," Malkovich says.

"But most of the things we pursue in America, whether in New York, L.A. or Washington, are deluded. He is not alone in that. I hope the film is touching on some level. What is amazing is that he isn't the dumbest of the characters.

They all are a bit thick." One constant on a Coens film, says Fellner, is how "assured" the final product always feels. "When you watch a Coen brothers movie, it is always so certain about what it is trying to portray. That is their strength. The minute they write a word, they know how it will onscreen. They are very Country for Old and they purposeful with no kind of mis- can do this, too.

This is no sequel. Anybody who has seen Or as Swinton says when most of their films knows what to describe "Burn After to expect: major surprises Reading," "This is a Coen amongst a lot of black plot brothers film. They can do 'No twists." CROSSWORD SOLUTION LAMB MI5 AS 10F 4TH MAGE AVER ESC THEDA ART A TO VENERATE AYES CILANTRO CUTALONG THED OTTE IN TOYOTA ISRAEL APOS TAP AS AUTO CUL FOLD EACH NO I CHEROKEE HYDRA SPOOFED LAB RATS 0 IL TEARFUL MEN PAIR NUMBERS PAD ITSELF PALEST LOW 3 SETS TAD UM STEP 2 ERO I CA CLEARER BOARDS IKON HARVEST EURO INT THEG GRID SEQUENTIALLY JOEYS EENY PDAS SLOES ANE 3R ET BY 2 BAH BODEGAS PAPAYAS SUCROSE 5 AGAINST4 POE PIC AS TR TILT WIKI GO THE A PLANE POOR IDEA EATER NOVELLAS SPREADER 01 IN ESSAYIST Several models available for touring ON-SITE! Models Open! Saturdays, 4 PM Sundays Your Dream of an Affordable Vacation Home has BECOME A REALITY at the New Carol Lynn Resorts East, u.c! Seasonal resort open April 1 November 1. Vacation homes 800 sq ft 1 2 bedroom models starting at only $85,000.00. Large private sites nestled in the quiet beauty of nature.

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