Eye Candy #29 - "Burn After Reading"

Burn After Reading: A dark, dark comedy from the Coen Bros., the kind they have specialized in for years, about the raging power of stupidity in the hands of emotionally overwrought, played against the background of various losers in and around Washington DC. We’ve got a fitness center employee Linda (Frances McDormand) who, longing for money for surgery, concocts a plan with her space-cadet co-worker Chad(Brad Pitt, in a very funny role) to blackmail a down-on-his-luck former CIA employee who has a penchant for profanity Oswald (John Malkovich). Oswald also happens to be married to a doctor, Katie (Tilda Swinton) who is fooling around with a Treasury agent Harry (George Clooney), who is also apparently fooling around with anything with pulse...including Linda. Absurd and funny, while at the same time violent and profane, “BaR” is exactly what I was hoping it would be – textbook Coen. You get a dash of farce, a sprinkling of noir, a dose of politics, and a heaping tablespoon of the human condition. Pitt and McDormand are at their best as the worst people you would ever want planning a crime. JK Simmons and David Rasche (TV’s “Sledgehammer”), in support, have some laugh-out-loud exchanges as two CIA functionaries trying to sort the whole mess out. Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”