7 Reasons I Might be Losing My Faith in the Film Industry, Courtesy of the Coen Brothers

So those who haven't seen the movie can at least understand me on some level, here's a plot summary: Very angry and very alcoholic CIA agent John Malkovitch is fired/quits (I don't feel like explaining it) his job and decides to write a memoir. He then leaves a CD containing material for his memoir at the gym where some very stupid employees (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) find it, think they've got some super secret government documentation, and attempt to blackmail Malkovitch into giving them muchas monies to return it. Shenanigans (and "hilarity") ensue.
Blah blah it's ironic biting satire black comedy shocking blah blah whatever. The Coen Brothers are serious artists, my friends.

1. I pretty much roundly detested all of the characters except two. I had to look up their names on imdb.com; i considered them that easily dismissed once the movie ended. Yeah, I know, they're supposed to be stupid, that's the point and that's why it's a satire...or something...I'm not really sure what they were going for with this, maybe some Dadaistic existential theme or something about how everything is actually absurd and nothing really means anything. But I really couldn't stomach this anyway--I didn't have anyone to root for. I could almost root for the two I mentioned previously, because one was stupid in a way that was just fun to watch and not exactly detestable, and one was a genuinely good character--though this doesn't do him any good in the end. Of course they both die, randomly and meaninglessly, leaving us with the rest of the repugnant cast.

2. As edgy and dark as this movie thought it was, it was riddled with comedy cliché. The essential premise--stupid people being stupid--is itself hackneyed, no matter what the setting. Basically this movie is [insert genre parody here] with a governmental twist. If you can even call that a twist, considering how many movies there are about how stupid the government is. It played out like a violent cartoon, with everyone's stupidity blown out of proportion and brains blown out of skulls with no time engaging my interest, not to mention sympathy.

3. George Clooney. Especially at the end. My eyes were about the swell and pop out from the cliché/banality level there.

*4. Violence. The asterisk here is to indicate that this is a personal preference and possibly has bearing on the quality of the movie. But I really hated the randomness and graphicness of the violence--it totally took away any desire to laugh that hadn't been sucked away by the characters. I hate violence in most films, but in war movies or gangster movies it fits the subject matter a little better. Arguably the situations in Burn After Reading were plausible, but the unexpectedness threw me off guard and turned it into more of a horror movie for me--making it very difficult for me to laugh at anything, since I was expecting violence to erupt any minute after the first sudden death.

5. Frances McDormand's character/the Ted subplot. At the beginning I actually sympathized with her a little; she had bawdy image issues (just click here to understand), she had issues with aging, she just wanted to find love. But she quickly grew more repulsive as the movie went on--having awkward sex with all sorts of guys, revealing new levels of her stupidity with every scene, and being oblivious to Ted's "rightness" for her for way too long. There comes a point where it just makes you want to puke rather than "creating sexual tension". It becomes stupid, meaningless and boring after this point.

6. People reviewing it seemed to like it. Thought it was funny. I'm trying but I'm afraid I don't understand this.

7. The plot was ridiculous at best. A lot of the events (the Russian embassy? Really?) were pretty farfetched. I know it's supposed to be kind of surrealist, but everything else--the shallow characters, the premise--was so unbelievable that I just wasn't willing to suspend my disbelief for this, too.

**Now for the qualifications. I understand that some people liked these movie, some people don't think violence is such a big deal (I will admit that I'm unusually sensitive to it), and some people either think the characters were developed as much as they needed to be for this kind of film or perhaps don't watch a film for its characters. My opinion is that Burn After Reading simply didn't follow the rules of storytelling to a degree that would make me forgive it for its experimentation.

I really feel that movies are supposed to leave you with an intangible "something" that isn't genre-specific: a warm feeling, a cold feeling, a call to action, a sense of truth, enlightenment--something. All I felt when I left the theatre was a strange mixed feeling of anger and depression. Is that normally the goal of a comedy movie? You tell me. I don't know anymore.