How can these guys make a great film like No Country for Old Men and then follow it up with crap like Burn After Reading?I'm a big fan of the Coen Bros., really. In college I took a class, in which we studied the Coens as postmodernists, meaning we watched all of their movies (the only two to come out since are the two I already mentioned). I've seen them all, I've studied them all. I wrote a twelve-page paper on them. I'm a big fan.
So I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But it's just not good. In fact, it's pretty awful. Brad Pitt is great (he's very funny), but he's not in it enough. John Malkovich (if you follow this blog, you know how I feel about him) is terrible with an extra helping of creepiness, and he's in the movie too much. The rest of the film is just kind of disjointed and meandering. Tilda Swinton and George Clooney seem completely lost in the material, and while Frances McDormand is funny enough, her role just never finds anything to ground itself.
The pacing is bad, the story is retarded, and the dialogue is silly and overly profane. Aside from Pitt, there's little charm in the film, and there's absolutely nothing to identify with here. This is postmodernism gone horribly awry.Though I hate to say this about any Coen Bros. movie, skip it.
Incidentally, if you're curious how I rank all of the Coens' films (because I love making lists), here you go:
- The Hudsucker Proxy
- No Country for Old Men
- The Man Who Wasn't There
- The Big Lebowski
- Miller's Crossing
- Barton Fink
- Raising Arizona
- Fargo
- Blood Simple
- O Brother, Where Art Thou
- The Ladykillers
- Intolerable Cruelty
- Burn After Reading
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