Coen brothers dark comedy premieres at Venice fest
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?The Coen brothers wrote their dark comedy, “Burn After Reading,” with stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand in mind. Not necessarily a compliment.
The movie, which premieres Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival, is a tale about idiots — and what happens when their worlds collide.
Pitt and McDormand are a pair of hapless gym employees who get in way over their heads when the memoirs of a failed CIA analyst (John Malkovich) fall into their hands and they try to peddle them as classified intelligence secrets. Clooney plays a hypochondriac philanderer having an affair with the CIA analyst’s disappointed wife, played by Tilda Swinton.
“Looking at the parts we are playing, I’m very concerned about what you think of us,” Clooney said at a news conference.
It’s Clooney’s third film with the Coen brothers — completing what he called “his trilogy of idiots” after “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Intolerable Cruelty.”
Pitt said he had waited a long time to work with the Coen brothers.
“Like George … I’m not sure if I should be flattered or insulted,” he said. “I’m still a bit unsure.”
Asked if the movie is a love letter from her husband, Joel Coen, McDormand quipped: “Have you seen the film? And you call that a love letter?”
The movie’s opening shots are of McDormand’s Linda Litzke having her behind, belly and arms scrutinized by a plastic surgeon in her attempt to fend off middle age.
“We started writing the movie as kind of an exercise, thinking of what kind of parts these actors might play, what kind of story they might inhabit,” Ethan Coen told a news conference.
- from AP