I saw Burn After Reading at the Winchester 21 last week. Fandango listed this movie as a dark spy comedy. After coming off a blockbuster packed summer to wallow in the doldrums of September, I thought this was a movie was worth watching. Since the Coen brothers directed this one, I was expecting something similar to their earlier dark comedy, The Ladykillers. That movie was about a group of bumbling robbers digging a tunnel from the basement of a black woman's house into a casino vault next door. While it had some hilarious moments, the cat stole the show. When one of the robbers blasted his finger off, the cat took off with it, and, at the end of movie, dropped the finger from a bridge to a garbage barge passing underneath that the robbers used to dispose of tunnel debris and dead bodies, which sums up the stupidty in the movie. Surprisingly, The Ladykillers might be a better movie than Burn After Reading.

When CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is demoted for having a drinking problem on the job, he either quits or is fired since no one knows for sure. (Another character remarks, "Everyone in this town [Washington, D.C.] who quits is actually fired.") He goes home to get drunk and tells his wife, Kate (Tilda Swinton), that he's writing his memior. She thinks he went off on the deep end and consults a divorce attorney because she's having an affair with his best friend, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Harry happens to be hitting the Internet dating scene for serial one night stands while his wife is away on an extended business trip. He meets Frances (Linda Litzke), a trainer at the Hardbodies Gym, who believes that she needs plastic surgery to find Mr. Right (although she seems to be respectfully hot for a middle-aged woman). When a compact disc with the memior financial records are found in the locker room, Linda and her co-worker, Chad (Brad Pitt), decides to blackmail Osborne for cash. When that fails, they storm the Russian embassy to get a better deal. The Russians, in turn, informed the CIA since the information provided is worthless. While Chad is snooping around Osborne's house for more info to give the Russians, he is accidentally shot to death by Harry, who is proud to say that he never shot his gun in 20 years of service for the Treasury Department. Things start to spiral out of control as paranoia runs rampant. What's the CIA's involvement with this? Besides having a surveillance team that stuck out like a sore thumb (e.g., a helicopter directly above the suspect's car in downtown Washington), and cleaning up the messes, not a whole lot.

The movie was dark (if not underlit), and humorless. With the exception of cutting remarks about spouses that only married people in the audience found funny, this wasn't a funny movie. Even with Brad Pitt playing a total idiot all the time wasn't that funny most of the time. This movie seems incapable of deciding whether the story should be about a CIA screw up that involves married people having affairs, or married people having affairs that the CIA feels obligated to clean up after. The only redeeming character was the CIA chief (J.K. Simmons) who sums up the entire mess as being much ado about nothing, which describes the movie in whole. That was funny, especially since it was the last five minutes of the movie. Had Burn After Reading been edited to be a "dark spy thriller" with the CIA screw up being the main focus, than some of the humor might've came across as being ironic. Instead, everything falls flat. Which is a shame considering that initial situation had potential to become a gripping story in the right hands. Without a doubt, Hollywood will remake this movie for better (or not).

I can think of several better movies in this genre than Burn After Reading.

There's In Burges (2008), a seriously dark comedy about two assassians who had to leave London for Burges after the blotched killing of a priest (which seems to be an English speciality since St. Thomas Becket was assassinated after the king says, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"). This movie slowly reveals that the "sin" was not killing a supposedly corrupt priest, but accidentally killing an innocent boy kneeling in prayer. Although I depise Hollywood's fatalism towards Hamlet endings where just about everyone dies and usually for no reason at all, the ending for In Burges is richly deserved as the assassians follow their own code of honor in a relentless spiral of death.

A more light hearted spy comedy is Hopsotch (1980) with Walter Matthew playing a veteran spymaster pulled from the field to a desk job at headquarters who decides to write his tell-all memior, mailing out each chapter to the Cold War intelligence agencies, and leading the CIA on a wild goose chase until he fakes his own death to go into hiding and drive up book sales when the book is published as a true story. My favorite scene from that movie was when the spymaster lights a fuse to set off numerous firecrackers inside the vacation house of his boss when the FBI shows up in force, heads out the back door and down the road, and the FBI unloads enough lead to bring down the house crashing down. Needless to say, the head of the CIA didn't have nice things to say about the FBI.

After the movie was over, I told my friend that I needed to go home to work on my novel, which is the fictionalized version of my six years in the video game industry as a game tester and lead game tester. Yes, I did quit before I could be fired. In a way, you can say I'm writing my memior.