Burn After Reading and Ghost Town

I got a bit 50's the other day. Went to a diner with my girl, had shakes and a burger, and then went to the cinema for a comedy double bill. Thankfully my girlfriend ain't as frigid as they were in the 50's and doesn't mind if I play the old popcorn trick (see Diner [1982]). She also pays for her half. Actually, most of the time she pays for my half too.
First up was the Coen brothers latest effort Burn After Reading, which has been getting a bit of panning by the critics. Is this just a No Country For Old Men backlash? Well, no. It's not that it isn't funny, there are some laughs to be found, though not in Brad Pitt doing a stupid dance. It's just the cynicism of the thing. The whole plot revolves around Linda Litzke's (Frances McDormand) desire to have plastic surgery. She and fellow gym employee Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) find a CD containing, what they believe to be, secret CIA files. They then try to blackmail CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) for money to pay for said surgery. Things go badly and another couple of A-list stars are thrown into the mix in the shape of Tilda Swinton and George Clooney. What the film seems to be telling us is that society is a vacuous shitheap run by idiots, driving the intelligent to murder and the innocent to the slaughter. It's a world view that I have a lot of sympathy with. The problem is that getting some of the best acting talent around to play dumb, to critique a dumbed down culture, well, it just seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me. (Is it an oxymoron to use the word oxymoron to sound intelligent but use it incorrectly?). It's my opinion that if we want to get out the shit swap that is contemporary celebrity culture it might just be best to stop satirizing it and get on with making art that, kinda, means something . After all it might not take a lot of talent to be Kerry Katona, but it takes even less to take the piss out of her.




Next up, after a short break, and change from salt to sweet popcorn, was Ghost Town, which is basically a totally bullshit film thats had Ricky Gervais surgically grafted onto it. The results are pretty good. If you were a burns victim and this was how the grafting of your new skin went you'd be pretty happy. Not too happy, I mean your still a burns victim, but you get the picture. Gervais plays a misanthropic dentist, Dr Pinkus, who thanks to some bodged colon surgery can 'see dead people' who, luckily, teach him a lesson about loving life and that. Gervais has obviously been given room to improvise and it pays off, there's some great observational comedy here. Gervais also gives Pinkus's loneliness a real tragic depth that almost brought tears to my eyes. However a few jokes do fall flat, one about torture techniques especially. But the beauty of Ghost Town is all the crap can be blamed on Hollywood. It bodes well for Gervais's directorial debut This Side of the Truth, out next year.

Jake Garriock