Bullet Trains gets $30 million

For the weekend of August 5-7, 2022, Brad Pitt proved his movie-star bonafides by helping Bullet Train open to #1. Reviews have been mixed, but the only other new wide release (Easter Sunday) had a much lower marketing budget and no one who'd classify as a star.

In limited release, Bodies Bodies Bodies enjoyed a $37,765 per screen average.

The box office should take a big dip over the next few weeks until it's rescued by September titles like See How They Run, The Woman King and Don't Worry Darling.

Opens August 12

MACK & RITA with Diane Keaton and Loretta Devine

EMILY THE CRIMINAL with Aubrey Plaza and Theo Rossi.

List of Oscar Nominations for 2019

BEST PICTURE
"Ford v Ferrari"
"The Irishman"
"Jojo Rabbit"
"Joker"
"Little Women"
"Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"
"Marriage Story"
"Parasite"
"1917"

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Antonio Banderas, "Pain and Glory"
Leonardo DiCaprio, "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"
Adam Driver, "Marriage Story"
Joaquin Phoenix, "Joker"
Jonathan Pryce, "The Two Popes"

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Cynthia Erivo, "Harriet"
Scarlett Johansson, "Marriage Story"
Saoirse Ronan, "Little Women"
Renée Zellweger, "Judy"
Charlize Theron, "Bombshell"

DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese, "The Irishman"
Quentin Tarantino, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"
Bong Joon-ho, "Parasite"
Sam Mendes, "1917"
Todd Phillips, "Joker"

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Kathy Bates, "Richard Jewell"
Laura Dern, "Marriage Story"
Scarlett Johansson, "Jojo Rabbit"
Florence Pugh, "Little Women"
Margot Robbie, "Bombshell"

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Tom Hanks, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"
Anthony Hopkins, "The Two Popes"
Al Pacino, "The Irishman"
Joe Pesci, "The Irishman"
Brad Pitt, "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
"The Irishman"
"Jojo Rabbit"
"Little Women"
"The Two Popes"
"Joker"

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
"Marriage Story"
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"
"Parasite"
"Knives Out"
"1917"

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
South Korea, "Parasite"
Spain, "Pain and Glory"
France, "Les Misérables"
North Macedonia, "Honeyland"
Poland, "Corpus Christi"

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
"How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"
"I Lost My Body"
"Klaus"
"Missing Link"
"Toy Story 4"

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM
"American Factory"
"The Edge of Democracy"
"Honeyland"
"For Sama"
"The Cave"

ORIGINAL SONG
"I'm Standing With You," "Breakthrough"
"Into the Unknown," "Frozen II"
"Stand Up," "Harriet"
"(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again," "Rocketman"
"I Can't Let You Throw Yourself Away," "Toy Story 4"

ORIGINAL SCORE
"1917," Thomas Newman
"Joker," Hildur Guðnadóttir
"Little Women," Alexandre Desplat
"Marriage Story," Randy Newman
"Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," John Williams

PRODUCTION DESIGN
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"
"The Irishman"
"1917"
"Jojo Rabbit"
"Parasite"

CINEMATOGRAPHY
"1917"
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"
"The Irishman"
"Joker"
"The Lighthouse"

COSTUME DESIGN
"Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"
"Little Women"
"The Irishman"
"Jojo Rabbit"
"Joker"

VISUAL EFFECTS
"Avengers: Endgame"
"The Lion King"
"Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"
"The Irishman"
"1917"

FILM EDITING
"The Irishman"
"Ford v Ferrari"
"Parasite"
"Joker"
"Jojo Rabbit"

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
"Bombshell"
"Joker"
"Judy"
"Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"
"1917"

SOUND EDITING
"1917"
"Ford v Ferrari"
"Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"
"Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"
"Joker"

SOUND MIXING
"1917"
"Ford v Ferrari"
"Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"
"Ad Astra"
"Joker"

ANIMATED SHORT FILM
"Dcera (Daughter)"
"Hair Love"
"Kitbull"
"Memorable"
"Sister"

LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
"Brotherhood"
"Nefta Football Club"
"The Neighbors' Window"
"Saria"
"A Sister"

DOCUMENTARY (SHORT)
"In the Absence"
"Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl)"
"Life Overtakes Me"
"St. Louis Superman"
"Walk Run Cha-Cha"

Screen Actors Guild Nominations 2019

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role:

Christian Bale (“Ford v Ferrari”)
Leonardo DiCaprio (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”)
Adam Driver (“Marriage Story”)
Taron Egerton (“Rocketman”)
Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role:

Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”)
Scarlett Johansson (“Marriage Story”)
Lupita Nyong’o (“Us”)
Charlize Theron (“Bombshell”)
Renée Zellweger (“Judy”)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role:

Jamie Foxx (“Just Mercy”)
Tom Hanks (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”)
Al Pacino (“The Irishman”)
Joe Pesci (“The Irishman”)
Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role:

Laura Dern (“Marriage Story”)
Scarlett Johansson (“Jojo Rabbit”)
Nicole Kidman (“Bombshell”)
Jennifer Lopez (“Hustlers”)
Margot Robbie (“Bombshell”)

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture:

“Bombshell” (Lionsgate)
“The Irishman” (Netflix)
“Jojo Rabbit” (Fox)
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (Sony)
“Parasite” (Neon)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries:

Mahershala Ali (“True Detective”)
Russell Crowe (“The Loudest Voice”)
Jared Harris (“Chernobyl”)
Jharrel Jerome (“When They See Us”)
Sam Rockwell (“Fosse/Verdon”)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries:

Patricia Arquette (“The Act”)
Toni Collette (“Unbelievable”)
Joey King (“The Act”)
Emily Watson (“Chernobyl”)
Michelle Williams (“Fosse/Verdon”)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series:

Sterling K. Brown (“This Is Us”)
Steve Carell (“The Morning Show”)
Billy Crudup (“The Morning Show”)
Peter Dinklage (“Game of Thrones”)
David Harbour (“Stranger Things”)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series:

Jennifer Aniston (“The Morning Show”)
Helena Bonham Carter (“The Crown”)
Olivia Colman (“The Crown”)
Jodie Comer (“Killing Eve”)
Elisabeth Moss (“The Handmaid’s Tale”)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series:

Alan Arkin (“The Kominsky Method”)
Michael Douglas (“The Kominsky Method”)
Bill Hader (“Barry”)
Andrew Scott (“Fleabag”)
Tony Shalhoub (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series:

Cristina Applegate (“Dead to Me”)
Alex Borstein (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”)
Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”)
Catherine O’Hara (“Schitt’s Creek”)
Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series:

“Big Little Lies” (HBO)
“The Crown” (Netflix)
“Game of Thrones” (HBO)
“The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu)
“Stranger Things” (Netflix)

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series:

“Barry” (HBO)
“Fleabag” (Amazon)
“The Kominsky Method” (Netflix)
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (Amazon)
“Schitt’s Creek” (CBC Television)

Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Comedy or Drama Series:

“Game of Thrones”
“GLOW”
“Stranger Things”
“The Walking Dead”
“Watchmen”

Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture:

“Avengers: Endgame”
“Ford v Ferrari”
“The Irishman”
“Joker”
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”

Allied - Movie Review

Starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney, Lizzy Caplan, Matthew Goode and August Diehl.
Written by Steven Knight.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis.

★★

Our two movie stars meet in Casablanca during World War II. Unfortunately they never swing by Rick's Casino, though director Robert Zemeckis has the technical know-how to make it happen if he wanted to. That might have been too on the nose.

Brad Pitt is Max, a Canadian serving in the UK's Royal Air Force, and a trained spy. He is to meet a French spy Marianne (Cotillard) in Casablanca and pose as her husband. They meet, they talk trade, they put on a good show for those around them, and their mission is to assassinate a German ambassador.

Though they pretend to be lovers, it is when the mission is over that Max decides he has fallen in love with Marianne and wants to marry her. It's a jarring scene when he proposes because up to that point, I'd had no hint Max was actually falling for her.

A wedding, a year, and a baby later, Max gets some bad news. Marianne is supected of being a German spy, and Max is to give her some false information to see if it gets transmitted out.

As both are playing spies, I was looking for hints of their layers. Where's the real person beneath the facade? I can say Cotillard gets there, but I never felt like Pitt did. The two just don't have chemistry together. It feels like it should be a sweeping wartime drama but it never takes off. It's actually all downhill after the assassination.

Moana is #1 at box office

For the weekend of November 25-27, 2016, Disney's Moana was able to overcome the Potterverse and claim the #1 spot for Thanksgiving weekend. Its five-day haul of $81 million means that $150 million domestic is guaranteed, and it'll rule over the next couple weeks, as the first weekend of December is usually one of the biggest box-office drop-offs of the year. It should ultimately be about as successful as Wreck-It-Ralph.

Fantastic Beasts is chugging along nicely. It has already crossed $470 million worldwide.

Of the other new releases, Brad Pitt's WWII movie Allied doesn't look like it'll do as well as previous Pitt WWII movies like Inglourious Basterds and Fury.

Bad Santa 2 is doing about as well as one could expect for a sequel no one wanted, and if they did, they wanted it ten years ago.

Warren Beatty's Rules Don't Apply is a big bomb, even for a movie made cheaply. It was Beatty's first directorial effort since 1998's Bulworth, and maybe audiences didn't really need to go back to Howard Hughes.

Opens December 2
INCARNATE with Aaron Eckhart, Carice van Houten and David Mazouz.

12 Years A Slave - Movie Review

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Alfre Woodard, Adepero Oduye, Garret Dillahunt, Michael K. Williams, Bryan Batt, Taran Killam, Scoot McNairy and Quvenzhane Wallis.
Directed by Steve McQueen.

★★★★

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender

Probably the best movie on slavery since Roots. But very difficult to watch.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, Salt) stars in the true story of Solomon Northup, a free man living in 1841 New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South.  Solomon is an educated man, well off from what we can tell as a violinist for hire.  He is our window to the experience, and it's a shrewd way to let us in.  Solomon is not a slave, nor is anyone in the audience, and so it makes easier to relate to the horrors thrust upon him, as opposed to someone who just grew up with it as their lot in life.

I've read some articles recently on trauma and PSTD, both what it does to children and to adults, but then there's the entire spectrum of damage done by slavery.  What does it do to generations beaten and imprisoned their entire life, family routinely removed from them, dehumanized daily.  What does it do to generations to raise them believing these humans over here aren't really humans so you can torture them and degrade them all you like.

Some of us descend from psychopaths who were okay with treating other people worse than animals.  Some of us descend from those other people who lived their entire lives at the mercy of those psychopaths.  How can a nation heal from such origins?

There's a scene where Solomon, on his way to the store, runs into some white men about to hang two black men.  And it's all treated so casually by everyone else in the scene.  The white men are just doing what's done, the black men know they can't do anything to resist, and Solomon has to walk away in despair as he hears the death throes of the slaves behind him.

Director Steve McQueen has an unflinching eye in the brutality.  There's another scene where Solomon is strung by his neck and his toes can barely touch the muddy ground.  We keep hoping the scene will cut away to something else, but it stays on him, and we hear him choking, and in the background, we see the other slaves ignore and go about their day. This is just the way life is.

Solomon spends most of his 12 years under a mentally unstable alcoholic named Epps (Michael Fassbender).  Epps has a mantra that "a man can do whatever he likes with his property." Epps' wife (Sarah Paulson), in ways, is as evil as he is, for when she gets upset, she wants to see some slaves beaten.  Slavery in all its brutality could only happen if there were women in on it.

I view it similar to Passion of the Christ, in that it's very violent, but it also leaves you with a lingering sense of the scope of suffering.  I was impressed with the pacing of it, and the way each event led to the next.  This is sure to get award nominations for Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor (Fassbender) and Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong'o, as slave-girl Patsey who unfortunately is liked by Epps).

One other note: there's a scene when a supervisor played by Paul Dano starts singing "Run N----r Run" to the slaves. It shows off his own deranged joy at keeping slaves in their place, but it also seems relevant to the headlines of today with Richie Incognito and others are still using the word. Let's just say I agree with Isiah Thomas's take on it.

World War Z - Movie Review

Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Ludi Boeken, David Morse, Fana Mokoena, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Sterling Jerins, Abigail Hargrove, David Andrews and Matthew Fox.  Directed by Marc Forster.

★★★½

I haven't read the source material, but what I see in front of me works.  It's a globetrotting view of the zombie apocalypse.  We've seen zombie-outbreak movies that focus on one area and they only vaguely hear of it happening in the rest of the world.  This time we follow a protagonist, Gerry Lane, (Brad Pitt) who starts in Philadelphia but goes to South Korea and to Israel and to Wales trying to find out what's going on and how to stop it.

It starts small, with Gerry and family stuck in traffic, but then like a wave it hits, and these are the fast-running kind of zombies.  They cooperate like army ants and wash through the streets like a flash-flood.  There's big emphasis on Gerry getting his family to a safe place.  Once that happens, he takes back his old job as a UN special-ops guy to fly with a scientist to see if they can trace the origins of the zombie outbreak.  If they can find the origin, maybe they can find a cure.

The PG-13 rating means we don't get a lot of gore.  Stabs to the head are off-camera.  We do still get a well-paced procedural, surprising considering all the production turmoils it went through.  I also liked how just as the scale was getting larger and larger, Act III narrows its focus and zooms in on a WHO building in Wales.

I'd like to know why Matthew Fox was all but edited out of this movie. If I didn't know he was in it, I don't know if I would have recognized him.

Friday's Box Office

For June 21.

1. Monsters University - $30.51 million - 1 day
2. World War Z - $25 - 1 day
3. Man of Steel - $12.7 ($181.49) - 8 days
4. This Is the End - $4.1 ($48.89) - 10 days
5. Now You See Me - $2.45 ($89.03) - 22 days
6. Fast & Furious 6 - $1.45 ($225.14) - 29 days
7. The Purge - $1.17 ($57.19) - 15 days
8. The Internship - $1.08 ($36.02) - 15 days

Pixar rules, as does Brad Pitt.  MU should get around $80 million for the weekend, and WWZ should get around $55 million.

Man of Steel is having a big dropoff for its second weekend.  It'll pass $200 million its second weekend, but it'll be scraping and crawling to get to $300 million domestic.  Still, overall, MoS has to be considered a successful reboot.

This Is the End and Now You See Me can be considered successful as well, relative to their budgets and expectations.

Killing Them Softly - DVD Review

Starring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Scoot McNairy, Richard Jenkins, Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Vincent Curatola, Sam Shepard and Max Casella.
Directed by Andrew Dominik.

★★

There's a really good mob movie buried in here.  Buried under all the talking.  This is a very talkie mob movie, where conversations go a couple minute longer than they should.  We watch, interested, but by the time a few scenes end, it's a conscious decision to re-engage with the movie.  And since the movie's only 90 minutes long, it's amazing how draggy the movie can be.

It centers on a high-stakes poker game, which two losers decide to rob.  The blame can be pinned on the runner of the game (Ray Liotta), but when hitman Cogan (Brad Pitt) comes to town, he's a little smarter about things.

Some of the best conversations happen between Pitt and Richard Jenkins. And I should mention that all the actors embody their roles well.  There are spurts of action here and there, and if the dialogue was QT-esque crackling, maybe I wouldn't have minded.  Pitt's final monologue is great.

Sidenote: This features three Sopranos alum but none of them are ever on-screen at the same time.

Breaking Dawn's still #1

For the weekend of Nov. 30 - Dec. 2.

1.  Breaking Dawn Part 2 - $17.41 million ($254.59) - 3 wks (Sum) -60%
 . . . 4008 screens / $4344 per screen
2.  Skyfall - $17 ($246.03) - 4 wks (Sony) -52.1%
 . . . 3463 / $4909
3.  Lincoln - $13.51 ($83.7) - 4 wks (BV) -47.4%
 . . . 2018 / $6694
4.  Rise of the Guardians - $13.5 ($48.95) - 2 wks (DW) -43.2%
 . . . 3672 / $3676
5.  Life of Pi - $12 ($48.36) - 2 wks (Fox) -46.6%
 . . . 2928 / $4098
6.  Wreck-It-Ralph - $7.02 ($158.26) - 5 wks (BV) -57.6%
 . . . 3087 / $2274
7.  Killing Them Softly - $7 - 1 wk (Wein)
 . . . 2424 / $2888
8.  Red Dawn - $6.55 ($31.32) - 2 wks (FD) -54.1%
 . . . 2781 / $2355
9.  Flight - $4.54 ($81.53) - 5 wks (Par) -46.3%
 . . . 2603 / $1744
10. The Collection - $3.41 - 1 wk (LD)
 . . . 1403 / $2430
11. Silver Linings Playbook - $3.34 ($10.99) - 3 wks (Wein) -23.8%
 . . . 371 / $9005
12. Anna Karenina - $2.23 ($4.08) - 3 wks (Foc) +148.8%
 . . . 384 / $5807
13. Argo - $2.03 ($101) - 8 wks (WB) -47.6%
 . . . 1043 / $1942

The new releases were dead on arrival, while the holiday holdovers kept raking in the dough.

Breaking Dawn Part 2 is on track to be the most profitable in the Twilight series. It's passed the $700 million mark in worldwide gross.  Skyfall has passed $869 million worldwide and is now the highest-grossing Bond movie in franchise history (unless you adjust for inflation).

Lincoln should have been a tougher sell, but the Spielberg name combined with Oscar buzz for the movie and for Daniel Day-Lewis has kept it strong.

I don't know how you screw up marketing a Brad Pitt gangster movie but the Weinsteins found a way.  Killing Them Softly's a bad title opening on a bad weekend for new movies.

Random Movie Stuff - 6/15/12

- Hugh Laurie (House M.D.) has signed on the play the villainous CEO of Omnicorp in Jose Padhila's remake of RoboCop, starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Abbie Cornish and Samuel L. Jackson.
- A sequel is in the works for The Woman in Black. During WWII, the old house has been converted into a military mental hospital, and a young nurse new to the place discovers that the patients dying one by one is no accident.
- I'd be surprised if he said yes, but Philip Seymour Hoffman has been offered the role of Plutarch Heavensbee, the new Gamemaster in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson and Liam Hemsworth.
- Filming has begun on Labor Day. No, it's not an ensemble comedy about a bunch of C-listers celebrating a holiday no one cares about. It's from director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) and it's about an escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who holds a single mother (Kate Winslet) and her 13-year-son hostage in her home over the four-day weekend.
- Production delays have forced the zombie apocalypse movie World War Z to move from its intended December release to June 2013.  It stars Brad Pitt.

The Tree of Life - DVD Review

Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken and Sean Penn.
Directed by Terrence Malick.

"THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!"

There is no doubt Malick is a master of visual poetry. But 138 minutes of montages and scene fades doth not a movie make.

This very personal, ambitious work calls to mind Stanley Kubrick's 2001 as its closest comparison, but even Stanley got around to telling a story. Here we swim through a cubist flipbook of life for the three O'Brien boys in small-town 1950's Texas. Brad Pitt plays the domineering father; Jessica Chastain the angelic mother.

Malick shows his hand in the first few minutes. We gets beautiful shots of birds, wind, trees, blades of grass, shadows, children running, a woman smiling, whispered voice-overs, and it keeps going and going... I was grateful when it spins off into a 20-minute sequence of the Earth being formed, through the dinosaur age, until it all comes back to the O'Brien family. We get a couple scene of the oldest boy grown up, played by Sean Penn, but it's really more of a cameo.

I know of Malick's tendencies and I was braced for a non-linear story, ready for an artist to expose his palette. But this is from an artist who knows he's an artist, who acts and thinks like an artist, and if we don't get it, well, I guess we're too bourgeois. He knows what story he's telling, but he makes it inscrutable. There are lasting images and impressions, and yes, he is very talented. But it's not as profound as he thinks it is, and large sections of it are boring. That is its ultimate crime. I wanted it to wash over me, but after a while, when it became clear this was all Malick had up his sleeve, it was laborious. Gorgeous shot after gorgeous shot, and yet, what is the sum of these parts?

I wanted to love this movie, to get swept up by it, but would it kill the director to just let two characters have a conversation, to have something happen and then have the next scene be the reaction to what just happened? It's the longest 138-minute movie I've ever seen.

Burn After Reading - Movie Review

The previews we had didn't get much reaction except for Oliver Stone's W. People were groaning and I heard one woman say, "That looks awful." I'm curious because I liked JFK and Nixon, even if Stone was, shall we say, "playful" with the facts.

Other previews: Milk (awards bait for Sean Penn), The International (bland big-conspiracy movie starring Clive Owen), Doubt (looks like a powerful acting tour-de-force with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and The Brothers Bloom (looks like a mediocre con comedy).

BURN AFTER READING (***) - Starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, David Rasche and JK Simmons.
Written & directed by Joel & Ethan Coen.

I must admit, if I ranked all the Coen brothers movies from my favorite to least, The Big Lebowski would be in the bottom half. I've only seen one movie of theirs I'd thumb down - The Ladykillers - and its main problem was the usually clever dialogue was replaced with over a hundred F-words. Some movies do funny things with this word - Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino come to mind, and HBO had Deadwood - but much more often, it's a lazy screenplay space filler. It's the 21st century's "very."

Now with The Big Lewbowski tending to be the favorite Coen movie of many Coen fans, I've wondered if I need to revisit it. Maybe a ClearPlay version, I don't know. And now Burn After Reading joins The Big Lebowski and The Ladykillers for me as Coen movies where it would have been a better movie if they'd been more creative with the dialogue than a parade of F-words. Without looking it up, as far as I know, this one had the same amount of F-words as Fargo, but it sure doesn't seem like it. Fargo was a better movie.

That aside, it has many elements of classic Coen comedy. Most of the characters are idiots, and the way things spiral out of control is hilarious. Clooney plays a Treasury department employee sleeping with a doctor (Swinton) who's married to an FBI man (Malkovich). Sensitive information about him is accidentally left on a CD at a gym, where two dim employees (Pitt, McDormand) decide to use it for extortion.

My favorite parts of the movie came from David Rasche (who will always be Sledgehammer! to me) as Malkovich's boss. He's keeping an eye on the situation, even though he can't tell what's going on, and he brings regular updates to his boss JK Simmons, who finds it all more confounding.

This isn't one of their best movies. I'd rank it around Intolerable Cruelty or The Hudsucker Proxy or The Big Lebowski, but I can think of half a dozen Coen movies I liked more.