Burn your memory.

Started off the week last night with circular forces, alas I saw the new movie Burn Before Reading.
You know, the film with all the fabulous ensemble: George Clooney, Tilda Swinson, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, and Brad Pitt. For some reason everyone has trouble remembering the title of this movie, but when you mention who's in it, a nod of aggressive certainty surfaces.

Before the movie even began, the preview's sound scores sounded amazing, with dramatic booms of gunshots, cries, and protests galore (no doubt was advertising Milk, the upcoming Sean Penn flick). Couldn't tell you anything about what the movies looked like though, because the screen was blank. Noise, but no picture. Something was clearly wrong with our screen. When an audience pays $10.75 each, half the evening revolves around the previews...Dane Cook can tell you all about the excitement. I personally don't swing either way, just as long as I see the opening scene of the movie I actually paid for. Two old ladies, a row in front of us, were complaining about the screen problems, questioned the theater's ability to hire people, "They must've picked these employees from the street!", imitated dimming the lights with vulgar hand gestures, and protested about our free tickets. But did they ever move from their seats? No. Just sat there bitching about technology and prices. If you're going to talk but refuse to act, then at least keep your complaints low enough so the teenagers drinking Bacardi in the back won't hear you. "Can I get a free hot dog?!" How fat can you be?

Burn Before Reading is pretty much a movie about nothing. The nothing is worth checking out however, if you have the time to spare. Beware most of the comedic moments are given away in the movie trailer, but John Malkovich saves us from solace with his dual character presidential personification in the concluding scene. The Coen brothers can do whatever the hell they want, because well any studio and actor will beg to receive the notoriety they so cleverly produce; but the arrow missed the center mark swaying from moments of dark humor and paranoia to random humor accepted by straight-laced society (a.k.a. iPOD funnies). Do ya have to dumb it down that much? The paranoia of paranoia was funny to me, because I too have once thought everyone was after me for some reason or another, and felt there was no where to turn except Venezuela.

McDormand has a dull middle-class vibe, and for some reason irritated me throughout the entire film. Her ability to shut people up before listening to them drove me crazy, and I prayed the cameras would stop panning her bulky figure and cheap-looking bob. That was probably meant to irritate me, and therefore fell prey to the Coen's objective. (Spoiler alert) Pitt had his moments, and the best one happened a split second before his death as he hid in Swinson's closest with the biggest grin I have ever seen on his aging face. His expression was like someone on extasy who encountered jesus' hand on their neck. Clooney's best scene is the unveiling of his 'gift', for his wife, to McDormand. The surprise: A chair that rocks back and forth with a dildo in the middle of the seat, optimizing time and space.

Overall, the nuisance of a predicament which should have never escalated as far as it did brings chaos to everyone except where the movie started, the C.I.A. The big honchos don't seem to care, but are bewildered but the sequence of events. People who originally seemed like a threat are either dead by accident, or work at a gym. McDormand has positioned herself to ultimately get her useless surgery, and we learn divorce is the sixth element to paranoid people in Washington DC.