In effort to catch up on the glut of missed films from 2008 I had intended, after watching W. the evening before, to watch a movie that wasn’t centered on politics. My decision to watch Burn After Reading (2008) over Charlie Wilsons War (2007) seemed natural at the time. That is at the time, since Burn After Reading is really a perfect companion piece or follow up to W. I started watching the film under a similar impression as the one I had before W., that the Cohen brothers follow up to No Country for Old Men (2007) in comparison, was not quite up to snuff. It shows me the pointlessness of reading any kind of review before hand; glad I was gifted with the “giving-films-a-chance gene” at any rate.

The Cohen brothers with Burn After Reading are out after capturing what I would consider to be the American zeitgeist, something also present and accounted for in No Country For Old Men. Burn’s plot involves characters that pursue cosmetic and shallow angles in life, ranging from a sex addict building a “fuck chair” to an ex-CIA analyst writing memoirs about an underwhelming and uninteresting career. In typical Cohen fashion the comedy is dark and brutal, accompanied by events played out in a completely chaotic and “cluster fuck-esque” fashion. Half way through the film I was reminded that yes, this is the Cohen brother’s brand of comedy, that it wasn’t quite as good as The Big Lebowski (1998) but it was close, which really ends up being high praise for Burn After Reading.

Beyond the comedic similarities Burn and Lebowski share, there is also the parallel I would quickly like to draw as to what is now glaringly evident for me. The Cohen brother’s overall body of work is rife with the questioning of capitalism’s logic, a hypothesis perhaps deserving of more space than a simple blog post can provide. That being said it is worth mentioning briefly how the Cohen brother’s films tend to deal with the suffering of what I would call “rats in tin shit houses” all trying to frantically gnaw their way out of various, self created predicaments, normally attached to the pursuit of “easy cheese”. The protagonists present in these films, epitomized by the Dude in Lebowski, are always the ones who don’t really want to participate, anti-capitalists if you will, who can’t be “ass’ed” but somehow get sucked in at any rate. Reaffirming that it’s nearly impossible to not play by the systems rules no matter how hard one tries.

Burn After Reading is an oddity here simply for its lack of heroic characters when juxtaposed with the Cohen brothers other films, making it very similar to W. with its lack of a “likeable” protagonist. Burn is a film indicative of the recently deceased fake economic upswing, or bubble, survived by its bastard child of obsessive cosmetic living that hopefully will only become funnier and more absurd as we distance ourselves from the un-heroic rats a large majority of us have become.

The first film I watched at this year’s festival was the documentary I.O.U.S.A., a film I had hoped beforehand would end up being educational. I’m no slouch when it comes to the rhymes and reasons behind capitalism and America’s recent down swing, I’ve made it a point to be “involved” where I’m moving back to the States, but the film did manage to “show me a trick or two” by its end. I can start by giving my complaints that the documentary unfortunately is made prior to the tumultuous economic upheaval that has occurred over a large portion of 2008, housing crash, stimulus package etc. Furthermore it also seems to have been wrapped prior to the election cycle’s main thrust. These two items lend a tremendous angle to the entire debate on America’s future but definitely do not negate the information provided in the film. Just don’t expect it to be entirely “up to date”.

I.O.U.S.A’s message, which is conveyed via interviews with the likes of Alan Greenspan, and Warren Buffet, to name a few, is that frankly people in the US spend money they don’t have. This may not come as such a shock, and you may be thinking well I just saved you some time and money in reviewing the film but what the film does clue one in on is exactly the long running repercussions of this spending logic, not to mention historical instances of “high debt” the rhyme and reason behind them, and subsequent lack of reason behind the current debt. This is namely to remind us that all major republics have fallen by similar financial mistakes and to clue us in on the hard times ahead.

What I took away from the film was a much clearer sense of who is screwed and who is not. Furthermore, how unnatural America’s form of capitalism is, with the FED playing the role of stabilizer. That is making sure people with money keep said money while milking the poor and middle class. Hearing Alan Greenspan during one interview state that there is no way for the FED to calculate the poor into the equation was priceless, not to mention the clip used where John Stewart “schools his old ass”, have a look for yourself,