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.

This weekend I finally got around to giving Oliver Stones W. (2008) a chance, having been banished from my apartment this past week it was nice to stay home and catch up on a few films.

I can honestly say I did not have high hopes for W. as a result of reading some fairly scathing reviews of the film; reviews that for the most part called into question the relevancy of the film with its sympathies for such an “undeserving” individual as George W. Bush. I think my patience to actually sit down and give it a chance was enhanced by my screening of Frost/Nixon (2008) the previous week. The film however did not begin well. Andreas over at filmstars.se (for those of you that speak Swedish) is spot on in describing the difficulty involved at the start of the film to see beyond things as being just an SNL skit minus the laughter. This changes somehow about half way through the film when suddenly Josh Brolin, who plays W, becomes believable and immersed in an almost “impossible” role . One can also give praise to Richard Dreyfuss‘s subtle portrayal of the “super villain” Dick Cheney and Thandie Newton‘s portrayal of the “stone cold”, “I didn’t get shit from the civil rights movement” Condoleeza Rice.

How much truth one can draw from the film is, as always, questionable; the format, medium and style all lend a hand in one being able to question the incompleteness or concreteness of the story. Oliver Stone’s biopic is therefore questionable in its accuracy of portraying W via the details, but this is neither here nor there, we are speaking about the details, I am more interested in the essences of how the film does succeed.

W. for me provides possible answers and perspective on what fueled George W. Bush’s rise to the presidency followed by his subsequent fall from grace to become a “lame duck” president. These aforementioned answers provided by Stone are simply put, political inbreeding and egoism. I had never thought of the bit players surrounding Bush as being quite as retarded and incompetent as they are portrayed by Stone; I figured they had to be smart to cover W’s ass. This however does not seem to be the case, the fact that many of these individuals have been kicking around Washington since the late 60s and 70s I believe really does make W sympathetic; he is and always has been a proper representative for America and Americans for the past 20-40 years. That is a president, just like the populous he presides over, manipulated and reliant upon capitalistic scavengers; to this extent Oliver Stone hits a home run. The whole thing is really summed up best by W himself,