September 5th, 2008
BURN AFTER READING, the new comedy from the Coen Brothers — make that the Oscar-winning Coen brothers* — opened the Toronto International Film Festival Thursday night, and the reviews are starting to be heard. Good news, Coen fans — it looks like another winner.
James Rocchi of Cinematical.com says he laughed a lot and the movie has “carefully-timed punchlines and comedy so dry it’ll leave your lips chapped. ” Brad Pitt, as a dimwitted fitness trainer is, Rocchi says ” is, bluntly, inanely great — full of verve and conviction, and deeply funny.”
Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells calls BURN “brilliant” and adds “When (Joel and Ethan Coen are) in the mood to dispense their extremely low opinion of human behavior, they are masters of the form. Nobody knows from dry, diseased and delectably deadpan like these guys. It’s in their bones and their blood.”
Sounds good to me! The movie opens in theaters next Friday, Sept. 12.
* And yes, I know they won an Oscar years ago for FARGO. I mean last year’s big victory for NO COUNTRY.
August 25th, 2008
The funniest thing in the Aug. 7 issue of THE ONION wasn’t one of the made-up headlines (though, admittedly, “Steer, Slaughterhouse Worker Make Awkard, Last-Second Eye Contact” was pretty good). No, it was the blurb on the ad for PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, supplied by Rolling Stone critics Peter Travers.
Allow me to quote it in its entirety:
“This is like if SUPERBAD met MIDNIGHT RUN and they had a baby, and then PULP FICTION and TRUE ROMANCE met FREAKS AND GEEKS and UNDECLARED and they had a baby, and by some miracle those babies met — this would be the funny movie they birthed.”
Italics his, by the way. Bold too.
Here’s my blurb for that blurb. Attention Rolling Stone and any movie posters using this blurb (and believe me, Travers writes his reviews so he can get his name on movie posters) — feel free to post this above that:
“This is like if a movie critic who doesn’t know what he was talking about and hasn’t written an insightful sentence since 1980 met a magazine that paid him a wad of money to write inane collections of meaningless drivel that sound hip but really aren’t — sort of like that magazine itself — then they had a baby – this would be the unfunny movie blurb they birthed.”Â
(By the way, this is not meant to reflect on PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, a movie I haven’t seen but figure I’d probably like. )
