Tuesday, December 15, 2009

77 burn after reading (coen bros., 2008)

For better or worse, my worldview is closer to the Coens' than that of most other filmmakers: as characters in a Coen brothers movie, the struggles we are put through to get what we want are defined by an inescapable structure that we can't see, or can only see part of, and that part we misread, and the joke is, the structure has been erected by other people going through equivalent struggles. You see that a few times in Burn After Reading: when Malkovich confronts Jenkins in the basement, for example. This reading (man v. mans?) is not an exclusive property of the Coens - you could apply it to a wide range of filmmakers. They seem to have consistently made it their favorite subject, scaling back on sentimentality and doodling funny faces to represent the screwy moments in our lives.

There's a strong base of viewers who reject their work as caricature artists; I understand but I don't agree. Mankind can withstand better caricaturing.

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