A Week Late!

The weekend of September 12th I again was out of town. I was forced to catch up on the new releases during the week. Out of the four major releases for that weekend I chose to see two - Burn After Reading and Righteous Kill. I considered The Women, but opted for De Niro and Pacino instead.

Burn After Reading was so odd. But what else would you expect from a Coen brothers movie? It's so difficult to review something like this because it's just so weird and different - it doesn't follow the usual rules. The performances are the big draw here and they pretty much deliver. Brad Pitt seemed to be the bright spot and his character provided most of the laughs in the movie. Another bright spot was J.K. Simmons (fresh off his great performance in Juno) who provided a few great laughs himself. As an avid movie goer it's a rare treat to see so many serious actors take on such quirky characters. I wish they'd do more stuff like this. Just to see someone like George Clooney actually make vivid facial expressions is so much fun. I'd love to see all of them - Pitt, Clooney, Tilda Swinton, etc do more comedic roles.


I don't really know how I feel about Righteous Kill. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't all the way won over by it either. First off, any time De Niro and Pacino share the screen is amazing. Just to watch them interact and play off of each other is really fun. Funnily enough I think the opening credits set my expectations too high. There was a lot of energy and great editing going on during the credits. But I'm not sure the rest of the story lived up to the credits' hype. It's weird, I can't describe what I didn't like about the film, but it just didn't totally do it for me.

On a side note, I think this may be the first weekend in Hollywood history when two different films opening on the same day each used the term "cluster f***." I was treated to this zesty noun in both Burn and Kill.

Saturday September 13 marked the beginning of my fall TV viewing with the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. As I noted earlier, I was out of town and unfortunately I missed the premiere. I know. But thankfully, like everyone else, I've watched the opening sketch featuring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hilary Clinton. Two words: Hilarious. Brilliant.