Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this desultory spy caper - which had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the Venice Film Festival, and will play the Toronto Film Festival later this week - they take George Clooney and Brad Pitt, those modern icons of sex and savoir-faire, drop them in the world of Washington, D.C., espionage, then keep ratcheting down their emotional IQs. They turn Frances McDormand (Mrs. Joel Coen off-screen) into a mad-man loser with a severe self-image problem. The characters' lives get more desperate as the camera style retains its affectless sheen...
...headed and why it's going there. The ultimate question, from this admirer of virtually all the brothers' work, from the early Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing to their previous Clooney collaborations O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, is a plaintive "What the heck kind of film is this...
...start of the film Cox is summoned to his boss's office and told he's to be cashiered from the CIA and transferred to a low-clearance post at the State Dept. As he spits out retorts with majestic acerbity, you think for a minute that he's right and the Agency is wrong - that he knows too much or has dug too deep. But by the end of the scene his bluster has revealed Osborne as a malingerer, a rummy and a jerk; his prickly panache is simply the spy's cover that everyone who works with...
...assistant Chad Feldheimer, played by Pitt with a blithe goofball goodness. Outfitted in Spandex, and getting around with a walk that suggests less a guest on Dancing With the Stars than a heretofore unclassified creature on Animal Planet, Chad-Brad is the least troubled character in the film. He's never thought hard enough to consider how other people might think of him; he has no special dreams to defer, no ambitions to be crushed. For him, the unexamined life is the only one worth living...
...appreciate the nicely modulated turns from Richard Jenkins as Linda's sweet-souled boss and J.K. Simmons as the head of the CIA. But for me, the surest laughs came from the portentous percussion in Carter Burwell's wonderful underscoring; it pile-drives an expectation of suspense that the film never delivers...