Burn After Reading

Last night I was watching the 2003 film House of 1000 Corpses, directed by Rob Zombie, on DVD. As the name probably hints, it is a horror film in which a group of twenty-somethings travel through America researching odd local legends and unusual attractions in order to write a book. When they stop off at Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen, run by a creepy individual in a clown costume, they become intrigued by the local legend of a sadistic doctor, and decide to go to the site where he was hanged. However, they get lost and soon run in to the murderous Firefly family. It's a deliberate throwback to the 1970s style of gritty, graphic horror films, and is pretty gruesome and full of bizarre imagery. The film features appearances from a number of cult actors, and also a couple of actors who went on to bigger and better things, such as Rainn Wilson who went on to star in the US version of The Office.

I had to be up pretty early this morning because I was going to see a preview of Burn After Reading with my mum. My parents came round to collect me at around quarter to ten, but when we got to the cinema we realised that mum had made a mistake with the times: instead of it being ten o'clock for a ten-thirty start, it was ten-thirty for an eleven o'clock start. So we went and found a coffee shop and had a drink before heading over to the cinema.

Burn After Reading is the latest film from the Coen Brothers (Joel and Ethan). It's a kind of spy comedy. Basically, Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) resigns from the CIA, much to the horror of his doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) who is having an affair with another Government agent (George Clooney). Osbourne decides to write his memoirs, while his wife decides to get a divorce and records all the details of the household finances on the same computer disc that Osbourne is usuing to save his book. However the disc is lost at a gym and found by the employees who immediately think it is all top secret spy stuff and two of the employess (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt) decide they can use it to get some money. The film has a pretty involved plot and is often extremely funny. It might not be the best of the Coen Brothers film but it is well worth watching, because it works really well as both a thriller and a comedy.

After the film we went back to my parent's house and I picked up the latest copies of Sight and Sound and Fortean Times ("The Journal of Strange Phenomena"), and some free Alfred Hitchcock DVDs that my parents had ordered for me from The Times. Later on we had some tacos for lunch. In the afternoon my parents were busy with the wiring under the house (they are planning a large scale decorating project in their house over the next few months or so).