BURN AFTER READING now available on DVD & Blu-ray

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An outrageous black comedy about murder, blackmail, sex addition and physical fitness!

"This latest offering from the Coen brothers is an outlandish dark farce/spy spoof with some hilarious characters and quotable lines." -Claudia Puig, USA Today

"The brothers have conjured a crazy-quilt comic thriller that takes on our growing national stupidity in the form of a sex farce. The result is wildly funny." -Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Universal Studios today releases the Coen Brothers' adult comedy-crime thriller BURN AFTER READING on DVD ($29.98) & Blu-ray ($39.98). The film's all-star cast consists of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and John Malkovich.

Extras include 3 featurettes:
-Finding the Burn
-DC Insiders Run Amuck
-Welcome Back, George

(BD Live: My Scenes Sharing on the Blu-ray)

Production Notes (from Wikipedia)
Burn After Reading is a 2008 black comedy film written, produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Joel said they intended to create a spy movie because "we hadn't done one before," but he feels the final result was more of a character-driven movie than a spy story. Joel also said Burn After Reading was not meant to be a comment or satire on Washington D.C.

The Coen brothers said idiocy was a major central theme of Burn After Reading; Joel Coen said he and his brother have "a long history of writing parts for idiotic characters" and described Clooney and Pitt's characters as "dueling idiots." Burn After Reading is the third Coen brothers film for Clooney (O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty), who acknowledged that he usually plays a fool in their movies: "I've done three films with them and they call it my trilogy of idiots." Joel said after the last scene was shot, "George said: 'OK, I´ve played my last idiot!' So I guess he won´t be working with us again."

Brad Pitt, who plays a particularly unintelligent character in the film, said of his role, "After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted." Pitt also said when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine.'"

Tilda Swinton described Burn After Reading as "a kind of monster caper movie," and said of the characters, "All of us are monsters – like, true monsters. It´s ridiculous." She also said, "I think there is something random at the heart of this one. On the one hand, it really is bleak and scary. On the other, it is really funny. It's the whatever-ness of it. You feel that at any minute of any day in any town, this could happen."

John Malkovich said of the characters, "No one in this film is very good. They're either slightly emotional or mentally defective. Quirky, self-aggrandizing, scheming." Pitt said the cast did little ad-libbing because the script was so tightly written and wove so many overlapping stories together.

The National Board of Review put the film on their list of the Top 10 Movies of 2008.

BURN AFTER READING - Explore the film further:

» View the Trailer (& HD) »
(from Apple.com's Trailers website)

» Theatrical Review by Jason P. Vargo »
We're not supposed to take anything in "Burn After Reading" seriously. Not the cheating, not the deaths, not the beatings, not the dichotomy between people trying to get out of relationships and the one trying to get into a coupling. No, this is a farce of the first order, ridiculously inappropriate for much of the running time, but filled with sublime comedic performances from actors we never would have thought capable. They are the focus of the film, obviously. We're supposed to see "everyday" people in them... Here's a prediction for you: Brad Pitt will get an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor this year.

"BURN AFTER READING has some outstanding comic highlights - many of them courtesy of Pitt himself. Loose-limbed and absent-minded, his hyper performance stays the right side of mannered." -Matthew Leyland, Total Film

Synopsis:
An all-star cast, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich, come together in this outrageous spy comedy about murder, blackmail, sex addiction and physical fitness!

When a disc filled with some of the CIA's most irrelevant secrets gets in the hands of two determined, but dim-witted, gym employees, the duo are intent on exploiting their find. But since blackmail is a trade better left for the experts, events soon spiral out of everyone's and anyone's control, resulting in a non-stop series of hilarious encounters!

From Joel and Ethan Coen, the Academy Award®-winning directors of No Country For Old Men and The Big Lebowski, comes this brilliantly clever and endlessly entertaining movie that critics are calling, "smart, funny, and original" (Ben Lyons, E!).

With their overtly comedic follow-up BURN AFTER READING, the Coen Brothers return--about a third of the way--from the dark, dank recesses of the human psyche they traversed in their Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men.

For those unfamiliar with the landscape of modern movie psychoanalysis, this puts the fraternal filmmakers square in the cruel, misanthropic, and farcical realm of their 1990s-era body of work, somewhere between the tragicomic crime thriller of Fargo and the disconnected noir-homage anti-storytelling of The Big Lebowski, with 2007's NO COUNTRY retroactively adding new nihilism-tinged dimensions of smart skepticism to the proceedings.

In a more linear trajectory, Burn After Reading also stands as the third entry, after Blood Simple and Fargo, in what could be an unofficial "Tragedy of Human Idiocy trilogy", wherein characters make the most outlandishly moronic moves to devastating consequences simply by adhering to true human behavior. Indeed, Carter Burwell's emotionally weighty score, which washes over biting scenes of explosive, anesthetizing belly laughs, is very reminiscent of his Fargo work.

BURN is ostensibly structured and propelled by a spy-thriller plotline involving a classified CD lost by a disgraced CIA spook and found by two simple gym employees. But, in actuality, it's simply--amazingly--a collection of brilliant caricature studies interwoven by veracious, if Coenesque, social interactions, as epitomized by the pathos of the Frances McDormand character's precipitous quest for cosmetic surgery. The CIA superior who learns of the film's events (always second-hand and sometimes along with the viewer) doesn't know what to make of it, and why would he?

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Please Note - More details:
Be sure to check out the full details under related releases.

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