OlderBrad Pitt Premieres “Burn After Reading”
Brad Pitt joins prankster pal George Clooney at the opening ceremony and Burn After Reading premiere during the 2008 Venice Film Festival at Sala Grande on Wednesday in Venice, Italy.
The 44-year-old father-of-six and the 47-year-old ladies man were accompanied by directors Joel and Ethan Coen and actresses Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton.
Last night, Brad and George partied into the wee hours after the black tie fundraiser for their Not On Our Watch charity. To read about their partying ways with some 20 fundraiser guests at the Cipriani’s poolside bar, visit People.com.
You can also check out one of the first reviews of the movie at Variety.com. Here’s a snippet: “Major star names might stoke some mild B.O. heat with older upscale viewers upon U.S. release Sept. 12, but no one should expect this reunion of George Clooney and Brad Pitt to remotely resemble an Ocean’s film commercially.”
25+ pictures inside of Brad Pitt premiering Burn After Reading…
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PEOPLE is reporting that Brad won Best Actor award (second year in a row) for Burn!!!
ja @ 08/27/2008 at 4:01 pm
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Are you talking about Traveling, Management, He’s and that into you and the dog movie???? You’re so right they will not do well at the box office.
cathereine i dont think its a good movie based on the first review from variety and the writter is right will not be good at b.o.
Sorry didn’t realize the info about him winning Best Actor in Burn was already posted. Was so excited for him I posted before looking. He is a grossly underrated actor! Hope he gets even more recognition as the film premieres elsewhere.
ja @ 08/27/2008 at 4:20 pm
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I don’t care, I for sure will see this movie.
did he really win?? or is that just a hater poster claiming he did not??
Go and support Brad’s movies.
Screendaily Review
The first film in the Coen Brothers’ two-picture pact with Focus Features and Working Title is a smart urban screwball comedy about the perils of idiocy that uses its all-star cast to dazzling and often hilarious effect. A beautifully produced mix of spy story, US zeitgeist satire and relationship drama, Burn After Reading cons the audience into seeing depths – and Fargo parallels – that don’t really exist. The consumate, near-throwaway ending sets the record straight: it’s a feelgood comedy so enjoy the ride and don’t take it all so seriously.
Central to the film’s appeal is the Washington DC setting with its brownstones, prim parks, viaducts, faux country mansions and fitness clubs. One of these is the overcrowded Hardbodies where Linda Litzke (McDormand) works alongside her gushy but gutless colleague Chad Feldheimer (Pitt). When the hapless duo find a CD containing the ‘classified’ memoirs of irate, alcoholic CIA agent Osborne Cox (a perfectly cast, self-parodying Malkovich), a half-baked blackmail scheme arises. Meanwhile, Cox’s cold, calculating English wife Katie (Swinton) is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), who also meets and beds women he meets online – including Linda. He does this more out of distraction than through any lack of affection for his own wife Sandy (Marvel).
The script was apparently written with the cast in mind, and it works. As with the Oceans franchise, Burn After Reading’s feelgood factor has as much to do with A-list actors having fun as it does with comic timing. Pitt’s turn as an airhead, blonde-highlighted gym instructor suggests that he would fit snugly into the bumbling numbskull role the Coens have so far given George Clooney. Clooney himself gets an equally tasty workout as a fitness- and sex-obssessed federal marshal who is too dim to realise that he is in love with his wife, while McDormand is solid as a no-longer-young single woman lost in the dating jungle, who is pinning all her hopes on cosmetic surgery. Malkovich and Swinton, more typecast but no less enjoyable for all that, round out a film that will derive much of its marketing muscle from those names on the poster.
As in Fargo, the classic Hollywood dramatic springboard – people making the wrong decisions – spreads to become a kind of existential miasma: even in the city that supposedly governs hearts and minds worldwide, brains are furred, the simplest acts of interpersonal communication are riven with difficulty, and even the CIA (led by a brilliantly offhand JK Simmons) hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. But there are glimpses too of real societal dilemmas – Linda’s complaint that “I have got about as far as I can with this body”; Harry suddenly surprised by the fact that, amidst his philandering, he misses his wife; a brief but well-judged scene in which Osborne Cox tells his mute, wheelchair-bound, father – himself a former CIA operative – that he has failed him.
Children Of Men DoP Emmanuel Lubezki gives the film a dark, autumnal look that lends its screwball antics a melancholy twist. Carter Burwell’s driving orchestral soundtrack – at times elegaic, at times menacing – also contributes to this tonal counterpoint, setting up echoes with No Country For Old Men – another yarn about bad decisions.
The Guardian Review
The Venice film festival got off to a rousing and star-studded start with the latest offering from the Coen brothers. Burn After Reading finds room for George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich - along with Tilda Swinton who, improbable as it may seem after all those years slogging it out for low-budget avant-gardists like Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and John Maybury, is now supping at the high table of Hollywood aristocracy. And the Coens themselves are new enough to the big leagues for them to still feel they are blinking owlishly in the spotlight.
The film itself may be a bit of an afterthought down here on the Lido. Clocking in at a crisp 95 minutes, Burn After Reading is a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy that couldn’t be in bigger contrast to the Coens’ last film, the bloodsoaked, brooding No Country for Old Men. Burn, in comparison, is bit of a bantamweight: fast moving, lots of attitude, and uncorking a killer punch when it can.
Set in Washington DC, at the heart of America’s political establishment, it moves in four directions at the same time. Osbourne Cox (Malkovich) is a superannunated CIA analyst who is given the push and rancorously starts writing his memoirs. A computer disc containing his alarming-sounding background material falls out of a bag in a gym locker-room, where it ends up in the gormless clutches of Chad Feldheimer (Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) who run the place; their instant reaction is to try a little blackmail. The cosmetic surgery-obsessed Litzke is also scouring internet dating sites and starts something with serial adulterer Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), who has an unspecified job in the Treasury dept, but is overly proud of his past in “PP” (that’s “personal protection” to the likes of us). But he is already having an affair with Cox’s wife Katie (Swinton) - and it’s the latter’s sneaky investigation of her husband’s financial resources as she gears up for a divorce that triggers the whole information-loss plot-thread.
With such a profusion of attention-grabbing performers, it’s hardly surprising that the first narrative motor - the fools-after-money trope of which the Coens appear so fond - is swiftly subordinated to backstabbing emotional shenanigans; we soon find ourselves watching a particularly murderous account of marital high-jinks among moneyed social elites. (In this regard, the Coen film it most resembles is the divorce-lawyer comedy Intolerable Cruelty.) It’s also stuffed with the usual throwaway brilliancies: McDormand, for example, has a running gag with a computerised switchboard that can’t recognise she is speaking English, while Swinton does a very subtle bit of eye-acting to suggest she’s actually turned on by the thought of rooting through her husband’s bank records. Pitt, in fact, gets the best of the funny stuff, but has by some way the least screen time of all the principal cast.
Where does this film leave the Coens? Their unique position, as darlings of both the Hollywood set and the festival circuit, is unchanged. What they have managed to come up with here, somehow, is a light-as-fluff flipside to hardcore “insider” films like All the President’s Men, Michael Clayton or, indeed, The Insider: it paints the powers-that-be as goofy, chaotic and definitively non-sinister. This lot, you feel, couldn’t bug their way out of a paper bag.
Burn After Reading may also go down as arguably the Coens’ happiest engagement with the demands of the Hollywood A-list - but this bit of career development may also be contributing to a diminishing of their particular film-making strengths. Or perhaps they are simply evolving. The highly-wrought grotesqueries with which they made their name seem well in the past; stars find it difficult to merge with the scenery. For better or worse, their films are now more simply natural to look at and experience. Whether it will pay off again at the Oscar ceremony or box-office remains to be seen.
Hello to all Jolie Pitt fans from Europe!!
I can not wait for this movie!! It looks great, and Coen brothers are four time Academy Award winning filmmakers!! So to “ja” and all other haters, please, you are all pathetic, you would give anything if Aniston could be in a movie from them, so here only we can see your hate and nothing else!!
I love Brad, I like him better now than ever, he finally looks like 44-year old man and a father of six - and in my opinion there is nothing as sexy as a devoted father!!
Brad did not pick up his trophy last year, so they just presented it to him. Congrats on receiving the trophy and congrats on the twins.
Congrats to Brad for winning the best actor award.
More favorable reviews are coming in!!!! The movie looks hilarious!!!
Can’t wait to see it!!!!!!
# 124 raye @ 08/27/2008 at 4:14 pm thelookoflove1365 @ 08/27/2008 at 3:39 pm CONGRATULATIONS to the yummiest DADDY!
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The writer at People.com is an idiot. The trophy handed to Brad was for his Best Actor last year. He did not win this year as the ceremony has just started and BAR is not even in the competition, its out of competition.
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>b> A stunned Brad Pitt was awarded the best actor trophy on Wednesday at the Venice International Film Festival, the same honor he was given last year for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
“I guess you forgot something here years ago,” said the mistress of ceremonies. Holding up the gold cup to honor Pitt’s performance in the upcoming dark comedy Burn After Reading, she said, “Brad, this is yours.”
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LOL!
I think the writer did not realize that the first paragraph contradicts the 2nd paragraph. If one is only skimming and not reading carefully, one would assume that the award was for BAR. But then how can that be when the festival just started!
Oh well! Congratulations to Brad anyway!
hooray
You are right, the excitement of him winning in the headline had me reading the story wrong!
From People:
A stunned Brad Pitt picked up his best actor trophy that he was awarded for last year’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
“I guess you forgot something here years ago,” said the mistress of ceremonies Wednesday at the Venice International Film Festival. Holding up the gold cup to honor Pitt’s performance in the film, she said, “Brad, this is yours.”
Pitt – attending the Venice film festival opening ceremony to premiere Burn After Reading – looked surprised as he walked up onstage.
“Congratulations for your twins,” she also told Pitt as she handed him the trophy.
“You can run but you can’t hide,” Pitt said laughing. “It was an honor to receive this last year and it’s an honor to receive it this year. Thank you very much.”
The mistress of ceremonies then held up a yellow flower. “This is for your friend George,” she told Pitt referring to George Clooney, his Burn After Reading costar.
dont worry bout jens movie it good for sure better than pitt we have high hopes. you should care pitts film its not good this according to some reviews.otherwise go and watch it yourself.
Brad Pitt. What an idiot. What a fake little chameleon. What a digusting human being. Evidently he was always ugly on the inside, now his outside matches.
oVEREXPOSEDANDSTUPID @ 08/27/2008 at 4:40 pm
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LOL. Jen hen is screaming at ocean.
what’s wrong w/ the thread??
LMAO@ yellow flower for George. Holy moly, the one, the only Brad Pitt is damn gorgeous.
ja @ 08/27/2008 at 4:40 pm
Why are you so hateful person, I already said, Coen brothers are four time Academy Award winning filmmakers, they are great filmmakers and I think that there is no actor or actress that would turn down an opportunity to work with them! Including Aniston, and you all know that!! Only because her movies like “Rumor has it” and some others were so bad, and her movie “He is not something” is pushed back two times, now you - Aniston fans - are being evil towards Brad and Angelina! Look, Brad and Angelina are not guilty if Aniston is not good actress, we all are responsible only for our work, ok? Don’t be hateful, it is not healthy!
Now I finally have to admit that George, while greyhaired and wrinkled, seems younger and fresher than Brad.
———old Brad Pitt—why don´t you come back?
Brad looks so hot, I wanna eat him up.
#138 I guess he was way to busy doing what is really important in life to worry about an award. Same a Jolie she doesn’t even know where her Oscar is.
…flop.
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