Grilled (2005)

My Rating : ***.5

EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND star Ray Romano takes a lead role alongside Kevin James (THE KING OF QUEENS) in this comic buddy movie. Playing two meat salesmen, Romano and James’s characters fall into a… EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND star Ray Romano takes a lead role alongside Kevin James (THE KING OF QUEENS) in this comic buddy movie.

Grilled

Playing two meat salesmen, Romano and James’s characters fall into a little bother and end up having to make a big sale quick before they end up in the same state as the goods they’re peddling. Juliette Lewis and Burt Reynolds make brief appearances.

Burn After Reading (2008)

My Rating : ****

MovieStudio Quote >> “Confusing, Funny and Confidential!”

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.

Burn After Reading

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.

Burn After Reading

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? This is the first Coen film in almost 20 years not shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, yet the “new” guy, Emmanuel Lubezki (CHILDREN OF MEN), has created as visceral and emotionally fraught a high-definition cartoon as any since BARTON FINK.