CJ Kennedy over at Living Cinema gets mad at David Poland’s odd analysis of Burn After Reading:
Most of us see the recently announced September 12th wide-release of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading as cause for celebration, but Poland puts on his Oscar colored spectacles and sees Focus Features hitting the Oscar eject button. In his mind, the picture is clearly no good and Focus is dumping it. To Poland it’s tantamount to a stink bomb.
He then chews through the cat turds like a dog chained up in the backyard and finds a bevy of evidence that the release date means Burn is DOA as far as Oscar is concerned. The horror!
I don’t remember what all the evidence was because my eyes started to glaze over and I’m pretty sure at one point I felt my soul actually trying to leave my body in an attempt to escape the utter drudgery of Poland’s peanut-picking Oscar obsession.
Finally, mercifully, at the very end of his little analysis, he concludes that ”perhaps The Coens have just learned the trick of lowering expectations and being satisfied by a decent box office result (likely under $50 million) and less awards pressure.” Gee David, do you think? Or maybe they’ve “learned the trick” of making good movies and that’s the end of it. Is it possible it was never intended to be an Oscar movie? Does Lebowski after Fargo mean anything to you?
If there is one thing we know for certain about the Coens, they don’t much care about awards, lest we forget Ethan’s lengthy acceptance speeches. They are probably two directors, maybe the only two, who never seemed driven by that particular poison, which makes them makes hard not to love. In this wacky awards clusterfuck we go through every year it’s unimaginable to think of any good film as not being Oscar fodder but indeed, some are not. We won’t know if Burn After Reading is an awards movie until after we see it.
