SOME WICKED: Dashiell Brown's Blog

The Cohen Bros. latest film, Burn After Reading, is a hilarious account of the idiocy of red-tape bureaucrats and how this idiocy obviously transfers down to the citizens who invariably get caught in the red tape as well, creating a huge microcosm of idiots trying to control other idiots. Furthermore, this film aims to prove that this red-tape, supposedly used to serve as a measure of control and efficiency, does the exact opposite: it’s self-importance becomes undermined by the fact that red-tape measures are utterly inefficient and ultimately worthless.

The humor really lies in the plot where some idiots at the Hardbodies gym find some “important” numbers and dates and mistakenly think the information is highly top secret and worth $50,000. Even funnier is the owner of this information, “Oz” Cox, so believes in his own self-importance, just like the Wizard of Oz, that his delusion further cements the delusions of the idiots at the gym who try to blackmail him, so much so that they take further measures and try to “sell” this information to the Russians, as if we were still in the Cold War. And spoiler alert here, if you didn’t predict in the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film, in that very sick and twisted Cohen fashion, it all comes down to be “much a do about nothing.”

But given the state of the economy and what the government thinks they’re doing with it, don’t be surprised if, when you help an old lady across the street, you get handed a pink slip by a man in black: you’ve just been served the “Good Samaritan Tax” in the name of red-tape. The title “Burn After Reading” is a making a joke. The red-tape that surrounds us does more harm than good and, in this film, causes people to commit murders. The red tape actually makes us insane, and this is the same red tape we are depending on to fix the world’s financial woes. God help us all.

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