O-kaaaaaayyyy...

Burn After Reading. (Spoiler Alert!)

That movie is now scratched off my mental list of wanna-sees. Is it ever! Here's the thing -- I feel like I usually can handle dark comedy. But this was a little too much for me to handle. I think the key to keeping a dark comedy funny is to only kill characters we either (A) don't know well enough to care about or (B) hate and won't care if they die. If you DO kill off a character we have any sympathy for, you shouldn't actually show it happening.

In "Burn After Reading," they did NOT follow these guidelines! They killed the funniest character in the whole show, thus killing most of the funny for the rest of the movie, and then they killed the only guy who seemed to have a decent head on his shoulders, which made me sad. I know, the irony is supposed to be what's comedic, but having to watch him be brutally killed was really terrible. And I hate graphic grossness anyway. And murdering in general. So yeah. But I mean, I got it. I got the jokes. It just wasn't quite my taste.

What was funny is that Frances McDormand, who plays the lady who unwittingly causes all the trouble, does a great job of playing this character who seems to think she's in a spy movie. She's melodramatic and delivers all those cliche lines she's probably seen on TV shows or read in paperback novels. She was brilliant. So was Brad Pitt as a dumb, classless gym rat who never seems to know what's going on but is ready to jump in and be a part of it. The best part of the movie was his phone conversation with John Malkovich, in which he's trying to get a reward for finding a CD of what he thinks is highly classified secret information...it gives me an insight into some of the people who call the station thinking they have a Grade-A story for our newsroom. It's hilarious.

I also laughed every time Malkovich said the word "memoir" even though I know that probably wasn't supposed to be funny.

This isn't the kind of movie that you leave feeling good about the world outside the movie theater, and it isn't even one that you leave repeating all the great one-liners. It just leaves you feeling much like the two CIA agents at the end of the film when they say, "What did we learn? Uh...not to do it again? Although I don't know what it was we DID..."

Next on the list are "The House Bunny" (which, let's face it, I'll probably just wait to see when it shows up in the Redbox machine), and "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist." As you probably know, I'm a Michael Cera fan, and the premise of the movie looked cute, so I think it'll be worth watching. Ooh! I also saw a preview for a movie adaptation of one of my favorite books of all time, "The Secret Life of Bees." Can't wait to see that!

OK, that's all I've got for now. Until later! ;)