Burn After Reading

Slothrop: When you figure out that this CIA movie is absolutely not about the CIA in any way whatsoever, it gets much better. Discerning viewers will have this figured out within the first two minutes in which we get a birds-eye view of D.C. and a series of camera-click-close-ups, all the way down to a synecdoche low-level shot of an agent's black shoes click-clacking on the hard floor of some government agency. If it looks like a CIA movie, and it sounds like a CIA movie, and you know Brad Pitt plays a dancing gay guy, it's not a CIA movie. In fact, Slothrop suspects that's what it is actually about: that it's not about what you think it's about. Which, I guess, kinda does make it a CIA flick. 

It's a likeable movie, with goofy characters. Which, of course, made thinking about The Big Lebowski impossibly non-avoidable, just like the orange hippopotamus you shouldn't be thinking about right now. So when was it that you knew, really knew that the Big Lebowski was more important than the Bible? Slothrop can't remember, but it wasn't on the first, nor the second viewing. Nor the third. How does that happen? And what are the odds that it might happen to this here flick? Almost non-existent, but you kinda can't predict these things, especially when they're not about what they are about.