Armagideon Time - The Clash - London Calling B-side - 1979

So I watched the Coen Bros Burn After Reading last night...I have mixed feelings about the Coen Bros and equally mixed feelings on the film. On the one hand they are the directors of my favorite film of all time, Miller's Crossing...a beautiful, sad and lyrical film that manages to encompass all of the genre trappings, cartoonishness, and showy violence the Coen's are known for while still being a touching statement about loneliness, self-destruction, redemption and loyalty.

The Coens have made many other fine films as well the wonderfully tawdry Blood Simple, the hilarious Raising Arizona, the enigmatic Barton Fink, their Oscar films Fargo and No Country for Old Men, and of course the sublime Big Liebowski...but they have also made some crap. Hudsucker Proxy is an interesting failure, whereas Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers are just failures. And even in their best films lies the sense that we are watching a movie. Even the semi-realistic tones of films like Fargo and No Country are steeped in cinematic convention and idiosyncratic behavior. Even when their movies are good...they remain fake.

Burn After Reading is probably closest to Hudsucker in terms of it's success, though the two films are very different. The attempt to satirize modern Washington DC, a city where even the people not involved in the government are involved in the government, is interesting and certainly not something that I have seen explored before. It is probably the only comedy I can think of that uses the Valerie Plame affair as it's cheif inspiration. And there are some wonderful little bits of characterization (Most of the stuff Brad Pitt does, Clooney's dildo chair, JK Simmons doing his usual unflabbable thing) but as a comedy...it just isn't that funny. And as a politcal mystery...it's rather lackluster...which again, is sort of the point, but then it needed to be a stronger comedy.

The Clash's Reggea attempts are much like this. It was an admirable attempt to fuse punk with the new found sounds of Carribean music...to fuse the tone of one dissaffected culture with the tone of another. Again, the attempt is admirable, but how often do you want to listen to it?