“Burn After Reading” (2008) is a not-very-good espionage movie with George Clooney. It’s kinda stupid, actually. But it does have a lot of people I like in it (Brad Pitt, the dude from the movie about the guy who plays the drum, Frances what’s-her-face, John Malkovich), and there are some characters that made me laugh. It wasn’t like I thought two hours of my life had been stolen. But when it was over, I was like: “What was up with that?” Then I reminded myself it was a Coen brothers movie, which means that probably nothing was up with anything.
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The one thing I’ve noticed about the last couple of Peter Berg movies is that Mark Wahlberg gets his ass whupped. First “Lone Survivor” and now “Deepwater Horizon” (2016), a retelling of the 2010 BP oil exploration disaster. (Good thing Berg isn’t doing the “Ted” series, otherwise the bear probably would have killed Marky Mark by now.) This one reminded me a little of 1970s disaster flicks (“The Towering Inferno,” “Earthquake”) where chaos is the star and we’re just trying to survive along with all the actors until the end. Things were a lot less gory 40 years ago, though.
Finally, toward the end of “Zoolander 2” (2016), I laughed out loud. I don’t know whether it was that particular gag or just the absurdity of the whole thing that finally got to me. This movie is stupid. It knows it’s stupid. It knows that you know it’s stupid. It wasn’t trying not to be stupid. In fact, because it knows that you know it’s stupid, it doubled down on stupid until stupid became absurd and I laughed out loud. Just like the original, there’s dopey male models and world-saving hijinks. Thank god Penelope Cruz has a sense of humor.
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