More Movies

I watched two more movies on the same topic that I wrote about a few days ago, namely Milk and Burn after Reading. Or one was about American modern political history and one was about Washington. “Milk”, the story about the first openly gay publicly elected official, was great. When seeing a movie like that, it is difficult not to adore Sean Penn and Gus van Sant.

“Burn after Reading” is a Coen brothers movie and just as messed up as Coen brother movies always are. It is not about politics, but it is set in DC, mainly in Georgetown (though the outdoor scenes from that part of the city are unfortunately filmed in Brooklyn, so you can’t see how it really looks there), with CIA involved in the background. It starts with one person desperately wanting a plastic surgery and two others having an affair, and ends with three people killed and one person shipped off to Venezuela by the CIA. Martin, who has some aversions against Georgetown, thinks it is very telling about the people who lives there and about Washington in general, since “this city is filled with professional incompetence combined with intellectual arrogance”. While I do think that DC is a little less loony than portrayed in the movie, I agree to a certain extent with Martin’s description of Washington careerists…

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