All serious Academy Award winning work and no play could make Joel and Ethan Coen dull boys. So they decided it was time for something else, not necessarily a movie, but a playground of their own where anything can happen, including Brad Pitt with really, really bad hair.

The Coens’ latest, “Burn After Reading,” has an insane, hard-to follow plot, that makes you want to constantly ask the person sitting next to you in the theater things like “But I thought this guy was with them…Why did they kill him? Wasn’t he with them? Oh, he was actually with the Russians! Oooohhhhh!”

The basic idea of the film is that there is no basic idea, only a series of twists and coincidences, a string of separate events that leads to one big disaster. It’s not a parody, but it’s highly ironic. The directors took the espionage flick to the next level and made it a farce about money and sex, populated with secret agents, greedy fitness trainers, neurotic women trying to get a husband through the internet and a washed-up, retired (dismissed) former law enforcer.

The latter is Osborne Cox, played by John Malkovich, an ex-agent who has nothing else than his memories, as he lost his job due to having inappropriate relations with the whiskey bottle and is in the process of losing his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), due to her inappropriate relations with a third party, played by George Clooney. At some unfortunate point, he loses his memories as well, in the form of a CD containing his memoirs, in a Gym locker room. The information is of course, found by no do-gooders, but by two clueless fitness trainers that only want money and figure they can get some by the use of blackmail against a trained former CIA analyst.

This is the point where all the action goes downhill and the snow ball keeps getting bigger and bigger, up to the point where it gets bloody, with some cold-hearted murders, in true Coens style.

The movie’s all-star cast does a pretty good job making it all more and more absurd, but so much funnier. Brad Pitt seems to have the time of his life playing an all-muscles-no-brain goofy kind of guy, fitness trainer at a gym called Hardbodies and is leaving the impression that he enjoys taking a break from the on and off screen image of the perfect man, perfect dad and husband. Clooney plays a charming adulterer unhappy in his marriage as well in his affair that gets tangled-up in the international intrigue, as cosmic karma and the internet involve him with Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s wife), Brad Pitt’s character fellow trainer, a depressed and neurotic woman who only wants the money for a plastic surgery that would keep the internet men lining up outside her door.

This is definitely not a movie that would forever change your life and leave you anything but giggly, but it’s a spontaneous and funny way to spend 1 hour 36 minutes and then forget all about who was on whose side.