Funny Girl(s): Truly funny female movie characters

Actually, putting this together was harder than I anticipated, and certainly not because I don't find women funny or because there aren't a lot of very funny women in Hollywood.

That's not the problem. Instead, it's that when you browse any list of the truly great comedic roles, the sad fact is that most of them are played by men (the reverse, at least right now, is true on TV, but that's a different subject for a different day). It's just a fact, and one that we (or at least I) can't change, so instead of lingering on it, in honor of the funny women of "Bridesmaids," here are six very funny female roles from my movie shelf that I go back to often:

Tracy Flick, "Election"
Not exactly the cute Reese Witherspoon we know now, but her role in this high school battle of wits with the outmatched but game Matthew Broderick is her funniest one, and every time Tracy scrunches up her face in righteous anger, I still laugh out loud.

Marge Gunderson, "Fargo"
Not surprising, I suppose, that Joel Coen would write (along with his brother, of course) the best female character he's ever come up with for his wife, Frances McDormand. Marge, the very pregnant and just as clever police chief played by McDormand, gives the movie much of its sense of place, its strongest suit, and is just extremely funny along the way.

Annie Hall, "Annie Hall"
You can argue that even when he played opposite women his own age, Woody Allen didn't necessarily think much of them, because he made Annie Hall as hippie and dippy as possible, but thanks to Diane Keaton, hilarious, too.

Patricia Franchini, "Breathless"
Her French was truly atrocious (which provided much of the humor), but Jean Seberg goes toe to toe with Jean Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's lighter-than-air gangster flick of sorts, and their flirting is just pure comedic bliss.

Poppy, "Happy-Go-Lucky"
The real charm of Sally Hawkins in this infectious Mike Leigh movie is that her Poppy is so thoroughly upbeat throughout that you want to either cheer for or choke her, depending on your outlook. In the end, it's a role so great it can melt even the most cynical of hearts, even mine.

Enid, "Ghost World"
Whatever happened to Thora Birch? Before she seemingly disappeared completely, she played Enid in this movie based on the comic book by Daniel Clowes, a character who savagely skewers everything that's wrong in her world even as she searches for her own place in it.

And there you have it. A brief list, I know, but please feel free to add any I may have snubbed (there are many, many I'm sure) and go see "Bridesmaids" this weekend if you like to laugh with truly funny women.

"Burn After Reading": "No biggie," but so what?

It really must be nice to be the Coens. What they've essentially done with "Burn After Reading" is enlisted as many of their A-list buddies as they could wrangle into what is easily one of their most nihilistic flicks - and probably one for devoted Coen fans only (of which I'm surely one.)

It's not that their twisted spy caper has no plot. It does, filled with the usual kind of Coen brothers' characters who are not terribly bright and almost always out to serve nothing but their own interest. As with "No Country for Old Men" and all their best flicks (which this isn't quite among), they've taken a conventional genre and added enough of their touches to make it a nasty little world that only they could create (even if in this case it's more than a little too close to the surveillance-crazy one we live in now.)

But this flick otherwise couldn't possibly be much different than the Coens' Oscar-winning triumph, and that's certainly something that should be celebrated. Despite its endearingly despicable characters, this is a screwball comedy until it comes to its inevitably bloody end, so the bottom line question is is it funny?

Well, after a slow start, the answer is very often yes, and thanks much more to Brad Pitt than I would have guessed. Judging from the trailers only, I expected to find his personal trainer to simply be annoying, but he's one of those Coen idiots that the brothers love to create, and Pitt jumps into it with gusto and steals just about every scene he's in. He doesn't quite go, as Robert Downey Jr. put it in "Tropic Thunder," "full retard," but it's pretty darn close and just very funny, especially when he's confronted with John Malkovich's CIA agent Ozzie Cox, who's as crazy as Pitt's Chad is stupid.

And what heart there is in all this darkness comes from Frances McDormand's obsession with plastic surgery in her quest for love and Richard Jenkins as the boss who loves her though she completely fails to notice. Without telling you any more to spoil this odd little flick, it may be the theft of intelligence from Malkovich's ousted spook that offers the semblance of a plot, but it's the three employees of the Hardbodies gym - Pitt, McDormand and Jenkins - that give the violence we all know is coming as much resonance as would be possible in such a wacky movie. (Jenkins, by the way, is just someone I always like to see, so I've just added last year's "The Visitor" to my Netflix queue to make up for overlooking that flick he toplined.)

In the end, it all really adds up to "no biggie," as JK Simmons's sardonic CIA supervisor says in wrapping it all up, but so what? It's not transcendent in the least and not quite the commentary on our current state of affairs that the Coens may have intended, but as a 90-minute lark with a dark wink, I'll take it and enjoy it. And they can always get "Serious" again next year with a flick about judaism and morality starring Richard Kind, so just take this little side trip while you can.