Film Freak Central

Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Spike Jonze

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The moment you realize that Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich is more than just another ultra-high-concept indie calling-card is right at the end, when all that quirk reveals itself as bleak, desperate, lonesome. It's the first time most of us conceptualized the idea of Charlie Kaufman, in fact--the moment that any follow-up became a cause célèbre. It's silly, really, to bother trying to synopsize the film, but for the uninitiated, it's about a failed puppeteer's discovery of a portal behind a file cabinet on the low-ceilinged floor of an office designed for the dwarf wife of a sea captain. ("Curs-ed t'ing," he calls her.) The portal leads, of course, to the inside of John Malkovich's skull for around fifteen minutes before expelling the interloper to the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Looking here, it's possible to begin to trace Kaufman's auteur obsessions with interiors, with language (in a job interview hinged on malaproprisms and miscommunications), with doubling, identity, surrealism, systems of belief, and, sneakily, science-fiction. What's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, after all, but a fairly extraordinary SF piece that just happens to be one of the best movies about love ever made?

State of Mind: FFC Interviews "Synecdoche, New York" Writer-Director Charlie Kaufman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Riding a mental rollercoaster with one of our heroes.

 

October 26, 2008 | I meet Charlie Kaufman in a dark little passage beneath Denver's Hotel Monaco, both of us surveying a spread of cold-cuts and a nice salad of greens and gorgonzola on the final day of a gruelling month-long junket in support of Kaufman's new film and hyphenate debut, Synecdoche, New York. His first interview of the day following a late-night, (packed) post-screening Q&A at the University of Colorado, I confided in Kaufman that I'd been vying for a chance to speak with him for over four years now after being thwarted at a junket for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--an experience I documented in an essay that developed a fun second life, probably got one of my local publicists fired, and doomed me to never getting offered another junket again. Mr. Kaufman asked me what it was like. I said it was like being a bug buoyed on the back of an ant colony and finally expelled not for smelling bad, but for smelling bad in the wrong way. We'd come back to this a few minutes later.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

****/****
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw Manny Farber wrote this about Orson Welles over fifty years ago: "Welles bequeathed to Hollywood, which had grown fat and famous on hurtling action films, a movie (Citizen Kane) that broke up into a succession of fragments, each one popping with aggressive technique and loud, biased slanting of the materials of real life." During that same period, Farber referred to Preston Sturges as a filmmaker working eternally within "the presence of Dada and surrealism"--and it's taken over fifty years, it seems, for the United States to produce what is at its essence the product of a marriage between Welles's self-conscious audacity and Sturges's common touch: Charlie Kaufman--more specifically, the Charlie Kaufman Screenplay.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

****/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the book by Chuck Barris
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw The second of two biographies of television personalities to make it to the cinema in 2002, George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is almost the anti-Auto Focus, tying itself to the chaotic memoirs of game-show host Chuck Barris and locating its identity in anarchic precepts of post-modernism (in sharp contrast to Auto Focus' reductive realism). Curiously, both films find a climax of sorts in a dream--I should say "dementia"--sequence wherein the stars of the show find their fantasies acted out through their small-screen vehicles. Where Bob Crane's bizarre personal life appears to be truth, however (the crux of familial challenges of the film seem to hinge on Crane not being moody and never having had a penile implant), Barris's contention that he split time between "The Gong Show" and being a fulltime CIA assassin gives considerably more pause. The real distinguishing quality of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is that it is a big-budget biopic that acts as simultaneously a satire of, and adherent to, the familiar progression of the genre--the layers of self-reflexivity so multi-foliate and rich that it comes as no surprise that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation., Being John Malkovich) is the scribe responsible for its slipperiness.

Junket Blues

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A less-than-"spotless" L.A. story

 

March 14, 2004 | An amazingly successful SimCity on the verge of spiralling out of control, Los Angeles at night on approach spreads out in every direction like a LiteBrite run riot, or an amazingly giant circuit board in a Douglas Adams/A.E. Van Vogt nightmare. The traffic looks pretty bad from a few thousand feet up, too. With twenty-one years left until the post-industrial wasteland of Blade Runner's City of Angels, everything appears to be coming along nicely. A pair of spotlights shot into the air most likely to announce the new Sizzler on Rodeo, but I imagined it was to herald one of those old newsreel, fur coat and spat premieres, right behind the barber college, maybe, that sits at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Shoehorned into a coach seat over the wing of one of those airplanes that seats about a hundred people, I quaffed my Pepsi with the quick rabbit-swallows necessitated by the tiny plastic cup they offer to the undesirables, and thought about the wisdom of Focus Features deciding to fly me from Denver to The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to attend the junket for Charlie Kaufman's bittersweet Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I wondered what I'd ever written to give them the impression that a junket and me would be a perfect fit. I wondered where I'd gone wrong.

Human Nature (2002) - DVD

½*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, Tim Robbins, Ken Magee
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

by Walter Chaw From the second screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the ink-stained wretch behind Spike Jonze's quirk classic Being John Malkovich, French music-video director Michel Gondry's sadly misguided nature/nurture sex romp Human Nature scores once or twice but ultimately thuds like a brick zeppelin. It's a film that thinks it a good idea for Rhys Ifans to appear either full monty or in a diaper for the majority of his performance, likewise that Patricia Arquette have a pelt of hair covering every curve of her Romanesque physique. (Though the latter is played for some surreal yuks as Ms. Arquette writhes on a miniature Empire State Building while a dwarf (Peter Dinklage) walks around in a biplane harness.) Human Nature, in short, isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is; neither is it as smart.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

****/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener
written and directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I don't feel up to writing about Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (hereafter Synecdoche), because, as with something like Mulholland Drive, it's in the writing about it that one is bound to discover one has said altogether too much about oneself and altogether not enough about the film. The picture is a lot like Nietzsche's abyss, you know: the more it's examined, the more it's a dissection of the critic's own fears and prejudices. There's a scene early on where theatre director Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman--cast because he's fabulous, and maybe because "Hoffman" incidentally rhymes with "Kaufman") sits by himself on the floor next to a telephone and we notice more than he does that there are a couple of strange boils growing on his leg. It's just something Caden lives with, and this visual comes sandwiched in the middle of an extended, uncomfortable sequence that begins with a gash to the forehead (and a glimpse into Caden's vanity when he's told it will scar), progresses through gum surgery and the revelation that Caden's contracted a virus that's made it difficult for him to salivate, and ends with his wife (Catherine Keener) and five-year-old daughter abandoning him, moving to Germany with monstrous nanny Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).