C/D -- Charlie Kaufman

yeah he's basically an existentialist. (or maybe a phenomenologist?) i think the woody allen comparison is apt, though kaufman's neuroses feel less corrosive (and therefore possibly less interesting). i like him a lot.

IOW, you wanted to watch a completely different movie?

Adaptation is a total dud. I was on the fence about it until seeing it for a second time.

Well, maybe, the movie started as a relationship between real people, but spent way too much time showing the interaction between Carrey and the imaginary Winslet. I didn't really see what was the point of it.

i mean gondry's hermetic style here is as much as the culprit for me as kaufman's writing. but for christ's sake shallow self-involved hipsters break up all the time and their solipsistic fetishization of their relationships AND their break-ups stay in their own head where it belongs!

i mean i just ask for one "wow these two are kind of pathetic huh?" kind of moment to validate this feeling but it never came.

I would usually agree with you 100% here, but he really does give a startlingly restrained performance in this film - it's a revelation.

Eternal Sunshine, OTOH, is brilliant, much better than I gave it credit for at the time. The only one of Kauffman's scripts that has a heart and emotions and human messiness, rather than just reading like a meta-joke or pure formal problem.

I see what you're saying, but I personally love his first two films for daring to be so meta and formal in an age of formulaic blockbusters. Also, I think they have more heart and emotional resonance than you give them credit for; it's just that those aspects tend to be a bit overwhelmed by the wackiness.

Uhh, that *was* part of the point of it, wasn't it? I mean, they've wiped their memories of their relationship then spend time scrambling thru the mind trying desperately to recover it out of regret. At least thats what I brought from it.

Caveat: I was quite stoned when I watched it, so my attention span was all over the place; I need to watch it again. Or several times, even.

That was the ENTIRE point of the movie.

look im perfectly willing to admit that playing under the covers with a lover* can be a perfect memory you wouldnt want to lose, a real life affirming moment and all that, but on the other hand it is a major cliche and a bit cloying the way it is staged. and this is symptomatic of the ENTIRE movie for me in a sense. elevating the banal and quite boring (come on, their relationship is boring!) visscisitudes of a typical relationship and subsequent break up to the heights of sublimity is just sort of, well, pandering to people's already heightened self-regard in these matters.

in other words: i wanted some objectivity and critical distance but didn't really get any. (tho this appears in the winslet character being a bit of a bitch, but not in the Carey character if i remember)

*I may have this wrong

I guess that must mean I have boring cutsey relationships and I am a neurotic, paranoid writer trying to find validation who is a boring sod.

Or something.

I don't think the point was so much that being in bed with Clementine was the greatest memory Joel ever had as much as it was each memory that was taken away made him that much more desperate to hold onto the ones he had left; the implication was that if he could hold onto at least one memory of her, he could get back all of the others.

Every long-term relationship I know of has extremely rough patches where the very things that attracted you to each other now drive you completely crazy; I thought the movie did a marvelous job of capturing this.

y'know, almost all movies are about imaginary people.

Totally spot on!

And I'm going to watch this RIGHT NOW too!

see one (1) Maysles Bros film

and it panders to people who think their romantic relationships are the ultimate existential experience that can be had. fuck that.
hrm. i can understand where this is coming from. but again, different viewers, different responses. i don't think this re: relationships, but i like the movie. i just thought it was about, well, life, not nec in an existential way.)

i like adaptation too. esp the ending.

hi john.

there was a twilight zone episode that had a woman without a mouth on it, and that gave me nightmares as a kid.

I think Eternal Sunshine is basically a good romantic comedy which, in a world where romantic comedies are absolute shite, is a bit of a revelation. It does have some visually stunning set pieces too.

BJM is great. I think it's lazy to criticise it for being Meta. I hate that knee-jerk reaction that people have to something being meta. It's almost as if, because the arm chair critic is clever enough to be able to know the correct technical term - metafiction - then it must be a shallow trick that only stupid people would buy into. BJM revolves around a really interesting idea. Its Metaness is secondary.

found this almost exactly equal parts riveting and annoying, which is a neat trick I guess

at least it was an admirably impenetrable way to toss a few of Netflix's millions into a snowy trashcan

I definitely agree w/ flappy that Synecdoche was his peak and the ultimate iteration of The Kaufman Thing, this convinced me he'll never top it

something that occurred to me a couple days after watching:

when they're in the car and she notices the abandoned house with the brand new swing-set outside and he responds irritably, he's frustrated because she's noticing design flaws in his own imagination. despite her being a figment of his imagination (or whatever) she has agency which threatens to derail his fantasy. i've had similar things happen to me in dreams, where some part of my brain suddenly becomes aware that it's just a dream, while another part feels disappointed or annoyed that the ruse is up

one thing i didn't like about the ending was i felt like the build-up of layers of chaotic meta-psychological navel-gazery was just getting started; it would've been fun if it had continued to tie itself into knots for another 30 mins instead of just bursting into song

I definitely agree w/ flappy that Synecdoche was his peak and the ultimate iteration of The Kaufman Thing, this convinced me he'll never top it

― Simon H., Saturday, September 19, 2020 12:12 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

haven't watched any of them recently enough but i found the end of synecdoche dragged on foreverrrr. i think being john malkovich and adaptation are my faves

flops i'm with you on the ending

also thanks for reminding me about the swingset exchange, one of my favorite parts of the movie

i was totally waiting for like, the names from the credit of the movie set in the diner to show up as characters

one thing i like about charlie kaufman movies is they seem really fun to write. i saw or read an interview with him where he said the usual line about how 'writing is excruciating torture', which is prob true, but i like to think that i'd have a blast if *i* were writing a CK-style screenplay

one thing i like about charlie kaufman movies is they seem really fun to write. i saw or read an interview with him where he said the usual line about how 'writing is excruciating torture', which is prob true, but i like to think that i'd have a blast if *i* were writing a CK-style screenplay

Synecdoche is a great movie about one of my favorite themes: trying to determine the correct way to lead "the examined life" (and how you completely destroy your life when you fuck it up)

I wanted to love this but

same. by the time the Kael recitation started the roomie and I basically exclaimed "oh, come on!" in concert.

especially since the Kael review has sharper writing than Kaufman offers.

I wondered aloud if the movie was overlong on purpose as a supremely meta reference to the revie. I think that was when I really turned against it, lol

The horror-movie setup & lighting & camera-work made the first half of this weirdly tense. I watched this with my wife and she was sure a jump scare was coming any minute ("Don't go in the basement!" etc.)

I can see the ending of Synecdoche as dragging, but that last scene with the old woman? The slow fade to white? the in ear command to "DIE"?

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/498/077/88e.png

Too on the nose

Maybe for you but it hit me in the gut! I was 16 when it came out but damn, still does!

Synecdoche is also his funniest movie

OTM

I love the overeager actor that doesn't age yet continues working with Caden thru Death of a Salesman up into Caden's 70s in the warehouse(s).

"I shall walk more... ambivalently."
"Yeah that's good, use that."

Jon Brion's score is perfect and I can't imagine the movie without it

i started antkind & im enjoying

found this almost exactly equal parts riveting and annoying, which is a neat trick I guess

― Simon H., Friday, September 18, 2020 11:57 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

at least it was an admirably impenetrable way to toss a few of Netflix's millions into a snowy trashcan

― Simon H., Saturday, September 19, 2020 12:07 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

More people should post about this movie because I'm not sure what I made of it but everyone so far otm. The Tulsey Town bit was my favourite, nearly leaned over into 'actually menacing' rather than flirting with it in an uncomfortable way. I liked Jessie Buckley's sort of drunk persona in the high school and the dumpster full of drink cartons was super-creepy to me.
All the lengthy quotations and reiterations of online opinions just remind me of that Little Britain (sorry) sketch where the romantic novelist is trying to fill pages: ""Do you know the Bible?" said Lord Harper. "No," said Geraldine. "I've never even heard of it." "Oh, it's really good. Let me read it to you," said Lord Harper. "Oh, OK then," said Geraldine. "Chapter One. Genesis. In the beginning God created heaven and earth..."'"

I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since watching it nearly two weeks ago, which I take as a good sign.

My problem with this is what it did with the weird/surreal. Commonly in art that deals with the weird either it's part of all the characters' world and they don't notice it as the proverbial fish don't notice the water they're swimming in (as in Synecdoche) or it's used to discomfit and disorientate the protagonist - and the viewer. This film doesn't take either of those paths. When a character in one scene is an ancient and bed-ridden old lady and immediately afterwards is a dancing housewife, and the protagonist obviously notices it but doesn't lose her shit, you know that for all the grand themes of death, aging, relationships etc, that the world we're in isn't real and nothing is at stake. My favourite bits were probably the two car trips, which realistically and painfully depicted her relationship crisis with just enough of a weird edge to keep you on your toes.

Question: who did she turn into in the second car trip, after the Kael monologue, discussing some book (I forget which)?

I haven't thought about it much since September which is a bummer

I go back to September all the time

do you remember

https://i.imgur.com/NYyGITK.jpg
i was your Butch

ack hueg!

Lol

She was very good, much better movie on the whole even if it was unsuccessful or uneven than Wild Rose, the only other thing I've seen her in

I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since watching it nearly two weeks ago, which I take as a good sign.
― A White, White Gay (cryptosicko), Sunday, October 11, 2020 4:25 PM (two months ago)

I started I'm Thinking of Ending Things a couple of months ago, stopped 20 minutes in--just wasn't in the mood--finally watched it this week. (Not in one sitting, though I of course restarted.) Cryptosicko's comment is pretty much where I am right now: I'm fairly sure I won't forget it, and there are strange films I forget immediately. I don't think I'd started the third season of Fargo yet when I made the first attempt, so I didn't know Jessie Buckley--she had some kind of year there. This is a lazy way to approach the film, I know, but I think my two favourite parts were when it felt like it was about to turn into a horror film: the scratched-up door to the basement, and the whispered warning from the Tulsey Town server.

I haven't read the novel the film is based on, but I have seen it classified as horror. I suspected that Kaufman heavily, er, Kaufmanized the source material, but this makes me curious to read how this material might play with a more genre-specific orientation (though, again, haven't read, so I have no idea if that's what the novel actually is).

the novel is definitely horror

"psychological horror" i guess

yeah, Horrorible

oh I thought you meant Antkind. hold fire on the author of I'm thinking of ending things

didn't love I’m Thinking of Ending Things while watching it the first time but it has stayed in my mind and I now want to see it again

My partner audibly hating every second of it made it hard for me to form a considered opinion.

i watched what the theater claimed was the official big screen debut of Ending Things with Kaufman there to talk, preceded by his new sad-poetry-slam-meets-john-wilson short Jackals and Fireflies.

i got to ask Kaufman a question that's been on my mind with most of his movies which is if his intent is to leave the audience playing with the puzzlebox and trying to keep up with his story or if he means for us just to try to hang on and enjoy the immediate ride. He said his goal was for people to appreciate the moment to moment experience of the film and not get caught up in the details, which gives it a framework for response on his terms: Jackals and Fireflies was not much to write home about but I found Ending Things equal parts disturbing, frustrating and very very good. Gonna have to see it again. It's very much an existential horror film with a knockout cast.