C/D -- Charlie Kaufman

thanks! yeah I couldn't see the title or the author on that but I wasn't looking very closely

The Wallace book also has the essay on David Lynch and the making of Lost Highway, from a script describing it as a "psychogenic fugue"...

I WISH I wrote this letterboxd review:

basically an amalgamation of everything kaufman sucks at. he spends the entire film briefly presenting these new philosophical ideas through his tedious dialogue yet never expands on these ideas. one minute he’s talking about existentialism and time, then about female liberation and feminism, then about unreciprocated love/relationships, then about death and aging, then about how desires and fantasies of the impossible (think of simping) can affect you. i’m well aware he tends to try juggling a lot of ideas with subtext and metaphors, but it doesn’t even feel like he tried making something meaningful from this. everything even slightly interesting is put on the backburner for an “epic charlie kaufman mindfuck moment” and pretty much ditches these ideas after it’s given some meaningless monologue voiceover about it. in the last 15-20 minutes or so there’s an abrupt tonal change, but its subtext was the closest kaufman got to elaborate on one of the aforementioned ideas, yet instead there’s just a plot twist that explains why/how everything in the course of the movie happened, and it just doesn’t work for me. i understand the film is supposed to be vague but it isnt concise at all, just messy and shallow. which is why by the end, how everything untangles and plays off doesn’t leave you with a strong feeling about anything, but more of a mild reaction about everything kaufman couldn’t make his mind up on.

https://letterboxd.com/childofbucky/film/im-thinking-of-ending-things/

a couple things I noticed: Kaufman obviously cast Plemmons as an ersatz PSH, and there's a clear visual allusion to Eternal Sunshine at the end (overhead shot of the car in the snowy parking lot)

Antkind was astonishingly awful and this movie was fine, but he already covered all of this material and territory in Synecdoche. he reached the apex of everything he had been working towards to that point, and in the 12 years since he's had nothing new to say. I don't think the impact of Synecdoche can be understated, I still think it's one of the most formally unique films I've ever seen and a movie that really did advance the medium. So my expectations were very high for the book, they cut down to almost nothing, and now this movie is more treading water, not as bad as the book, but with just a few funny sections and nothing moving. SNY is extremely funny too

I've only ever seen the "time avalanche" structure of Synecdoche (50 years in 2 hours, unevenly dispersed) used in one other movie, The Long Gray Line. It really works!

Flappy, I agree with everything you say about Synecdoche, so I'm kind of surprised you hated Antkind that much. It certainly required several mental readjustments, and comedy that dark is always tricky, but I was blown away by it!

Wasn't dark enough. Synecdoche was much funnier. Antkind was insufferable because of the tics of the character. You're essentially put through 700 pages of a Kaufman character's inner monologue, and it is predictably torture. I thought it was a pale imitation of Sabbath's Theater and to think the same guy made Synecdoche makes me very depressed.

Kael still otm about A Woman Under the Influence.

She is. I like it but my biggest problem with that movie though is that Gena Rowlands disappears for the second half, and like all Cassavetes movies, it's too fucking long!

first hour of this is banging. second hour steadily lost me then caught me then lost me again, a little too much absorption of other texts into the text, the poem went a long way but the kael recitation felt very tedious while it was happening, and then the "baby it's cold outside" argument, my god lol. of course i get it. we are in many ways just traces of other people, our ideas just cobbled together from ideas we've absorbed from others and bent through our perspective. but i guess i was disappointed to figure out that the main character is a trace, a compilation of multiple people, very similar to though not as my profound as my disappointment that anomalisa was just about how shitty this one fuckin guy is. i still kinda liked it. kaufman deconstructs experience to the point where it's like we're viewing a life from the inside out. it's never not formally exciting. it's just if the ideas aren't working all the time i slip right out of whatever effect it's trying to have. anyway, always worth it to see toni collette work

circa's posts make me like it more, and i certainly lol'd v hard at the robert zemeckis credits roll in the middle

not gonna spoiler tag this bc i think it's very apparent early on, but i loved the motif of the various names she's called during the movie literally calling her phone. so stressful

i liked this quite a lot (much more than synecdoche), second circas thoughts.

everything is tinged.

the balance of everything seemed right to me, the audience is certainly not spoonfed & has to puzzle out how to contextualize everything similarly to how the main character is tracking where/how things went wrong in his life

i think its exceedingly clever even just the framing conceit of drawing in a diff type of audience w/ "im thinking of ending things" as a break-up movie

how do you do that hidden text thing?

I found most of the film irritating and hamhanded.

jed, click the "show formatting help" link under the submit post button

Alfred knows

No. Both of you are wrong.

My hot take. Irritating, yes. Consciously so. I think everything up until when they leave the house is easily the best thing he’s ever done. So clearly.

I’m not even a big Kaufman fan, but there’s so much to chew on moment to moment. And it’s a masterful tightrope walk. Lot of people shitting on this don’t seem to care to actually reckon with it. How is this “ham handed”? Somehow inscrutable yet obvious.

I like synecdoche but it swings so hard and doesn’t quite hit. The artifice is too clear, distractingly. This did the same things in such a more primal (fuck I hate myself) Kafka way.

Synecdoche is much less dialogue dependent. The ideas he's interested in and returns to frequently are best expressed (imo) visually, with terse absurdist dialogue and as little speeches as possible. Someone or something is taking the piss out of PSH in every scene of Synecdoche. When it's two people just barfing out hyperlinks and suggestions of themes and ideas he's been working through--mostly through images--I wanted to put a fucking gun in my mouth. When illustrated--the always burning house, the fucked up floor in Being John Malkovich and the cave and the dream sequence, the bed on the beach and the childhood home set and all the disappearances in Eternal Sunshine--the stuff he's interested in is really compelling, to me.

When delivered in a car setting that reminded me of The End of the Tour (I was stunned when he actually mentioned DFW), with a pathetic D-level PSH clone gibbering in Plemmons, and again, this just struck me as ineffective and silly and immature compared to his prior work. I was really disappointed. Doesn't even approach the awfulness of Antkind though, Jesus Christ. I'm Thinking of Ending Things has a great case (Plemmons is very good, just given a shit role), the cinematography is particularly great, and like I said I enjoy when the film is freed from that fucking car.

No I don't relate to these sad fanboys who feel they have wasted their lives! I don't find them interesting. At least Caden spent the last 50 years of his life DOING something, even if he never opened the show... I mean, fuck, look at that set! Sets?

But that's really not the issue--it's being monologued at in the most boring fucking possible setting for a scene in a movie. There is nothing more dull than a car conversation.

How are those car dialogues not beautifully suffocating? It’s grueling and entrancing in equal measure. That’s when I immediately knew the movie was special, never felt quite that way watching a dialogue. Their looks, tells, everything, it’s one hundred things.

Those initial car scenes are so elegantly put together. I wish you guys could see what see in it.

Elegance of composition and detail are not the primary components of great art io, otherwise there are some amazing oil paintings of dead things that would qualify, e.g. this:

https://i.pinimg.com/236x/0b/44/16/0b4416711eb115118f1c908fc8e30973.jpg

They're just suffocating. Beyond what I've written in this thread I can only hold up Synecdoche as proof of what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about "elegant composition," I'm talking about images illustrated. This movie has a dearth of stuff Kaufman is dependable for--the ice cream stop goes nowhere--but for an example of what I'm talking about, the Betty Boop cartoons playing on the windshield to the janitor. That's beautiful--not dull car conversations that add up to nothing more than bad breakup riffs, pop philosophy hyperlinks, and relationship/loneliness territory that has been mined clean. The windshield shot is alone here--Synecdoche is filled with them. And these aren't paintings, they're moving images: the flower tattoo wilting and falling off of Olive's arm as she dies, the search blimps over the make believe city, the pink box... There's nothing in here half as compelling as any of that stuff. "A wife shaped loneliness"--come on. That shit sucks. That's just Adele in the first half of Synecdoche! "Everyone's disappointing the more you get to know them." THANK YOU! Excellent. ALL THATS' NEEDED!!! Her behavior says the rest.

Long story short, Kaufman is not Rohmer!

Elegance of composition and detail are not the primary components of great art

Who says? Of course they can be.

I think the car conversations in this were fine - exactly the kind of chat that two youngish, college-educated people who don't know each other that well might have on a long desolate journey together.

more paintings of dead things pls

the ice cream stop goes nowhere

this is the best part of the second car ride imo. actually hits the note of eerie lynchiness

the negative letterboxd reviews make me want to like this movie more bc they're just... too much. everybody seems to think that charlie kaufman thinks that he's better than them (or seem to have gotten their taste insulted by an imported pauline kael review) and i don't get that at all from this movie. they have this same complex about ari aster tho

ppl are extremely obnoxious about Ari Aster yes (not that there aren't legit criticisms or ehat have you)

I see flappy found it "astonishingly awful", but any other thoughts on Antkind? I'm really thinking I might be into a Kaufman novel that even hints at the same territory of Synedoche, but the reviews I've read are (unsurprisingly) divisive.

i am also curious about antkind, prob exclusively bc i heard the main character invents and gets obsessed with a gender-neutral pronoun, which could be and probably is obnoxious but i like the idea anyway

The gender stuff in Antkind is a thin joke played out over 700 pages. The character is a caricature of an over the top overcompensating "guilty white male," and a couple of the main characters are very similar to Sabbath's Theater. That's vibe--neurotic self sabotaging perv.

There are some really cool Synecdoche style images in it, lots of bureaucracy absurdism, the lost film itself and how it's described. If you're a fan of any one of his movies I'd say it's a necessary read. It has been really polarizing, like almost everything he's done (everything?). But my expectations were extremely high: this--and now the new movie--were the first new things from him since Synecdoche (the play Anomalisa had been out there for about a decade, I liked the movie).

Another really frustrating thing about Antkind is that it's always on the edge of getting interesting. He's dealing with film history, film's complicity in evil of the 20th century, how it lies and rewrites history in real time... and then five pages of self-cancelling worrying apologizing for being white or a man or looking Jewish while not being Jewish...

There's a lot in there and I may have skated over greater treasures. Not one I'm eager to revisit. I'm curious about others' thoughts though on the pronoun/white guilt stuff in the book, I just found it dysfunctional at a basic level (an unfunny joke played out throughout).

I'm weirdly more interested in Jim Carrey's Kaufmany-sounding book than Antkind.

I'm really thinking I might be into a Kaufman novel that even hints at the same territory of Synedoche, but the reviews I've read are (unsurprisingly) divisive.

I liked Matthew Spektor’s NYT review.

I'm curious about others' thoughts though on the pronoun/white guilt stuff in the book, I just found it dysfunctional at a basic level (an unfunny joke played out throughout).

My second quote is from flappy bird, not the NYT, if that's not clear.

Thanks! Sounds worth checking out at least.

its main purpose is to show how awful he is. It’s all fake; he’s a terrible human being!
― Cherish, Monday, September 14, 2020 2:17 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hmmm yeah maybe i should stay away

It wasn’t very funny, true, but its main purpose is to show how awful he is. It’s all fake; he’s a terrible human being!
― Cherish, Monday, September 14, 2020 5:17 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I figured as much -- was beating a dead horse for me. But the book is obviously using repetition and accretion for something, idk what though. And I keep bringing up Sabbath's Theater, but I probably would've liked Antkind more if I hadn't read the former, because Mickey Sabbath is a very similar character--physically and mentally--and there's some overlap with the Tsai character in Antkind (certainly the soiled panties). So a lot of the self hatred perv stuff fell flat for me because I'd read another thick book about the same thing last year. I don't read as many books as I would like to... when will there be time enough at last... 😔

Antkind is often funny tho. I love when he asks Ingo if he's read any of his monographs and Ingo, without missing a beat, replies "Of course. It's on my nightstand."

Brad--and anyone else interested in this aspect of the book--read the first 30-40 pages if you can. The joke and its entire extent are played out by then

I completely forgot the thing about this movie that I liked the most: It references Anna Kavan's book "Ice" at least twice, maybe more than that; there's also a fair amount of it that has the same feel of that novel. I feel often like the only person who has ever read any of her books, she's really under appreciated, so it was nice to see that kind of very public mention.

great book, I perked up there too

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