In Contention

Tag: Being John Malkovich

  • Charlie Kaufman on Charlie Kaufman

    Charlie KaufmanFlipping through Empire Online’s typically entertaining list of features recently, I stumbled across this portrait of filmmaker Charlie Kaufman (whose brilliant “Synecdoche, New York” opened in the UK this weekend) giving one-offs on the six features sprung from his twisted mind to date.

    There’s talk of his working relationship with director Michel Gondry on their first effort, “Human Nature” (which I still haven’t seen), the agony of adapting Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” into 2002’s “Adaptation” and meeting Harvey Keitel and Pierce Brosnan at the Oscars in 2004 (when Kaufman one the original screenplay award for his masterpiece, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”).  My favorite is this aside about “Being John Malkovich”:

    “There’s something about John Malkovich that’s odd and unknowable. There’s a look in his eye that makes me imagine there’s someone else looking out from inside his head. His name is funny, you know – when people say ‘Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich’, it’s funnier than any other name I’ve tried. And I’ve tried other names, because we didn’t know if we can get him. We also thought of Christopher Walken, we thought about Willem Defoe. I don’t know what that group is exactly, but they’re serious actors, they’re good actors, but they’re slightly odd. So it’s funny, but it’s not a joke in the way it would be if it were, say, Jerry Lewis.”

    Kaufman also calls “Synecdoche” a “horror film,” which I’d be willing to go along with.  I’d be willing to go along with just about anything he has to say on that film, to be honest.  It’s the most bizarrely brilliant film that I can’t qualify to come across my path in a long, long time.  And suddenly I want to see it again.

  • Superb ‘Disgrace’ trailer goes online

    As I’ve said before on these pages, I’ve been looking forward to Aussie filmmaker Steve Jacobs’ film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” for some time.

    It’s a novel very close to my heart, John Malkovich seems ideally cast in the lead and, though it’s a South African-set story, its stark, ruminative nature sits comfortably in the groove of great Australian cinema. A warm reception at Toronto (where it won the FIPRESCI award) only amplified my anticipation.

    Now a trailer has finally appeared, and from where I’m standing, it looks excellent: spare, understated, with a fine feel for the severe beauty of the Eastern Cape landscape.

    Malkovich, who appears in some ways to be channelling Coetzee himself, seems to have captured the character’s balance of affectation and disengagement, and South African newcomer Jessica Haines looks equally promising. This should really be one to watch in 2009.

    It’s not available to embed yet, but check out the trailer here. (Thanks to Stale Popcorn for pointing it out.)

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 films of 1999

    (from left) Joe Pantoliano, Laurence Fishburne, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in The MatrixRemember that Entertainment Weekly cover from November of 1999?  The headline boldly proclaimed: “The year that changed movies.”  Indeed, it has become nearly a cliche to harp on and on about those 12 months of solid product as a time not equaled since the glory year that was, 1939, but to many, the truth was the truth.  1999 was the best year for films in a long, long time.

    And it wasn’t a microscopic view of “quality” either.  A broad net was cast, from genre successes aplenty to art house sensations, both finding equal play in the film awards circuit that year.  And so it is that hammering out a list of the 10 best constitutes to be a pastime of sorts for the movie lover, especially those like me who were experiencing an awakening of sorts around that time.

    1999 was my first year of film school — the dark ages, as I like to call them (because I’ve come to know film school as a fool’s errand of sorts, an education not easily passed from one person to the next but better learned through trial and tribulation).  But I was still an eager, unjaded soul and took a trip to the local theater one day with a troupe of friends for our own double feature: Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty” and David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.”  It was our first real understanding of the year that had been unfolding right before our eyes.

    “American Beauty” has, of course, aged quite poorly, though Russell’s Iraq war film remains a staple of sorts, a unique blip in a consistently uneven genre.  This was already the year that had seen the release of the first “Star Wars” installment in over 20 years (however disappointing), the last great exhibit from the portfolio of the cinema’s greatest artist (Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”) and a science fiction masterpiece that owed as much to William Gibson as anything else (at least those ideas were making it to the screen).

    Moreover, this was a cinematic year that would see releases from more top-tier directors than any other year: Kubrick, Scorsese, Lucas, Lynch, Allen, Fincher, Burton, Leigh, Minghella, Anderson, Almodóvar, Mann, Lee, Stone, Jordan, Sayles, Soderbergh, Forman, Burton, Pollack, Darabont and Howard, while simultaneously launching the exciting careers of untold newbies.  The range of quality, as expected, was certainly wide, but that all of these guys were in neck deep in their work during the same stretch of time had plenty to do with the perception of 1999, then and now.

    So with that, I felt that this week’s top 10 list (a Tuesday regularity now, if you haven’t been keeping score) would address 1999, the year that was.  Here are my picks:

    (from left) Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney and Ice Cube in Three Kings10. “Three Kings” (David O. Russell)
    David O. Russell is a visionary of sorts, but he seems to always be right at the surface, just about to break through with an unyielding brilliance, never fully harnessing the wicked talent he clearly has.  But for a brief moment in the fall of 1999, he discovered an outlet in this Iraq War dramedy that became more famous for its off-screen drama than what unfolded on-screen.  Pity, because I would rank “Three Kings” in a list of the 10 greatest war films ever made without flinching.  George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze and Ice Cube headlined a sprawling cast that probably deserved some ensemble attention.

    (more…)