The Guidelines: Random notes from pop culture Sophie Barthes's engaging new comedy Cold Souls is the latest of a new breed of films that can be called "Kaufmanesque", with deference to the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman. In Kaufman's work, reality falls prey to meta-textual and metaphysical influences, usually with bittersweet, hilarious results. His shadow falls on Barthes's film, in which...
Sreenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who spun American cinema on its head with striking scripts for "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," goes for fiendishly obsessional, intellectual acrobatics in his directorial debut. "Synecdoche, New York" is monumentally ambitious — so crammed with literary innuendo and references galore the distributors...
DVD Video Review: Roger Keen watches the strange world of Charlie Kaufman get stranger still, as he intermingles life and art in ever ascending and myriadly complex ways.
The Splice - Creative Movie Reviews (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
“These men were high priests who gave their lives to serve the only god they knew and worshipped – art. Their reward was to produce great works that, at the time I knew them, went largely unappreciated and unnoticed. The price they paid to produce such art was inordinately high; they sacrificed any chance at [...]
Spike Jonze's heavily anticipated, hipster Where the Wild Things Are , from a screenplay by Jonze and Dave Eggers , succeeds in nothing so much as the clarifying the substance of the director's authorship, thanks largely to Charlie Kaufman's absence in the film's pre-production (marking a first in the director's three feature career). Whereas both of Jonze's previous films supplied a distinctive sensibility...
It appears that David Schwimmer is leaving the comedy genre for his latest directorial project, Trust, a dark drama starring Clive Owen and Catherine Keener. (And yes, typing out that last sentence did seem a bit trippy.) Owen and Keener will play parents who are shocked to learn that their teenage daughter (played by Liana Liberato) has been victimized by a sexual predator who she met in an online...
Charlie Kaufman's first film as both writer and director is so bizarre that it makes his screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine... look like Richard Curtis rom coms.
THE hugely anticipated release which stunned the world and smashed the box office is now finally available on DVD and Blu-ray from October 12, 2009. From Charlie Kaufman, the Oscar winning creator of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , comes the smash-hit comedy of the year. Synecdoche, New York tells the incredible story of one man’s seemingly insane mission to create...