the groundhog day project

The Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) does awesome puppet shows in Being John Malkovich . Like his author, Charlie Kaufman, he embraces all that his medium is capable of but uses them to tell intimate, and often very internal, stories. There's plenty of room for big stories in movies, spectacles like Mad Max Fury Road (though that certainly has its intimate moments) but sometimes my favorite films are ones like, well, any of Kaufman's. Existential. Personal. And, however much the fictional version of Kaufman in Adaptation. might want to avoid it, they find profundity in the mundane. Craig also gets inside someone else's skin, as he puts it. Which is effectively what any of us get to do when we watch a film.           I'm not sure if Kaufman could write a normal story. Being John Malkovich , before it even gets to the portal into Malkovich's head, involves an oddball reality like--I don't know-- Joe Versus the Volcano ... or a Wes Anderson movie, maybe. Cra...

Synecdoche, New York begins with Caden's daughter singing, then an alarm clock--7:45--and on the radio, a literature professor reads from a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Autumn Day (Herbsttag)" because, she says, Autumn is "seen as the beginning of the end." She compares the year to a life and September is a "melancholy month" in which "the bloom is off the Rose and things start to die." She reads the last few lines: Whoever has no house now will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening And wander the boulevards Up and down, restlessly While the dry leaves are blowing Not sure whose translation that one is, but here is Edward Snow's, with the earlier lines: Lord: it is time. The summer was immense. Lay your long shadows on the sundial, And on the meadows let the winds go free. Command the last fruits to be full; give them just two more southern days, Urge them...

There is a person hidden in the wallpaper in Caden's kitchen in Synecdoche, New York. He's turned away. He's incomplete. He's a little Hitchcockian. Like Charlie Kaufman has inserted another filmmaker into his film to (not) watch over Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as he tries to direct something bigger than just a play, bigger than just a movie. He tries to direct life itself, and kind of succeeds... There are many reasons that I sometimes avoid certain films in this blog. For example, on the one hand, I would love to really break down how the differences between the multiple versions of Blade Runner in my boxset really create quite different (or maybe not different at all) films. On the other hand, however, I think I am afraid that so much has already been written on the subject that I might have nothing useful to add to the discourse... Which is somewhat contradictory of the ideas I write about here in this blog sometimes, and notions that are central to th...

Day 888. Eight eight eight. Like three infinities lined up next to one another. A good day to start in on another Charlie Kaufman film, one that deals in a fractal sort of reality, like that painting in Anomalisa . It also deals in depression and paranoia and hypochondria... But really, it deals in a universe where melancholy is the norm and walls burn incessantly and the colour of one's bowel movement is topic of everyday conversation. Synecdoche, New York is the film. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman)--whose name exists somewhere between the alter ego of a superhero and some sad recluse of a man who barley belongs to the same notion of humanity as the rest of us... Actually, he's a bit too close to the latter to really be the former. Caden directs plays. In the first few minutes of the film, we see a production of Miller's Death of a Salesman and already we have a hint of what this is about. This is about death. In the opening sequence at home, Caden misread a h...

Rubin and Melnick (2007) argue: " West Side Story turned to Puerto Ricans as the newest 'problem' group that needed to be incorporated into a national narrative of reconciliation" (p. 100). Romeo and Juliet , the blueprint for West Side Story , deals in a generational conflict between families, not a matter of race. West Side Story makes color a vital difference between one side and another. That opening 4 minute color-shifting aerial drawing of New York City is not just a simple poster-style visual but a vital transition of stage to screen. I don't know how colorful the stage version was, but this film version is all about color, and not just of skin. The gangs have their colors--Sharks a lot of purples and reds, and a bit of green, the Jets some muted yellows and blues and browns. There are a few exceptions (one Jet that wears a red shirt, for example). But, color separates not just people but locations. For example, "Jet Song" is starting right now...