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...

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...

118,089 frames. It's the little details in Anomalisa that really stand out. I don't mean the obvious stuff like the taxi driver not making eye contact (until he does, but only through the mirror) and the guy at the front desk in the hotel not breaking eye contact even as he types into and reads from his computer. Those things are nice touches. Another is the billboard that calls the zoo "zoo sized." Also, the fact that the movie's version of Lakmé and My Man Godfrey involve the same voice as all the people in Michael Stone's world. Or that character's breathe. Safe to assume there will be SPOILERS somewhere in here. They probably won't ruin the film for you, though. And you should watch it if you can. Something that I liked the first time I saw the film--and each time since--is the little movements of, say, Michael's hands and arms. When he's on the phone right now, for example, his right arm swings a little, and he touches his fingers to...

As Anomalisa gets underway again, I reflect on the days that were full of life. And I reflect on today. I think of full days like some speech tournament days--good and bad--or when I met my first girlfriend in Salt Lake City, or my second in Memphis, or my third in Burbank. It is not that many things need to happen. It is just that something needs to happen. I've written before in this blog--so very long, it seems--about the moments worth repeating. But, it could just be about the moments... the mundane moments. Today, for example, I awoke just before my 6:11am alarm. I actually have several alarms set, most of them on my old phone which is now just a glorified alarm clock. The 6:11am is louder and on my iPhone. I was awake early enough that I did not have to rush. I fed the cats and headed out, stopped at Starbucks on the way to work. Taught class at 8:00am and at 9:50am. I got a good impression of both set so students. I've got a good feeling about this quarter. It was the...

That Anomalisa is set primarily in a hotel, and hotel rooms are virtually identical wherever you go, is as important, I think, as--SPOILERS--all of the puppets aside from Michael (David Thewlis) and Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) having the same face and the same voice. The film relies on existential isolation to tell its story. Making the location as anonymous as the puppet extras is important. They have three of the sets on display at Arclight Hollywood right now, with some of the figures. You can see their faces Here: There is a painting in Michael's hotel room as well that is basically fractal in design--zoom in or out and the image looks the same. Like an echo of Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York ... which I only just learned that a lot of his fans didn't particularly like. I liked it. Anyway, the fractal--the hotel room as a microcosm of the larger world, or a larger living quarters anyway, with the bed, the bath, the toilet, a refrigerator/minibar, a television, and a ...

The last recap post had themes of puberty and werewolves, and transformation of self in general. Ultimately, I think that has been the biggest theme in this blog. Even when a particular entry, or a particular film, has not been about that the writing of this blog has been . For me, I mean. And, I don’t need to quote that in my master’s thesis because that is an idea I’ve already promoted many times. Still, for my own edification or some researcher’s future use, this entry will get a “thesis” tag at the bottom because I try to be thorough. That being said, Groundhog Day is playing because it’s the 2nd, and Phil just met Ned for the second time (not counting when they knew each other in school, of course). I’ve written before about how it can be comforting returning to this film each month. Today, it’s more like background music, a favorite song I’ve listened to many, many times. The winter quarter begins in two days, I’m teaching three classes and taking two, and winter quarter is t...

"I love doing stop-motion for no reason except that it's stop-motion... My favorite thing is a puppet not moving, just sitting there and being depressed." That's Dino Stamatopoulos, one of the producers of Anomalisa , quoted in the New York Times . And, somewhere in those two sentences, the real genius of Anomalisa is captured--using stop-motion, a format that made the production take three years, to tell what is mostly a very mundane tale-- that is the primary conceit of the latest Charlie Kaufman film. This story could be told in (and actually was before) as a stage play, a single run-through that takes the 9o-minute runtime. But that is rather the point. Taking the time to tell a simple story. That story, though, is really far larger than its mundanity in being so mundane. Dealing with themes of identity, fidelity, attraction, all while playing with the idea of a Fregoli Delusion. That is, one person's inability to tell strangers (and familiars, for tha...