Tag: Charlie Kaufman

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Film Features Film/TV

2020 on Screen: The Best and Worst of Film and TV

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Steve Carrell sucking up oxygen in Space Force.

Worst TV: Space Force

Satirizing Donald Trump’s useless new branch of the military probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But Space Force is an aggressively unfunny boondoggle that normalizes the neo-fascism that almost swallowed America in 2020.

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Worst Picture: Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s latest gizmo flick was supposed to save theaters from the pandemic. Instead, it was an incoherent, boring, self-important mess. You’d think $200 million would buy a sound mix with discernible dialogue. I get angry every time I think about this movie.

We Can’t Wait

Best Memphis Film: We Can’t Wait

Lauren Ready’s Indie Memphis winner is a fly-on-the-wall view of Tami Sawyer’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Unflinching and honest, it’s an instant Bluff City classic.

Grogu, aka The Child, aka Baby Yoda

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Grogu, The Mandalorian

In this hotly contested category, Baby Yoda barely squeaks out a win over Buck from Call of the Wild. Season 2 of the Star Wars series transforms The Child by calling his presumed innocence into question, transforming the story into a battle for his soul.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Most Inspiring: Hamilton

The year’s emotional turning point was the Independence Day Disney+ debut of the Broadway mega-hit. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of America’s founding drama called forth the better angels of our nature.

Film About a Father Who

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs

Best Comedy: Palm Springs

Andy Samberg is stuck in a time loop he doesn’t want to break until he accidentally pulls Cristin Milioti in with him. It’s the best twist yet on the classic Groundhog Day formula, in no small part because of Milioti’s breakthrough performance. It perfectly captured the languid sameness of the COVID summer.

Soul

Best Animation: Soul

Pixar’s Pete Docter, co-directing with One Night in Miami writer Kemp Powers, creates another little slice of perfection. Shot through with a love of jazz, this lusciously animated take on A Matter of Life and Death stars Jamie Foxx as a middle school music teacher who gets his long-awaited big break, only to die on his way to the gig. Tina Fey is the disembodied soul who helps him appreciate that no life devoted to art is wasted.

Jessie Buckley

Best Performance: Jessie Buckley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Buckley is the acting discovery of the year. She’s perfect in Fargo as Nurse Mayflower, who hides her homicidal mania under a layer of Midwestern nice. But her performance in Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending psychological horror is a next-level achievement. She conveys Lucy’s (or maybe it’s Louisa, or possibly Lucia) fluid identity with subtle changes of postures and flashes of her crooked smile.

Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Jonathan Majors in Da 5 Bloods.

MVP: Spike Lee

Lee dropped not one but two masterpieces this year. Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the jungle, the kaleidoscopic Vietnam War drama Da 5 Bloods reckons with the legacy of American imperialism with an all-time great performance by Delroy Lindo as a Black veteran undone by trauma, greed, and envy. American Utopia is the polar opposite; a joyful concert film made in collaboration with David Byrne that rocks the body while pointing the way to a better future. In 2020, Lee made a convincing case that he is the greatest living American filmmaker.

Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul

Best TV: Better Call Saul

How could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s prequel to the epochal Breaking Bad keep getting better in its fifth season? The writing is as sharp as ever, and Bob Odenkirk’s descent from the goofy screwup Jimmy McGill to amoral drug cartel lawyer Saul Goodman is every bit the equal of Bryan Cranston’s transformation from Walter White to Heisenberg. This was the season that Rhea Seehorn came into her own as Kim Wexler. Saul’s superlawyer wife revealed herself as his equal in cunning. If she can figure out what she wants in life, she will be the most dangerous character in a story filled with drug lords, assassins, and predatory bankers.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in Shirley.

Best Picture: Shirley

Elisabeth Moss is brilliant as writer Shirley Jackson in Josephine Decker’s experimental biographical drama. Michael Stuhlbarg co-stars as her lit professor husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who is at once her biggest fan and bitterest enemy. Into this toxic stew of a relationship is dropped Rose (Odessa Young), the pregnant young wife of Hyman’s colleague Fred (Logan Lerman), who becomes Shirley’s muse/punching bag. If Soul is about art’s life-giving power, Shirley is about art’s destructive dark side. Shirley is too flinty and idiosyncratic to get mainstream recognition, but it’s a stunning, unique vision straight from the American underground.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons in I‘m Thinking of Ending Things.

I recently rewatched an old favorite: Being John Malkovich. The 1999 comedy, written by former sitcom scribe Charlie Kaufman and directed by Beastie Boys video maker Spike Jones, is a surrealist take on the corrosive effects of celebrity culture. It’s a comedy, sure, but that label is somehow too limiting. It’s the height of 90s indie weirdness as a kind of high art.

Kaufman and Jones would reunite for 2002’s Adaptation, which twisted Susan Orlean’s nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief into an unrecognizable pretzel. Then Kaufman wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, in the hands of Michael Gondry, became a film on the short list for best of the 21st century.

Awkward! Jake and Lucy meet the parents, Toni Collette and David Thewlis, in one of the most awkward dinner scenes imaginable.

But after the financial crisis of 2008, Kaufman-esque surreality seemed to go out the window. Arthouse and indie films became much more neo-realistic, in part because the mid-budget movie became an endangered species as studio dollars flowed towards megabudget “sure things” based on recognizable intellectual properties. You know, superheroes.

One of the great side-effects of the streaming era has been giving new life to strange voices like Kaufman, and allowing creativity to take flight. One of the earliest examples of this was Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, a Greek comedy/musical about street violence, which was produced by Amazon. Now Netflix has made a film with Kaufman that simply couldn’t exist in the contemporary Hollywood studio system.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like Adaptation, a loose adaptation of a book — this time, a 2016 novel by Iain Reed. Kaufman doesn’t insert himself into the story this time, but then again, Orleans inserted herself into her narrative of the eccentric Floridian swamp ranger, so it was only fair. That being said, there’s very little about this film that is conventional in any sense.

The story starts on a long car ride through a snowstorm. Lucy (Jessie Buckley) is staring out the window, contemplating how her young relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons) is unsatisfying. They eventually arrive at his parents farmhouse, where she meets his mother (Toni Collette) and his father (David Thewlis), and the family shares an awkward dinner. Then, as it’s getting late and the snow is piling up outside, Jake and Lucy head back to the city. As they pass a small side road, Jake insists on a detour to see his old high school, over Lucy’s objections.

Ice cream? In a snowstorm?

And that’s pretty much the whole plot of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but it tells you almost nothing about the film. It is dense, extremely wordy, and at times stubbornly elusive in meaning. Also, there’s a dance sequence.

Buckley excels in one of the most difficult parts you can imagine. Her character’s identity is elusive and ephemeral. Her name seemingly changes again and again. At one point, she does a full-throated impression of legendary film critic Pauline Kael, reciting passages from her review of A Woman Under The Influence. It’s a stunning technical performance.
Plemons’ performance is exceptional. His vacant Nazi enforcer is often overlooked in Breaking Bad, because it’s just another great performance on a screen crowded with them. Here, his gifts are on full display. He even sings songs from Oklahoma! (What is it with the Rogers and Hammerstein thing lately?)

Did I mention the animated sequence?

Kaufman, who also directed, has constructed one of his strangest scripts. It’s almost Becket-like in its mixture of mundane details and slippery symbology. At times it descends into pastiche, sampling texts as strangely disconnected as David Foster Wallace essays and A Beautiful Mind. I’m not going to attempt to explain its meaning. I suspect the writer(s) would insist the attempt to do it for yourself is the point of the exercise. Nor is it a puzzle movie that will click into clarity as soon as you discover and assemble all the clues, although it does have that aspect. The key question to ask if you’re looking at it from that perspective is, who is imagining whom? In that way, it’s about how we construct our identities, and how fragile our mental houses of cards really are.

As a director, Kaufman is a better than average composer of strange images, but his words do miss the visual flash of Gondry and Jones. Ultimately, I’m not sure I’m Thinking of Ending Things comes together in the way that Eternal Sunshine or Anomolisa does. But I have been thinking about it for a couple of days now. It’s a big, sprawling, uncompromising vision from one of our most talented writers. Just don’t go into it expecting to come out with easy answers.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is streaming on Netflix. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo

Welcome to our final installment of the Indie Memphis Greatest Hits series, which brings our list of the top vote getters in the Best of Indie Memphis poll to the present day. If you need to catch up, here’s part one, part two, part three, and part four.

Lights, Camera, Bullshit (2014)

It’s hard out there for a…well, you know.

14 years after starring in The Poor And Hungry, Eric Tate joined director Chad Allen Barton and Piano Man Pictures to cast a satirical eye on the whole indie film thing. Tate stars as a filmmaker who comes to Memphis to make art, but finds himself constantly sidetracked by increasingly absurd obstacles. His boss is a delusional crook who wants to stay in business despite the fact that his business has literally burned to the ground. And he being hunted by a terrorist organization who wear masks of Presidents. Lights, Camera, Bullshit is a maze of jokes and old school indie surrealism that takes on the myth of the self-sufficient auteur. Tate puts himself in the tradition of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd as the last sane man in a world gone nuts.

Comments from voters:

“The irreverence of the story to all things political as a subplot. The main plot was interesting, dealing with a power hungry record producer who hires a young man to work on a film who has his own ideas…. the diversified cast with so many fine performances. The Memphis locations were also a highlight…Also great photography.”

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo


Anomolisa (2014)

Being John Malkovitch and Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman used stop motion to adapt his stage play about a man drowning in depression who meets and briefly falls in love with a woman at a conference in an anonymous hotel. It’s safe to say that this is not familiar ground for an animation disciple best known for Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons battling Jason and the Argonauts. Anomolisa uses its formal tricks to great emotional payoff.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (2)

Movement + Location (2014)

Lots of people want to move to the big city, reinvent themselves, and forget their past life. That’s Kim Getty’s (Bodine Boling) plan when she arrives in Brooklyn. What’s different about Kim is that she’s from 400 years in the future, a time when the planet is overcrowded, resources are scarce and life is miserable. Who wouldn’t want to go back to the luxury of the early 21st century, when there was enough clean water to boil pasta? The problem is the past—which is to say, the future—is not done with Kim yet. Movement + Location is directed by Alexis Boling, and the combination of shadowy tension and Bodine’s intense performance made this low-budget sci fi a big Indie Memphis hit.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (3)

The Keepers (2015)

The Keepers won the hearts of the Indie Memphis audiences in 2015 by exploring the relationship between animals and people in a humane and empathetic way. With subjects like the staff of the Memphis Zoo and a skittish teenage giraffe, getting people to care was a matter of patience and editing in this cinéma vérité tour de force. “It was a very tight edit,” says Joanne Self Selvidge, who co-directed The Keepers with Sara Kaye Larson. Amy Scott, who was our editor, is a total badass. She started with a 2 1/2 hour cut, and got it down to 70 minutes. I had done all the editing at that point, but Amy was wham bam thank you ma’am done. It was amazing.”

Larson and Selvidge started their festival run with a win at the Nashville Film Festival and made it two for two at Indie Memphis. The director/producers hustled to transform their festival wins into wider success. “We were able to secure national distribution, which was huge. We worked at that. We were approached by a couple of people who thought it seemed like an interesting film…” before signing with Vigil, Selvidge says.

Now on Hulu, the film got a name change to See The Keepers: At The Zoo. Selvidge and Larson were recently approached by Real South to air the film on more than 200 PBS stations across the country, and possibly internationally as well. The pair are currently back in the editing room creating a 56 minute TV version.

The Keepers – Festival Trailer from True Story Pictures on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (4)

Tangerine (2015)

The technological revolution that made the digital indie era possible has only accelerated. When Indie Memphis started, submissions were on VHS. Director Sean Baker shot Tangerine with three iPhone 5s, and it is visually beautiful. But it’s not the gimmick that makes Tangerine special, but the layered performance of Kitana Kiki Rodrigiez as Sin-Dee Rella, a transgendered sex worker just out of jail who tries to get to the bottom of her boyfriend’s alleged infidelity. Indie Memphis was lucky to get one of the defining moments of this film decade.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (5)

Carol (2015)

Indie film hero Todd Haynes brought a Douglas Sirk aesthetic to this period piece of forbidden lesbian love in an America on the verge of a cultural revolution. The list of accolades won by the film is long enough to rate its own Wikipedia page, so if you haven’t seen it, you probably should. 

Voter comment: “One of my favorite films of the century so far, from its resplendently photographed Christmas-mode period trappings to its aching expression of unspoken longing to its “Brief Encounter” cribbing structure, “Carol” is my idea of pure heaven. It’s a coming-of-age story AND a midlife reckoning in which neither lead is a navel-gazing, dissatisfied man, and one of whom is Cate Blanchett. Need I say more?”

Cameraperson (2016)
Every filmmaker finds out quickly that you have to throw out perfectly good material in order to make the whole film stronger. Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson saved memorable shots and moments that didn’t make the cut from her twenty year career shooting all over the world, and then put them all together in this tribute to the emotional power of collage. Cameraperson is one of my personal favorite documentaries ever to screen at Indie Memphis, and I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one that felt that way.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (6)

Jackson (2016)

The human cost of the culture wars is front and center in this arresting doc about the relentless assault on women’s reproductive rights in Mississippi. Jackson won Best Documentary Feature at Indie Memphis 2016, and it’s currently finding a national audience on Showtime.

Voter comment:
“This documentary pissed me off and made me feel hopeless, but it also encouraged me to talk to strangers about these feelings. Our national apathy (veiled contempt?) directed toward women and their bodily agency is unacceptable, particularly when it comes to poor women of color. Jackson didn’t flinch.”

“On The Sufferings Of The World” (2016)

Filmmaker (and Memphis Flyer contributor) Ben Siler is one of Memphis’ most prolific filmmakers. His work got a lot of votes in the our poll, and unexpectedly “whichever Ben Siler film gets the most votes” was a fairly common response. I’ll let his fans speak for themselves:

“Ben Siler was always an unsung hero for me in Memphis movie-making. His strange and unexpectedly poignant short films were always favorites of mine.”

“Just everything Ben Siler’s done. He’s one of the few filmmakers, in Memphis or elsewhere, with a truly unique voice.”

“Ben Siler should be at the top of every list. I idolize him as an experimental filmmaker.”

“Ben Siler is literally a genius and all of his films should be in the Smithsonian.”

The Siler film that closes out our list of Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits is one of the most radical works ever produced in the Bluff City. Funded by IndieGrant, a program begun in 2014 to give competitive grants to Memphis filmmakers, it’s a collaboration between directors Siler, Edward Valibus, actresses Jessica Morgan and Alexis Grace that started when Siler wanted to marry images with philosopher Arthur Shopenhaur’s essay “On The Sufferings of the World”. It’s most striking feature, the layers of images that are similar but not quite the same, came about when Valibus and Siler were trying to reconcile different cuts of the film. It’s a haunting, beautiful end to our retrospective of the best films of indie Memphis’ first twenty years.

On the Sufferings of the World from Edward Valibus on Vimeo.

Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 5: Lights, Movement, And The Zoo (7)

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Film Features Film/TV

Anomolisa

I’m a fan of awkward sex scenes. I’m not talking about the blue-backlit, Tom Cruise/Kelly McGillis sex scene set to “Take My Breath Away” in Top Gun, or the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman mirror sex scene in Eyes Wide Shut. Sure, I like watching Tom Cruise have sex as much as the next guy, but I prefer fumbling, awkward, embarrassing sex scenes. One of my favorites is in the otherwise unremarkable 1986 film The Big Easy, where Dennis Quaid struggles with his clothes, and Ellen Barkin exclaims, “I’m not very good at this!” Not only do those kinds of scenes feel more realistic (Have you ever had Berlin and a blue backlight on a first date?), but they also reveal more character than boobs. Would you believe that the best sex scene of the Oscar season is in a film nominated for Best Animated Feature?

It’s not hentai. It’s Anomalisa, written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman, who won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Anomalisa was created using stop-motion animation of the type more usually associated with late ’60s Rankin/Bass holiday specials or Robot Chicken. Instead of Frosty the Snowman or pop culture-riffing slapstick, Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson have pushed the medium somewhere new.

You might forget you’re watching an animated film in Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa.

Based on an experimental play Kaufman wrote in 2005, Anomalisa‘s closest filmic companion is probably Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is an author and customer service management consultant who is traveling from Los Angeles to Cincinnati to deliver a lecture. After an awkward exchange with his seat mate on the plane (voiced by Tom Noonan) and an excruciatingly long cab ride with a talkative cabby (also voiced by Tom Noonan), he settles into his fancy hotel room with a call to his wife (Tom Noonan) and son Henry (Tom Noonan).

You may be sensing a pattern in casting by now.

The only other character in the film not voiced by Tom Noonan is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman from Akron who has traveled to Cincinnati to see Michael speak. By the time the two meet, Michael is in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis of the sort that, in films, always seem to occur in a luxury hotel. The two share a brief encounter (this is where the awkward sex happens) before Michael must give his speech the next day and decide whether or not to return to his wife.

Anomalisa‘s often funny script full of quiet yearning would have been quite easy to film in a conventional manner — indeed, there are countless indie films in the last decade that use the premise of the chance encounter that fills unmet needs in lonely lovers’ lives precisely because it’s an easy scenario to film. But by taking the story and lovingly creating everything in miniature — from the cotton-ball clouds the tiny model airplane flies through to the dingy Cincinnati cab to the anonymous luxury hotel suite — Kaufman and Johnson have conjured a great technical achievement. By the time the close-up of a martini glass stem in the hotel lobby bar happens, you might have forgotten you’re watching an animated film. But don’t worry, Kaufman will remind you with a dream sequence where he deconstructs everything, right down to the stop-motion puppets themselves.

Anomalisa is a worthy addition to Kaufman’s formidable filmography, which includes not only his collaborations with Spike Jonez, such as Being John Malkovich, but also Synecdoche, New York, which no less a critical mind than Roger Ebert called the best film of the 2000s. This is Kaufman’s first film in seven years, which is a big shame. When you hear the lament that superhero-sized blockbusters are pushing out more worthy mid- and small-budget movies, consider that little bits of genius such as Anomalisa is the sort of creative, serious work we’re missing out on. It’s not just the artists who are suffering.