Where the Wild Things Are

Somehow, I had no childhood and managed to grow up without ever reading (or recalling) Where the Wild Things Are.

Luckily, somewhere out there, Spike Jonze did have a childhood and has now apparently recreated the beloved classic in all its nostalgic glory. The trailer captures in all its simplicity the innocence, fear, imagination, unconditional hope, love, and above all, pure magic of childhood. Driven by a beautiful recording of Arcade Fire's "Wake Up," it reaffirms the power of music, film, and stories to constantly inspire.



If the film's as beautiful as the trailer, Spike may have just given me a childhood.

Control (2007)

Shadowplay: Sam Riley is Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn's Control

Photographer Anton Corbijn's debut film Control manages to escape the conventions of biopics documenting the life and death of troubled rock stars. Possibly it is the fact that Corbijn is foremost not a filmmaker but a figure deeply established in the story he is narrating, having photographed Joy Division and directed one of their videos before Ian Curtis's death, that makes the film so moving and raw in its account.

Sam Riley's Curtis is persuasive and utterly heartbreaking. Troubled by emotional fragility and bouts of epilepsy, he is tortured by uncertainty, indecision, and the fact that life and its decisions are not defined by one clear right. He cannot bring himself to leave Debbie, the woman he fell in love with and married too young (Samantha Morton), nor can he resist the beautiful Belgian woman he loves yet hardly knows (Alexandra Maria Lara, Riley's real-life companion).

Aside from love tearing him apart, he is disillusioned by the pressure of the band's swelling fame. He longs for the simplicity of life before Joy Division's rise, a time when he could love without distortion - music, literature, his family.

Shot in black-and-white and with the aesthetic elegance that comes only from a photographer's eye, the film simply captures the heart and soul of Ian Curtis. It does not loiter around creating background or making clear the progression of the band's success or the events of Curtis's life. With these details disregarded, Corbijn has ample room to explore the human tragedy of the singer's life, resulting in a film heartbreaking and profound in its narrative.

The film closes at the cemetery with a lovely shot as the camera slowly pans up until it lies just above the rooftops and gazes lingeringly into a blank, grey sky. Joy Division's 'Atmosphere' continues throughout as we float above this worldly conception of death to something beyond, something as of yet undefined, and, most of all, something that holds great hope, creating a sense that the music Ian Curtis created with Joy Division transcends all the tragedy and pain, all the absurdity and gravity of mortal existence, both Curtis's and ours.

A Surrealist Fantasy about Reality

After trekking through a portal into John Malkovich’s brain, challenging the boundaries of self-reflexivity in Adaptation, and ultimately undergoing memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we end up in Charlie Kaufman’s latest cerebral romp, Synecdoche, New York.

Inspecting miniscule art or human existence?

Marking his directorial debut, Synecdoche offers Kaufman at his “Kaufman”-est, with no filters installed by Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze. The result is a film unrelenting in its complexity, persistently confusing, absurd, surreal, heartbreaking, and, above all, beautiful.

The film’s protagonist, playwright Caden Cotard (played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman), suffers fears regarding his mortality and the pressure of achieving something meaningful before dying. Earning a prestigious MacArthur theater grant, he finally gets his chance to create a massive play that will cement his legacy to the world.

Upon embarking on this task, however, his vision grows larger and larger until he abandons his old reality to live in the reality he created. He is living in a play about his life creating a play, and new characters are brought in to play old characters, leading to uncertainty over what is reality and what is his creation.

Rather than try to understand the physical complexities of the film, we should appreciate that Kaufman has crafted a reality that is simultaneously absurd and deeply poignant. He offers plentiful humor, usually in the form of nonchalant acceptances of painful truths many of us don’t like to acknowledge. However, even in the midst of such pessimistic realism, he presents beautifully understated moments of life’s simple grandeur.

Kaufman offers a philosophical view of reality, the world, and our human existence within both. Using his films as texts, one can delve into his view of human experience: that there simply are no solutions or explanations, no matter what we try to do to create one. Though this appears to be the track to despair or nihilism, within Kaufman’s narratives also lies an unbounded optimism in finding profundity in the everyday existence that connects us as a human race. His stories tend to end with a twist that lands the protagonists far from conventional happiness, yet manages to be oddly uplifting in its depiction of life’s many ironies – and this film is no exception.

All in a week's work.

Things I've done in the past week:
1. Interviewed Stifler.
2. Received the gospel from Charlie Kaufman.
3. Been plunged into the deepest depths of the human condition.

Austin Film Festival took place this past week, and though I was out of town for a quarter of it and busy for the rest of it, I did happen to catch a special screening and perform an interview, which amounted to a more than sufficient amount of excitement for one week.

On Monday morning, I traveled to the Four Seasons downtown for a chat with writer-director David Wain and actors Seann William Scott and Jane Lynch of the new comedy 'Role Models,' which premiered at AFF on Sunday.



I'd caught an earlier screening before the AFF premiere - I enjoyed the film, but maybe not as much as I enjoyed my specially reserved press seat next to Ain't it Cool News. All pretentiousness aside, I did like the movie - nothing too memorable, but enough healthy laughs to keep me entertained for 99 minutes.

Director David Wain

Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, and Jane Lynch

David Wain, Seann William Scott, and Jane Lynch were endlessly gracious and hilarious. You can find our conversation here.
Only when I began transcribing the interview did I realize that more than half the conversation I had recorded would not fit in a print interview, so what you see is probably a quarter of the banter. A few highlights:

David, this film is quite different from some of the work you’re most well known for (“Wet Hot American Summer”, “Stella”). How was the experience doing this type of big-budget comedy?

DW: I had caviar. I had gold-plated cameras. I had “fluffers.”

SWS: I was one of them.

DW: It’s just different type of material, definitely a different machine behind it, but the actual process of making the movie itself was exactly the same. It’s still just figuring out the best actors, figuring out the best way to tell the story. The tools you have to tell the story no matter what the budget are the same. It was a great experience learning the other side of it.

The film had a great cast. And there were many actors that had worked with David Wain and with each other before. What was the dynamic like on set – did you all get along great?

SWS: It was funny – I hadn’t had a chance to work with any of the cast before. But it was really great for me; I’m a huge movie buff and I’d been a fan of the “alternative comedy.” “Wet Hot American Summer” is one of my favorite comedies, so it was a big opportunity to work with all the guys. But it did seem like all these people knew each other, so at times I kind of felt like the new kid at school.

DW: We beat him up sometimes.

SWS: They raped me.

DW: Then we realized that he was a lot bigger than us.

All of you have played some memorable comedic characters. How similar are you to these characters? Any disclaimers you’d like to present about roles you’ve played?

JL: I don’t think I could do something if it wasn’t in me somewhere. You know, I choose not to lead with the type of narcissism that [her “Role Models” character] Sweeney has, but it’s right under the surface.

DW: How similar are you to your character in “40 Year Old Virgin”?

JL: I don’t have any of the sexual entitlement. But I do have power issues.

DW: Do you ever just count up your IMDB number?

JL: On a daily basis.

DW: I read about myself on the Internet every day. I get Google alerts.

[Side note: It looks like we've neglected him, but Paul Rudd is in this movie. I was originally scheduled to interview him last week, but he pulled out due to a family emergency.]

Now #2 and 3 on my list of things I've done this week all pertain to the Tuesday night AFF premiere of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, 'Synecdoche, New York' at the Paramount. Coincidentally, Tuesday's word of the day on dictionary.com was none other than synecdoche! Fate? Yes.

I can't decide which poster I like more.

Kaufman himself was present at the screening, performing a Q&A session following the film. The prospect of having him there to sort of elucidate the film was inevitably a futile endeavor - that man is simply on another plane of thought. At times he could hardly comprehend the simple questions the audience presented, and other times he was purposefully enigmatic, believing the power of the film lies in its subjectivity and ability to transform over time. Kaufman is undoubtedly the most cerebral and intellectual screenwriter working in the industry today, and though he gave little or no answers, he was a pleasure to be in the presence of.

As for the film itself, a review is in the works, and an overall very positive one. Conflicting reviews have been surfacing, from those blindly applauding its merits to those dismissing it as pretentious dribble. Personally, I see absolutely nothing pretentious about Kaufman's films - he merely strives to portray the deepest, most basic truths about the human condition.

'Synecdoche, New York' opens today in New York and Los Angeles; 'Role Models' opens November 7