Latest News

Human Nature! The one nobody talks about! Shout Factory are giving it the Blu-Ray treatment on June 21. No info on extra features, but I doubt there'll be anything beyond a trailer.

David Hernandez has done what the rest of us are too lazy to do, and annotated Antkind. Amazing. You can check out the 7400-word document here, and if there's something he has missed or goofed, you can let him know in this Reddit thread.

So, I hope you’ll enjoy skimming these references that took me many hours to annotate. For readers who finished Antkind, maybe you’ll enjoy revisiting; for new readers, perhaps this can be a companion.

Comment in this thread with any references I’ve missed and I’ll do my best to amend. Some references I may have plainly got wrong. There are several apocryphal quotes, genuine quotes, and genuine quotes that have been misattributed. (Source)

Also, over on Letterboxd, Jack Moulton has catalogued all the films referenced in Antkind.

I've always thought Antkind deserved something like the Pynchon Wiki, and now we have this.

This is a neat concept. Station 451 (or Станція 451) is a Ukrainian podcast that discusses filmmakers who've also published books (Cronenberg, Alex Garland, Martin McDonagh etc.), and of course CK has been given the Station 451 treatment! BCK and myself get a mention @01:06:25, WOOHOO.

SoundCloud is below, or you can check it out at Apple Podcasts.

Thanks to host Oleksandr for the heads up!

Awards season is a bit of a mess this year, and as far as that goes I haven't heard a lot of buzz around Ending Things, but Wikipedia tells me the film hasn't done too badly at all, all things considered. Here we go:

Boston Society of Film Critics Awards

• Best Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, Won
• Best Editing, Robert Frazen, Won

Chicago Film Critics Association

• Best Actress, Jessie Buckley, Nominated
• Best Supporting Actress, Toni Collette, Nominated
• Best Adapted Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, Nominated
• Best Art Direction, Gonzalo Cordoba, Nominated
• Best Use of Visual Effects, Ending Things, Nominated
• Best Editing, Robert Frazen, Won

Dublin Film Critics Circle

• Best Actress, Jessie Buckley, Won

Florida Film Critics Circle

• Best Adapted Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, Won

Gotham Independent Film Awards

• Best Actress, Jessie Buckley, Nominated
• Best Actor, Jesse Plemons, Nominated

indieWIRE Critics' Poll

• Best Film, Ending Things, 5th place
• Best Director, Charlie Kaufman, 7th
• Best Performance, Jessie Buckley, 6th
• Best Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, Won
• Best Cinematography, Lucasz Zal, 6th

London Film Critics Circle

• Film of the Year, Ending Things, Nominated
• British/Irish Actress of the Year, Jessie Buckley, Nominated
• Screenwriter of the Year, Charlie Kaufman, Nominated

National Society of Film Critics

• Best Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, 3rd Place

San Diego Film Critics Society

• Best Adapted Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, Nominated
• Best Production Design, Molly Hughes, Nominated

St. Louis Film Critics Association

• Best Picture, Ending Things, Nominated
• Best Actress, Jessie Buckley, Nominated
• Best Adapted Screenplay, Charlie Kaufman, Won
• Best Editing, Robert Frazen, Nominated

Not too shabby!

Did you know your humble webmaster is an Aussie? You probably knew this. Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg is having a minor feud with the Australian government at the moment--our goverment wants FB to pay Australian news websites for using their content--and as a result, Zuck has said "Nope" and frozen a bunch of Aussie news sites. Including, apparently, BCK's FB page, despite BCK not being Aussie-centric.

Supposedly a deal has been struck, though, and I expect the FB page will be working again soonly. For now, however, I can't post stuff there. Twitter still works, of course.

No biggie, but a bit of a pain.

Here's a supercut of typewriters in action, featuring a bit of Nic Cage as you-know-who. Consider it BCK's "hold" music between the last update and the next one, which will probably involve me mentioning that Ending Things ISN'T GETTING NOMINATED FOR MUCH OF ANYTHING. Bastards.

The Typewriter (supercut) from Ariel Avissar on Vimeo.

Charlie has sometimes sung the praises of What Happened Was..., the 1994 indie film written, directed by and starring Tom Noonan. (Tom would later play Sammy in Synecdoche and almost everyone in Anomalisa. But you knew that already.) The film is getting the 4K restoration treatment and will hit virtual cinemas at the end of this week. Good interview with Tom at Slate:

[...] What Happened Was … isn’t your typical romance, though it puts two lonely people together on their first date. [...] And it isn’t your typical horror movie, though it does feature creepy dolls. It’s somewhere between the two, an uncanny comedy in which the giant butcher knife only cuts a birthday cake but nonetheless no one gets out unscathed. What Happened Was … won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, then was released with little fanfare by a distributor that didn’t know what to do with it. (Total U.S. gross, according to IMDb Pro: $327,000.) A cult classic and a favorite of Charlie Kaufman’s, this indelible portrait of dating dread has been newly restored and opens in virtual theaters on Friday.

Do you think someone could make a movie like What Happened Was now?

Sure. [Pause.] In what way?

Do you think the movie business could foster something like that now?

Oh, I don’t know. I wrote a sequel. At one point, it was taken to Netflix and to Prime. It looked like there was a lot of interest and it might get made. I’d have this all-star cast, sort of, at least from my point of view. I had Louis C.K. in it and Charlie Kaufman was going to do it, and Vin Diesel. It was the second act of my relationship with Jackie.

[...] You mentioned Charlie Kaufman. You’ve been in a couple of his movies. How did you two meet?

He saw What Happened Was in 1993 in Minnesota, while he was working in a bakery. His wife encouraged him to go and he didn’t want to go and she basically forced him to go see it. Years go by and this Being John Malkovich movie comes out and Charlie becomes a big star and he wins Academy Awards and all this stuff, and people start asking him, What were his influences? He starts talking about What Happened Was. More people contacted me because Charlie mentioned it than ever contacted me because they saw the movie. Then Charlie and I, through that, ended up meeting each other on the phone, talking a little, and then having this friendship. We’ve become pretty good friends.

Do you see your influence? Where do you see What Happened Was in his work?

You know, it’s what’s happening in the dark inside your heart … It’s something ineffable. (Source)

Critic Mark Kermode didn't seem keen on his Antkind cameo, but he has moved on. This from December 31st, via r/kaufman:

Also this in August:

Clearly more a fan of one-way relationships between critics and artists, yeah?

Contrast this with A.O. Scott's response to his own Antkind cameo, via his Ending Things review.

Ah well.

A.V. Club polled their contributors and put I'm Thinking of Ending Things at #7 in their best films of 2020. YAY.

7. I'm Thinking of Ending Things

It’s funny that Charlie Kaufman once lost an Oscar to Inside Out. Don’t most of his movies also plunge audiences into the mind, via magic or sci-fi or just good ol’-fashioned voice-over? I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, the third film he’s directed from one of his own ingenious scripts, has left some viewers feeling rather trapped within its oppressively interior psychodrama; it’s a disorienting nightmare reverie about a young woman who begins to lose her grip on herself during a surreal day trip to meet her boyfriend’s parents. Yet for all the slippery cerebral games Kaufman plays with his source material (including boldly abstracting the twist ending of Ian Reid’s novella), the film remains anchored to an emotional reality—the foundation of quotidian discomfort offered by a terrific Jessie Buckley, finding a personality even as the details about her character begin to shift like sand in an hourglass. She’s our guide through the dense thicket of Kaufman’s imagination: a wondrous twilight zone of existential anxieties, dream ballet, and Robert Zemeckis jokes. [A.A. Dowd] (Source)

First Cow came in at #1, followed by Nomadland, The Assistant, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Lovers Rock, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Thanks to Jeff!

indieWIRE conducted their annual poll of over 230 film critics to find the 50 best movies of 2020, and I'm Thinking of Ending Things came in at number 5! Nice.

Per tradition, IndieWire asked over 200 film critics around the world to rank their favorite films of the year. We tallied up the numbers and present the 50 highest rated titles below.

The 2020 IndieWire Critics Poll featured reviewers from major trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter as well as critics from local newspapers and websites, freelancers, and contributors on film from across Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

[...]

5. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis

Read IndieWire’s review: If “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” feels like both an act of self-parody for its director and also a radical departure from his previous work, that’s because it takes Kaufman’s usual fixations and turns them inside out. While this leaky snow globe of a breakup movie is yet another bizarre and ruefully hilarious trip into the rift between people, it’s not — for the first time — about someone who’s trying to cross it. On the contrary, Kaufman is now telling a story about the rift itself. (Source)

Nomadland, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, First Cow, and Lovers Rock were ahead of CK's film.

In December, EW listed their top 15 performances in film for the preceding 12 months, and Jessie Buckley's turn in Ending Things made the grade.

Jessie Buckley in I'm Thinking of Ending Things

It takes a special kind of performer to carry a movie like Charlie Kaufman's mind-bending psychological thriller, but Buckley does it with apparent ease. She’s the guiding light and a steady presence through the constantly shape-shifting script, flipping between long stretches of poetry recitation and scientific debate and cultural criticism but somehow always remaining coherent throughout. We'd follow her anywhere. (Well... weather permitting.) —Mary Sollosi (Source)

Well deserved.