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It makes sense if you've read Antkind. Or if you've seen Malkovich, for that matter.

Thanks to @catnip2221!

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh makes a convincing argument that now's the time TV networks should bring out some of their unaired pilots, like for instance Charlie's How and Why and Game of Thrones' reportedly horrible original pilot.

One of the problems with trying to resuscitate those pilots long after some suit pronounced them dead is that they can’t fill a time slot week after week. “I think the issue is to just have a single episode of something,” Tarses says. “There’s really no way to promote and market it without spending money that you don’t want to spend on something that’s a one-off.”

There might be one way: Package the pilots together. At HBO, the original Game of Thrones pilot could conceivably serve as a pilot for a series of previously unseen pilots.

[...] Showtime passed on Ridley Scott’s The Vatican, which starred Kyle Chandler and would have marked Scott’s small-screen debut. CBS passed on Nick Stoller’s Entry Level, a cubicle comedy with a cast that included Michael Angarano and Brie Larson. ABC passed on a Brian Cox fantasy detective drama called Gotham (not the Batman one). NBC passed on Brad Anderson’s Midnight Sun, a Julia Stiles drama about an Alaskan cult being investigated by an FBI cult specialist. Comedy Central passed on David Gordon Green’s Black Jack, starring Ving Rhames as a decommissioned special ops agent. FX passed on Charlie Kaufman’s How and Why—a half-hour comedy starring John Hawkes and Michael Cera—as well as Hoke, a Scott Frank vehicle starring Paul Giamatti as a homicide detective in mid-1980s Miami. (Source)

Holly Williams from The Observer:

Antkind is 706 pages long. It offers a maximalist satire of a contemporary America defined by fake news, corporate bullshit, vacuous pop culture and performative wokeness, but one so excessive, surreal and repetitive that it is itself tiresomely bloated and absolutely exhausting. If anything can happen without consequence, stakes are lowered. It’s absurdism ad infinitum.

Where Kaufman’s films are playfully mind-bending, they usually have real heart. But although Antkind is skippingly clever – saturated with comic allusions, puns, linguistic inventiveness and wildly unfettered imagination – it is sorely lacking characters you actually care about or any emotional narrative to cling to. (Source)

BOOOOO.

Ah well. The initial universal acclaim was bound to give way to a few negative reviews, eh. Charlie is never for everyone.

Ta-da!

What thinkst ye?

The trailer will drop some time in the next 24 hours. Possibly I'll be asleep when that happens, but I'll post it as soon as I'm able. And then... September 4!

Longtime friend of BCK, Davide Romagnoli has a new book out, Sineddoche, Charlie Kaufman, and you'll never guess what it's about! Says the Amazon blurb:

"Sineddoche, Charlie Kaufman" non è un libro biografico per spiegare chi è Charlie Kaufman, dove è nato e cos'ha fatto. E non è nemmeno un compendio esaustivo o una completa esegesi delle opere del regista, produttore e sceneggiatore statunitense. "Sineddoche, Charlie Kaufman" è un invito a conoscere uno degli artisti più interessanti della sua generazione e rivedere, leggendole, le sue pellicole. Tutti titoli ben noti al grande pubblico, come Essere John Malkovich, Il ladro di orchidee, Synecdoche e Anomalisa. Un libro che racconta i retroscena dei suoi film seguendo il filo rosso delle dichiarazioni più interessanti e geniali dell'autore di Se mi lasci ti cancello. Per approfondire i suoi virtuosismi espressivi o anche scoprirli per la prima volta. (Source)

... which Google Translate turns into:

Synecdoche, Charlie Kaufman "is not a biographical book to explain who Charlie Kaufman is, where he was born and what he did. Nor is it an exhaustive compendium or complete exegesis of the works of the American director, producer and screenwriter." Synodoche, Charlie Kaufman "is an invitation to get to know one of the most interesting artists of his generation and review his films by reading them. All titles well known to the general public, such as Being John Malkovich, The Orchid Thief, Synecdoche and Anomalisa. A book that tells the background of his films by following the red thread of the most interesting and ingenious statements of the author of Se mi mi ti ti cancell. To deepen his expressive virtuosity or even discover them for the first time.

Neat, no? Davide sent me a copy, and I can't read a lick of it, but the cover is great!

Another review! This time it's Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian:

This debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of movie masterpieces such as Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York, is funny, exhausting and very, very long. Reading it is like watching (or being) someone trying to sprint to the top of an Escher staircase.

[...] Finally Antkind comes to its crazy, hellzapocalypticpoppin ending, and this twilight of the puppet-gods dwindles into darkness, leaving me with the punchdrunk feeling I have after all Kaufman’s movies. He may be someone for whom anxiety and sadness are a personal ordeal, but he transforms them into bleak, stark, unearthly monuments to comic despair. (Source)

indieWIRE's David Ehrlich chimes in with a film reviewer's review of Antkind. It's mega-heavy on the spoilers, though, so be warned. (His verdict, if you don't want to read: he really liked it, with a handful of qualifiers.)

Kaufman’s 720-page Globster of a novel initially feels like it’s trying to split the difference between Haruki Murakami and Hollywood Elsewhere (and later flirts with the likes of Pynchon and Borges on its way toward settling down as an adventure that can only be described as Kaufmanesque). (Source)

Was it released on Blu-ray at an earlier point, somewhere in the dim dark past? I can't remember. [Update: it was. Thanks to Bryan for confirming.] No problem, though, cos Adaptation will be coming to Blu-ray later this year thanks to Shout! Factory:

Bonus Features:
· Original Featurette
· Trailer
· Still Gallery

So nothing new, but if you need to update or upgrade your collection of CK paraphernalia, this one's for you!

Two bits of cool fan-created CK art! First one comes via a Redditor who commissioned this piece:

The artist is tan.drine on Instagram.

Charlie's new look in the City Arts &Lectures interview inspired our friend and BCKster Sarah, whose other work you can check out here:

Nice, eh?!

Antkind proved too much Kaufman for Miller:

I’ve long had a weakness for obsessive, neurotic, paranoid, and comically vain narrators, but Charlie Kaufman’s overstuffed, formless first novel, Antkind, may have finally cured me of it.

[...] Yet Antkind also has flashes of wit and even beauty, often just at the point when the reader has started to wonder if Kaufman wants her to suffer as much as the benighted B.

[...] Why, then, is Antkind so often tedious when Kaufman’s films are, for the most part, entertaining and delightful? Could it be something so simple as the constraints of cinematic form, the fact that you can’t make a three-month-long film because every minute of a movie costs a lot of money, typically other people’s money? That the limitations collaborators impose on a genius can end up rescuing him from his own hopelessly dithering solipsism? It could. Other people may be hell, according to Sartre, but sometimes they can save your ass—or at least stop you from crawling up it. (Source)